(2018-11-18) Targeted Advertising Is Ruining The Internet And Breaking The World

Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World. Contextual advertising had supported the print and broadcast media for decades, so this was the logical next step. What could possibly go wrong?

It all started with targeted advertising, and with the new economic arrangement that Harvard Business School scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism."

Zuboff’s new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontiers of Power, examines surveillance capitalism’s 20-year history

“With advertising technology, political communication has changed dramatically,” Joan Donovan, who researches media manipulation and platform accountability at Data & Society, told me in an email. “If we were looking for a digital revolution, it happened in advertising online. Much of online advertising is completely unregulated and unmanaged. Political strategists understood this new opportunity and capitalized on it by serving up digital disinformation using ads as the delivery system.

Google and Facebook even keep tabs on what people who don’t have an account with them do online, and use that information in their data modeling and to serve ads around the Web. More recently, they’ve started buying data about consumers’ credit card purchases and other offline activity.

It’s no surprise that governments are eager to get their hands on that data

For example, the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations contained details about several NSA programs, including PRISM, that relied on obtaining data from major technology companies, both with and without executives’ knowledge. Similar relationships between tech companies (including telecom operators) and state actors can be found in other countries, as well.

Experts disagree on whether the targeted advertising ecosystem can be meaningfully reformed, and whether that will be enough to reverse its harmful impact on society. “Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to targeted advertising than managerial capitalism was limited to the production of the Ford model T,” said Zuboff

Dipayan Ghosh, who studies privacy engineering at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is more optimistic, but doesn’t rule out regulatory solutions.