Nicholas Rempel has an excellent rant on what passes for advertising these days with the post What We Have Now Is Not Advertising. His thesis is that while things like billboards, TV ads, and magazine ads are advertising, much of what is called advertising today is just spying and tracking in the service of showing targeted ads to people. This is, of course, what adtech is all about: vacuuming up as much information about users as possible so that they can be served targeted ads. Even leaving aside the seedier aspects of the whole enterprise—such as providing a platform for malware and other illegal activities—building huge databases of information about a significant portion of the population should give anyone pause.
As creepy as that collection is, what’s worse is that sooner or later the information will prove to be too tempting to the usual suspects and the iron law of data collection assures us that it will be abused. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the government is already subpoenaing information from the data brokers who collect it.
Rempel has some suggestions:
- Get off social media as much as you can. Facebook and the like exist solely to collect your private information. Twitter is a giant time-sink that has been taken over by trolls and ideologues. You’ll be much happier and safer without them.
- Be aggressive about blocking ads. The advertisers will try to guilt you and say it’s stealing. Tell them to get back to you when they clean up their own act. As I’ve said many times, I don’t object to ads and will happily allow them but I won’t tolerate being tracked or having arbitrary scripts run on my machines.
- Be careful about “smart devices” you allow in your home. Don’t install anything that’s going to collect information. And for goodness sake, stay away from things like Alexa and Google home.
Rempel’s post is short and worth reading. It should remind us, once again, that the perpetrators of adtech are not our friends, their “services” are for their benefit, not ours and they should be resisted by any means possible.