Your data, their yacht

I recently had a conversation with a team who justified tracking visitors by bringing up the ad industry’s favourite alibi: “people love tailored advertising”. It’s not only wrong, it’s a lie that the people telling it know is a lie.

Google’s Sundar Pichai has said it, Meta’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg said it. Larry Page said it. They all say it.

For over a decade, the people who built the surveillance-advertising complex have insisted, with a straight face, that the public is clamouring to be tracked. That being profiled and auctioned off to the highest bidder is something we secretly want, if only the ads were personalised enough.

Pichai said: “The more digital and personalised advertising becomes, the more it becomes a part of the experience. Consumers will like online ads because they are tailored to their needs and preferences.”

So let’s ask these people, not “people” as imagined by a Google exec building a multi million dollar advertising business, but actual humans. A Harris Poll of 2000 consumers [pdf] found that online advertising is the single biggest gripe people have about the internet. Worse than security, worse than privacy invasions. Four out of five said data collection for ad targeting was a bad thing.

The people who profit from tracking are also the people telling consumers that they want it. If they were honest they’d say it how it is: “we’re tracking you because it’s profitable and you can’t stop us” but, instead, they dress up extraction as a service.

Next time someone tells you your customers want to be tracked, ask them for their source. That source is never the customers, it’s always whoever’s selling the tracking.

Colin