Profit Over Privacy

I'm reading this book along with a series of others about advertising, privacy, etc. The Naked Consumer (1992) takes us up to the pre-internet era, and Sub Prime Attention Crisis (2021) shows us the implications of propping up the infrastructure of the internet with advertising, specifically targeted instead of contextual advertising. 

Profit Over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet

Matthew Crain, University of Minnesota Press, 2021

"Commercial monitoring" is the palatable name for surveillance advertising.

He calls Russia's 2016 interference an "ad system" (p3) -United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, LLC., No 18 U.S.C. SS2, 371, 1349, 1028A (n.d.)

Facebook is an ad platform - "data-driven influence peddling is their bread and butter" (p4)

The 2013 Facebook Like Study: Michael Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, "Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable From Digital Records of Human Behavior," PNAS 110, no. 15 (2013): 5802-5

Cory Doctorow's microtargeting: "How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism," OneZero, Aug 26 2020.

Funny how the author is talking about lack of public access to high quality information, caused by digital ad ecosystems, yet low-credibility info is the fuel of digital advertising via engagement algorithms more likely to spread and instigate further engagement if they're extreme and novel, i.e., low-credibility.

The privacy market (which is now a free market with no rules) (p21)

"The fiction that advertising supports or makes possible the news, entertainment, or educational content has been a public relations mainstay of the commercial mass media" -Dallas Smythe, 1981: Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada

Far from creating objective representations of the world as it is, consumer surveillance reproduces and often reinforces existing structural inequalities (p105)

-Noble, Algorithms of Oppression

-Jathan Sadowski, To Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World. 2020

The strategic communications campaign to pacify the public on privacy issues (p132)

-Inger Stole, Advertising on Tril: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930's. 2005 

-Molly Niesen, "The Little Old Lady Has teeth: The US Federal Trade Commission and the Advertising Industry, 1970-1973," Advertising and Society Review 12, no. 4 (2012)

Daniel Pope: The Making of Modern Advertising

The divergence between Google and Doubleclick (before 2007)

• Google: Rather than collecting consumer info to target ads, they relied on users' search keywords to display "contextual advertising", and this was very successful
• Doubleclick: Consumer data was the keystone for closing the loop between ads and sales

-Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, 2010

The central business proposition of social networks stemmed from their arguably superior capacities to collect and operationalize personal information, not from any significantly technical innovations in advertising practice (p140) [And so Facebook ultimately forced Google to abandon the context-approach completely ... Surveillance was too big of a business.]

Accounting for the shift: Google's first privacy policy, created in 1999, sparsely explained that the company did not collect data on any individuals. Twenty years and thirty versions later, it now takes four thousand words to outline the company's extensive data collection practices across its array of websites, applications and partners. (p142) -Warzejl and Ngu in New York Times, 2019

On Opt-In: "Offering advertising on an opt-in basis goes against the economic model of the internet" [because you made it that way through decades of policy manipulation] (p143)

-Google spokesperson, in JR Raphel, "Google's Behavioral Ad targeting: How to Regain Control", PC World, 2009

Back to Politics: The history of surveillance advertising is not a story of disruption but rather one of continuity. (p145)

Further Reading:

-Matt Honan, "Google's Broken Promise: The End of 'Don't Be Evil'", Gizmodo 2012

-Tim Libert, "Exposing the Invisible Web: An Analysis of Third-Party HTTP Requests on 1 Million Websites," Int. Jour. Comm. 2015

-Julia Angwin, :The Web's New Godl Mine: Your Secrets", WSJ 2010

-FTC, "Cross Device Tracking: An FTC Staff Report", 2017

-Jennifer Valentino-DeVries et al., "Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They're Not Keeping It Secret", NYT 2018

-"Stat Oil", The Economist 2013

-John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Oour Digital Selves, NYU Press 2017

-Gabriel Weinberg, "What If We Al Just Sold Non-Creepy Advertising?" NYT 2019