The only people who want to save hypersegmented advertising are those who make their living from it
I’ve been calling for a ban on hypersegmented advertising for some time, and so I was pleased to see an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), recommending an end to behavioral advertising.
Why would anybody want to ban a type of advertising that has given rise to a billion-dollar industry? Fundamentally, because its premises are wrong, abusive and unsustainable. By now, anybody who uses the internet that the idea of monitoring everything we do online so that our activities can be analyzed in order to bombard us with hyper-segmented advertising knows this is a bad idea, as it would be in the real world: imagine brands following our movements 24/7, recording what we do, what stores we enter or what shop windows we see, or what we talk about with our friends and family. That would be a gross invasion of our privacy, right?
And yet, for the simple reason that it was something new and still not adequately regulated, for more than a decade we have been accepting and taking as a characteristic of the online world that very advertising model, which has generated huge amounts of money for the companies that sell advertising, but hasn’t translated into more sales. The result is that brands waste their advertising budgets, we feel spied on, and all…
