Robin Buckson/Detroit News via AP
Endless tracking around the internet only facilitates the interests of monopolies at the expense of society.
A few years ago, after getting presented with maybe the 10,000th online ad for something I didn’t need, I had a question. Why are we bothering with this? Why are we sacrificing our digital privacy and making a couple of dominant platform companies unspeakably rich and getting so little in the exchange? Why don’t we just ban targeted ads?
Given my profession, I had the ability to not just mutter this to myself but to get the idea out into the world. I wrote it up for The New Republic in 2018, arguing that “the surveillance economy should die. This manner of advertising doesn’t serve the public and it’s not even clear it serves advertisers.” It took a few years, but now a newly formed broad coalition agrees with me that endless tracking around the internet only facilitates the interests of monopolies at the expense of society, feeding addiction, disinformation, toxic politics, and the death of the free press. Here’s an excellent short video from the coalition.
Thirty-eight different advocacy organizations have come together to Ban Surveillance Advertising. They argue that as long as social media platforms profit from collecting more user data—so they can use it to target ads—then they will do whatever possible to hook and keep users on their sites, amplifying “echo chambers, radicalization, and viral lies.” By enabling Facebook and Google to track and serve ads across the web and deliver precisely modeled audiences to advertisers, targeted ads also rob news publishers of their own business model, by making irrelevant the unique specialness of their readerships.
In advance of yet another hearing on Thursday, this time in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on Big Tech disinformation, where we’ll get another array of claims and counterclaims about censorship and moderation, legal immunity for toxic content and antitrust enforcement, the truth is that attacking this central feature of Big Tech’s profit mechanism would be the biggest near-term intervention to fundamentally change the media ecosystem.
It’s interesting and welcome that ending surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff termed it in her 2019 book, is the one issue these disparate groups have managed to agree on. It signals a newfound maturity in a somewhat inchoate movement attacking Big Tech, recognizing that focusing on how these platforms make money is the best strategy. Some of the other approaches have unappealing trade-offs. Constant moderation is susceptible to massive error and unnecessary censorship. Introducing legal liability for user-generated speech could potentially lead to the end of user-generated speech. But banning targeted ads would bring us back to a world where writers and their outlets can be compensated at scale for their work, sharply reduces the possibility of mass data breaches, eases the general distastefulness of being constantly under surveillance, and begins to move the internet back to the way it was initially envisioned.
Since I’ve been looking at this for a few years, let me address some of the big questions around banning targeted ads. First, the government absolutely has the power to do this. Marketing and advertising is routinely monitored through the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive practices and truthfulness. The U.S. has banned cigarette ads on TV and radio, banned ads for smokeless tobacco, banned 900-number ads marketed to children under 12, among other advertising bans targeted at kids, and banned the online collection of data from children under 13. We’ve even banned television ads that are too loud.
Second, it’s not clear that the “dark ages” of untargeted ads would actually be very much darker. While invasive marketing is certainly invasive, sometimes creepily so, the dirty secret about targeted ads is they’re not really very good, or at least not as good as the platforms claim. They’re slow to react, showing us ads for shoes we’ve already bought, Mother’s Day ads after people’s parents have died, parenting ads after the death of children. Pop-up blockers and other evasions render these ads often unseen. And they’re just not as magically all-knowing as everyone thinks; a 2018 study found that data brokers assumed the correct gender on a targeted ad, a seemingly easy task, only 42 percent of the time.
We do know that Facebook and Google constantly lie to advertisers about the reach and effectiveness of targeted ads by wildly overstating video viewing, misreporting referral traffic, and even claiming, in Facebook’s case, that they reach more young people than exist in the United States. It’s hard to tell a plausible story that these ads are necessarily worth it for advertisers.
The most careful academic study of targeted ads, from 2019, found them to be not worth it for publishers, who earn just 4 percent more for a targeted ad than an untargeted one, or $0.00008 per ad. In fact, the platforms’ targeting has decimated publishers, who used to be able to research their audiences (which is different from personalized targeting) and sell to advertisers on the basis of having a lot of business CEOs (The Wall Street Journal) or young influential tastemakers (Teen Vogue) in their readerships. None of this matters if the platforms can slice and dice audiences no matter what website they visit. Publishers don’t share in the value of the content they create, while thousands of writers and creators go to the unemployment line.
Surveillance ads put the public at risk, with little value except to mint more Facebook and Google billionaires.
Despite this mountain of evidence, Facebook and Google (and to a lesser but growing extent Amazon) continue to dominate ad markets, more and more of which have switched to digital. These three firms control 90 percent of the digital ad market, in almost a mindless fashion, where advertisers just stick with the platforms with the eyeballs regardless of reliability or results.
As for social media users, is getting served slightly more “relevant” ads some of the time really worth giving up every intimate detail about themselves so Silicon Valley billionaires can get richer? Is it worth these significant harms: enabling con artists and mass scams to proliferate; facilitating discrimination in housing and employment; and opening up personal data to harvesting and breaches? In the alleged dark ages, I managed to figure out what I wanted to buy and where to buy it, with the aid of the, I don’t know, 78 other forms of advertising and marketing, without opening myself up to the negative side effects of the surveillance economy.
So why not disallow individually targeted ads tied to a user’s identity, and return to the model of the best audiences, sampled through market research, getting the best results? This removes the financial incentive to spy on internet users and builds a more level playing field for niche publishers.
It would certainly be disruptive to make the adtech industry illegal, but it was disruptive on the other end, too, as adtech muscled out newspapers and more traditional marketing departments. I’m confident that the well-educated cogs in the surveillance economy machine will land on their feet; maybe we can offer them adjustment assistance. And Facebook and Google will still have billions of users, and if they can’t figure out a way to survive without spying on them, it’s not really the government’s role to ensure they can.
Congress is currently taking up legislation to deal with Big Tech. I don’t know if banning surveillance ads has made its to-do list, but it should. It’s well within historical norms of government action, it would restore competition, and the harm-causing entity it would eradicate is wholly nonessential. It’s also incredibly popular; a recent poll found that 81 percent of respondents agreed that government should “ban companies from collecting people’s personal data and using it to target them with ads.”
Surveillance ads put the public at risk, with little value except to mint more Facebook and Google billionaires. We have for centuries passed laws to prevent such risks, even when it made a for-profit company less profitable. I’m glad that more people are coming around to the idea of doing this again.
