NewsBeat

March 2019 NewsBeat 7 "That's all 'AI' and 'machine learning' is for these companies: getting better at guessing what ads to show you," Libert said. "Every tiny bit of data increases the chances they show the 'right' ad so they never stop, they never sleep, and they never respect your privacy — every single day everybody at Google collectively works to one purpose: getting the percentage of 'right' ads shown slightly higher." In copying the traditional media's advertising-based business model, internet companies neglected to adopt a crucial rule: the separation between business operations and editorial decisions. Though the rule was far from universally respected, 20th century journalism's code of ethics prohibited financial considerations from influencing news coverage. This ethical screen allowed American capitalism to subsidize the press, which in turn helped keep the government and companies honest: checks and balances at work. This all fell apart with targeted advertising, which stole journalism's lunch money and used it to sustain platforms whose driving logic isn't to educate, to inform, or to hold the powerful to account, but to keep people "engaged." This logic of "engagement" is motivated by the twin needs to collect more data and show more ads and manifests itself in algorithms that value popularity over quality. In less than 20 years, Silicon Valley has replaced editorial judgment with mathematical measures of popularity, destabilized the democratic systems of checks and balances by hobbling the Fourth Estate, and hammered nail after nail into the coffin of privacy. "We are witnessing a full-blown failure of trust in online platforms at a time when they are the most influential force in undermining or protecting democratic ideals around the world." The targeted advertising business model incentivizes companies to amass as much information as they can: what their users do on the platforms themselves and what they do elsewhere on the internet. Google and Facebook even keep tabs on what people who don't have an account with them do online, and use that information in their data modeling and to serve ads around the Web. More recently, they've started buying data about consumers' credit card purchases and other offline activity. These digital dossiers contain revealing information about each of us individually and all of us collectively. It's no surprise that governments are eager to get their hands on that data. Targeted advertising and the algorithmic curation practices associated with it harms democracy itself. Advertising's shift to digital has cannibalized the news media's revenue, thus weakening the entire public sphere. And linking advertising to pageviews incentivizes media organizations to produce articles that perform well, sometimes at the expense of material that educates, entertains, or holds power-holders accountable. We have allowed corporate greed to transform our media ecosystem into one that structurally favors authoritarian populism. Saving democracy requires more than reforming internet companies, of course, and the exact recipe for success varies by country. We need to reverse 30 years of media deregulation. The targeted advertising business model at the heart of surveillance capitalism needs to be restructured, maybe even replaced. But with what, and how do we get there? Experts disagree on whether the targeted advertising ecosystem can be meaningfully reformed, and whether that will be enough to reverse its harmful impact on society. The onus is on Silicon Valley to demonstrate that firms can guard against surveillance capitalism's gravest harms without uprooting their business models—or better yet, to find new revenue streams that don't rely on commodifying people's private behavior. This is important because people can't meaningfully opt out. While Google and Facebook let users opt out of seeing targeted ads, it's impossible to opt out of being tracked or being included in the datasets used to create targeting algorithms. There are technological ways to prevent some level of tracking, but it's like taking aspirin to cure your cancer, it may make you feel a little better for a few hours but you're still dealing with cancer. The only way to root out the cancer of targeted advertising is regulation. Europe is conducting a grand experiment right now with GDPR, and the rest of the world is watching." Policymakers around the world, including in Washington, are increasingly aware that privacy and data protection are intimately linked to the basic structure of society. Neither they, nor the public, are likely to accept the status quo for much longer. — Dr. Nathalie Maréchal is a senior research fellow at Ranking Digital Rights, where she studies the impact of information and communication technology companies' business practices on human rights.

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