The Shameful State of Online Advertising
Or how we sacrifice our privacy and receive nothing in return
We’re running out of visual metaphors to conceptualize the amount of data that technology companies hold about us. Amazon is shipping our data in 18-wheelers, Google has built 15 small villages around the world to store our information, and Facebook just granted scholars to 52 tons of pepperoni pizzas worth of data on misinformation. Zettabyte, a word that should be reserved for a cyberpunk villain, is now entering our lexicon. The numbers quite literally transcend human comprehension.
While big tech is seen as the data-hoarding bogeyman, advertisers of all sizes have chased data with reckless abandon. In their lust, too many marketers have lost sight of which data points truly hold value and are hoarding information for information’s sake. This has serious implications for both our privacy and the fundamental quality of advertising we receive.
In recent years, the advertising industry has sextupled down on finding out who consumers are on a personal level. This is powered largely by a plethora of companies who fundamentally exist to collect any morsel of data that users drop into the ether. Perhaps no example is more comical than MoviePass, a company that is essentially a giant subsidy given to consumers to mine personal…
