You can generalize from firearms and target shooting up to something that applies to software and surveillance dragnets. Sure, you might just want to target your ads more accurately but the same software can be turned right around and (ab)used as a surveillance dragnet.
Selling better ads and tracking consumers is just target shooting with some abstraction. You can still ruin lives with the technology if it's used irresponsibly. Any similarity or comparison with the firearms industry is not popular in the software industry for reasons having to do with the beliefs most people in the software industry subscribe to.
The parent comment was denying that software can be used for nefarious purposes because software only does what the developer builds it to do. That is probably why he was down-voted.
Selling better ads and tracking consumers is just target shooting with some abstraction. You can still ruin lives with the technology if it's used irresponsibly. Any similarity or comparison with the firearms industry is not popular in the software industry for reasons having to do with the beliefs most people in the software industry subscribe to.
The parent comment was denying that software can be used for nefarious purposes because software only does what the developer builds it to do. That is probably why he was down-voted.