Something tells me that we’ve already lost the battle to prevent algorithmically generated advertising
I’ve been saying it for years: from the moment the Internet made it possible to systematically capture user data, advertising was changed forever. But this was never a change approved by law or public consensus, and instead was simply an opportunity seized on by companies like Google and Facebook who quickly made it a de facto reality of our lives.
Before the internet, all advertisers could do was to assume that somebody who read a particular newspaper, or went past a billboard, or who listened to this or that radio station or watched this or that television program at a particular time would meet the target audience they were trying to reach. Let’s not disregard that segmentation: for many decades, it was the essence of how companies made decisions about multi-million dollar investments and how they reached their potential customers, and even though they knew they were throwing away half their advertising budget — but didn’t know which half — the equation was still clearly positive: our potential customers still knew we existed and where to find us.
But in the Google and Facebook world, everything we do is rigorously collected: our interests, our socio-demographic characteristics, our fears, our sexual preferences and even our health problems…
