Irreal has been railing against adtech and the malware that advertisers download onto our computers to facilitate their tracking for a long time. Despite pretty compelling evidence that it doesn’t work, its use continues unabated. There is, however, a modicum of good news. Sort of.
The New York Times has announced that beginning next year they will no longer use 3rd-party data to target their advertisements. That means that they will no longer buy customer data from third parties to use in targeting their advertisements. That’s not great; they’re still collecting our information but at least it’s information we’ve revealed to them directly rather than data vacuumed up by tracking cookies and other sketchy methods.
Part of their decision is apparently because of the growing backlash against spying on our Internet activities and a desire to be seen as on the right side of the privacy debate. That and the fact that most of the major browsers make collecting meaningful data and associating it with a given person much harder than it has been.
Some other publishers are following suit but the strategy of using your own data doesn’t scale very well. The NYT has 6 million subscribers and millions of registered users who have signed up for occasional access and newsletters. Small publishers don’t have the wherewithal to rely on their own data.
As I say, this isn’t unmitigated good news but it may be a leading indicator of a trend to move away from surveillance capitalism. Best of all, it’s bad news for Facebook, Google, and others who make their money spying on us and tracking us across the Internet. Their demise can’t come too soon to suit Irreal.