22 Oct 2019 Search

I don’t know if it’s Duck Season or Wabbit Season now, but starting Jan. 1 it’s creepy database marketing company season here in California.

This doesn’t mean that we can just use the opt-out flow that’s easiest. The surveillance marketers are already working on a way to make people feel like they’re doing CCPA, and to make things harder for publishers, but without affecting the bigger players. The IAB CCPA Compliance Framework for Publishers & Technology Companies is out, and it enables you to signal an opt-out only for the site you’re on. Not what we need, because it doesn’t do anything about the party that actually holds the data, and that’s where the opt out or data deletion demandI know the law says data deletion request but if you’re not allowed to turn me down then I’m not requesting. needs to go. Places like

  • Oracle Data Cloud

  • Acxiom

  • Experian Marketing Services

  • LiveRamp

All the companies on this CCPA todo list. If you want advertisers to buy you better ad-supported content, you have to starve them of the targeting data they need to reach you on crappy content, or in social media and native apps. Which means focus on the DMPs, not the peripheral ad targeting. Anyway, we should be able to make CCPA flow a lot easier. Here’s a button to help me test something to do that.

Two more things.

Anybody with a clean whiteboard can design a better web advertising system than what we have now. The hard part is incrementally getting ad-supported publishers from the current shitshow to the new system before they run out of money.

Solutions to the surveillance marketing problem have to be built for real people, not for a fully-informed, rational Homo economicus. Two pieces of irrational behavior you can count on, and that the solution has to take into account.

  • Users won’t pay for privacy even when it’s cheap.

  • Advertisers won’t pay for context even when it’s valuable.

(The first makes sense if you consider that we consider surveillance marketing as something that the other side is doing wrong and we expect norms violators, not the people affected by the violation, to bear the cost. The second one seems to be a lot more complicated.)