NewsBeat

6 NewsBeat March 2019 Targeted advertising is ruining the Internet and breaking the world I n his testimony to the US Senate last spring, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that his company doesn't sell user data, as if to reassure policymakers and the public. But the reality — that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other social media companies sell access to our attention — is just as concerning. Actual user information may not change hands, but the advertising business model drives company decision making in ways that are ultimately toxic to society. Social media companies are advertising companies. This has never been a secret, of course. Google pioneered the targeted advertising business model in the late 90s, and Sheryl Sandberg brought the practice to Facebook in 2008 when she joined the company as chief operating officer. The cash was flowing in, and companies around Silicon Valley and beyond adopted the same basic strategy: first, grow the user base as quickly as possible without worrying about revenue; second, collect as much data as possible about the users; third, monetize that information by performing big data analytics in order to show users advertising that is narrowly tailored to their demographics and revealed interests; fourth, profit. For a while this seemed like a win-win: people around the world could watch cat videos, see pictures of each other's' babies in Halloween costumes, connect with family, friends, and colleagues around the globe, and more. In return, companies would show them ads that were relevant to them. Contextual advertising had supported the print and broadcast media for decades, so this was the logical next step. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, as it turns out. Sure, would-be revolutionaries, reformers, and human rights defenders were among the first to master the power of what we used to call "Web 2.0," but authorities caught on quickly and used the new tools to crack down on threats to their grasp on power. Similarly, the 208 Obama campaign was the first to harness online advertising to reach the right voters with the right message with near-surgical precision, but 10 years later the same techniques are propelling right-wing authoritarians to power in the US, the Philippines, and Brazil, and being used to fan the flames of xenophobia, racial hatred, and even genocide around the world. How on Earth did we get here? It all started with targeted advertising, and with the new economic arrangement that Harvard Business School scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism." Just like 20th century firms like General Motors and Ford invented mass production and managerial capitalism, Google and Facebook figured out how to commodify "reality" itself by tracking what people (and not just their users) do online (and increasingly offline too), making predictions about what they might do in the future, devising ways to influence behavior from shopping to voting, and selling that power to whoever is willing to pay. "As societies, we have never agreed that our private experience is available for extraction as behavioral data, much of which is then fed into supply chains for the manufacture of behavioral predictions," Zuboff told me in a phone interview. "Surveillance capitalism was invented in the context of targeted advertising," Zuboff said. "This was the material, historical context in which it originated in a moment of financial emergency during the dotcom bust. Google was a fledgling firm, and its investors were threatening to bail — in spite of its superior search product. That's when Google turned to previously discarded and ignored data logs and repurposed them as a 'behavioral surplus.' Instead of being used for product improvement, these behavioral data were directed toward an entirely new goal: predicting user behavior." Online tracking is ubiquitous, Tim Libert, of Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, told me in an email. "Across the top one million websites you will be tracked on 91 percent of sites. I've been doing these types of scans for years and the results are always the same: you can't browse the web without being tracked, period. Companies track you when you visit medical websites, pornography websites, websites for lawyers, websites for politicians, newspaper websites, and the same goes for apps. There are very few things that people don't seek out or share using a computer and nearly all of that is tracked, all the time, by the billion dollar giants you see in the news as well as hundreds of companies you've never heard of." Companies collect this information in order to monetize it: while we may not see much value in the individual data points about our behavior, in the aggregate it adds up to big money. When you visit a webpage that hosts advertising content, the ad network — Google's DoubleClick, for example — chooses between showing you several ads. Because Google knows so much about you, your friends, your tastes, your habits, and your purchasing power, DoubleClick can calculate which ad you are most likely to click on and ultimately which product you're most likely to purchase. By DR. NATHALIE MARÉCHAL Surveillance capitalism and targeted advertising have become the norm on the internet, and it's hurting all of us.

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