Click this to buy better stuff and be happier

How does this work?

I still don’t know how exactly how this tip works, but so far there have been a few theories.

1: lower fraud risk. It’s possible that de-personalizing the ads reduces the number of scam advertisers who can successfully reach you. Bian et al., in Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud, show that Apple App Tracking Transparency, which reduces the ability of apps to personalize ads, tended to reduce fraud complaints to the FTC.

We estimate that the reduction in tracking reduces money lost in all complaints by 4.7% and money lost reported in internet and data security complaints by 40.1%.

That’s a pretty big effect. De-personalizing ads might mean that your employer doesn’t get compromised by an ad campaign that delivers malware targeting a specific company, and you don’t get targeted for fake ads targeted to users of a software product. Even if the increase in fraud risk for users with personalization left on is relatively small, getting scammed has a big impact and can move the average money and happiness metrics a lot.

2: more mindful buying. Another possibility is that people who get fewer personalized ads are making fewer impulse purchases. Jessica Fierro and Corrine Reichert bought a selection of products from those Temu ads that seem to be everywhere, and decided they weren’t worth it. Maybe people without personalized ads are making fewer buying decisions but each one is better thought out.

3. buy more from higher quality vendors. Or maybe companies that put more money into personalized advertising tend to put less into improving product quality.ICMYI: Product is the P all marketers should strive to influence by Mark Ritson In Behavioral advertising and consumer welfare: An empirical investigation, Mustri et al. found that

targeted ads are more likely to be associated with lower quality vendors, and higher prices for identical products, compared to competing alternatives found in organic search results

In Why Your Brand Feels Like a Cheap Date: All Flash, No Substance in the World of Performance Marketing, Pesach Lattin writes,

Between 2019 and 2021, brands that focused on brand equity saw a 72% increase in value, compared to just 20% for brands that relied primarily on performance tactics. Ignoring brand-building not only weakens your baseline sales but forces you to spend more and more on performance marketing just to keep your head above water.

Brands that are over-focused on surveillance advertising might be forced to under-invest in product improvements.

4. limited algorithmic and personalized pricing. Personalized ads might be set up to offer the same product at higher prices to some people. The FTC was investigating, but from the research point of view, personalized pricing is really hard to tell apart from dynamic pricing. Even if you get volunteers to report prices, some might be getting a higher price because stock is running low, not because of who the individual is. So it’s hard to show how much impact this has, but hard to rule it out too.

5. it’s just a step on the journey. Another possibility is that de-personalizing the ads is a gateway to blocking ads entirely. What if, without personalization, the ads get gross or annoying enough that people tend to move up to an ad blocker? And, according to Lin et al. in The Welfare Effects of Ad Blocking,

[P]articipants that were asked to install an ad-blocker become less likely to regret recent purchases, while participants that were asked to uninstall their ad-blocker report lower levels of satisfaction with their recent purchases.

Maybe you don’t actually make better buying decisions while ads are on but personalization is off—but it’s a step toward full ad blocking where you do get better stuff and more happiness.

How do I know this works?

I’m confident that this tip works because if turning ad personalization off didn’t help you, Google would have said so a while ago. Remember the 52% paper about third-party cookies? Google made a big deal out of researching the ad revenue impact of turning cookie tracking on or off. And this ad personalization setting also has a revenue impact for Google. According to documents from one of Google’s Federal cases, keeping the number of users with ad personalization off low is a goal for Google—they make more money from you if you have personalization on, so they have a big incentive to try to convince you that personalization is a win-win. So why so quiet? The absence of a PDF about this is just as informative as the actual PDF would be.

And it’s not just Google. Research showing user benefits from personalized ads would be a fairly easy project not just for Google, but for any company that can both check a privacy setting and measure some kind of shopping outcome. Almost as long as Internet privacy tools have been a thing, so has advice from Internet Thought Leaders telling us they’re not a good idea. But for a data-driven industry, they’re bringing surprisingly little data—especially considering that for many companies it’s data they already have and would only need to do stats on, make graphs, and write (or have an LLM write) the abstract and body copy.

Almost any company with a mobile app could do research to show any benefits from ad personalization, too. Are the customers who use Apple iOS and turn off tracking more or less satisfied with their orders? Do banks get more fraud reports from app users with tracking turned on or off? It would be straightforward for a lot of companies to show that turning off personalization or turning on some privacy setting makes you a less happy customer—if it did.

The closest I have found so far is Balancing User Privacy and Personalization by Malika Korganbekova and Cole Zuber. This study simulated the effects of a privacy feature by truncating browsing history for some Wayfair shoppers, and found that people who were assigned to the personalized group and chose a product personalized to them were 10% less likely to return it than people in the non-personalized group. But that’s about a bunch of vendors of similar products that were all qualified by the same online shopping platform, not about the mix of honest and dishonest personalized ads that people get in total. So go back and do the tip if you didn’t already, enjoy your improved shopping experience, and be happy.

More: advertising personalization: good for you?

Related

You can’t totally turn off ad personalization on Meta sites and apps (Facebook and Instagram), but there are settings. See How to Change Your Meta Settings | Make yourself less valuable to Meta. Brought to you by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.. You can also limit the flow of targeting data in or out. See Mad at Meta? Don’t Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data by Lena Cohen at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

how Google can go legit In theory, advertising can enable shoppers to identify legit sellers of high-quality goods. If too much of the advertising system is dominated by a small number of deceptive intermediaries, though, that breaks down—trading away total value created for value that can be captured in the current quarter. A future, more honest Google could make more money over a longer time for its shareholders.

B L O C K in the U S A Ad blocking is trending up, and for the first time the people surveyed gave their number one reason as privacy, not annoyance or performance.

fix Google Search will get you not all the way back to classic Google, but pretty close.

MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets: An overview and exploration of the concept of missing datasets. by Mimi Onuoha: That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to. It’s in these things that we find cultural and colloquial hints of what is deemed important. Spots that we’ve left blank reveal our hidden social biases and indifferences.

The $16 hack to blocking ads on your devices for life (I don’t know about the product or the offer, just interesting to see it on a site with ads. Maybe the affiliate revenue is a much bigger deal than the programmatic ad revenue?)

personalization risks In practice, most of the privacy risks related to advertising are the result not of identifying individuals, but of treating different people in the same context differently.

Bonus links

Samuel Bendett and David Kirichenko cover Battlefield Drones and the Accelerating Autonomous Arms Race in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials started to describe their country as a war lab for the future—highlighting for allies and partners that, because these technologies will have a significant impact on warfare going forward, the ongoing combat in Ukraine offers the best environment for continuous testing, evaluation, and refinement of [autonomous] systems. Many companies across Europe and the United States have tested their drones and other systems in Ukraine. At this point in the conflict, these companies are striving to gain battle-tested in Ukraine credentials for their products.

Aram Zucker-Scharff writes, in The bounty hunter tendency, the future of privacy, and ad tech’s new profit frontier., The new generation of laws that are authorizing citizens to become bounty hunters are implicitly tied to the use of surveillance technology. They encourage the use of citizen vs citizen surveillance and create a dangerous environment that worsens the information imbalance between wealthy citizens and everyone else. (Is this a good argument against private right of action in privacy laws? It’s likely that troll lawyers will use existing wiretapping laws against legit news sites, which tend to have long and vulnerable lists of adtech partners.)

Scharon Harding covers TVs at CES 2025. On the one hand, TVs are adding far-field microphones which, um, yikes. But on the other hand, remember how the Microsoft Windows business and gaming market helped drive down the costs of Linux-capable workstation-class hardware? What is the big innovation that developers, designers, and architects will make out of big, inexpensive screens subsidized by the surveillance business?