Around two or three years ago, I was on a sales call/app demo as a potential customer–not for TikTok, of course. It’s an American company and I’m based in Canada. I asked the sales guy about their data storage, encryption, privacy, and the like; he didn’t know. I said I needed to know that if our group uses the application to communicate internally about, for example, helping refugees, the government won’t be able to access it. The guy asked me if that really was a concern.

Well, you tell me now, sales guy, is it really a concern?

Turning off the targeted ads settings indeed prevents Google from showing you overtly targeted ads. It makes no claim that it prevents Google from harvesting the same data that is used to target ads