The problem with the internet
A recent article by Katie Notopoulos in MIT Tech Review, “How to Fix the Internet”, got me thinking. I have long shared her belief that ultra-targeted advertising is the cancer destroying the web, and was impressed by how she it traces its origins precisely.
Let’s go back to that moment in 1999, when a company called DoubleClick came up with the idea of combining users’ personal data with cookies. This allowed it to track people on the web and target ads more effectively. This was the moment that changed the rules of advertising, creating a new social contract by which advertising could segment you based on what you looked at on the internet, how much time you spent on it, and within a decade, where you had been.
The humble cookie, originally a neutral, low-cost technology created by Netscape to store data locally on users’ computers, was weaponized into something used to track us on the internet and monetize our attention. Little wonder DoubleClick found itself the target of a lawsuit brought by the the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The company…
