21 Jul 2024 Search

Over on the social media sites there have been a bunch of very serious posts from very serious people explaining how surveillance advertising is here to stay and the best we can do is put some privacy-enhancing technologies on it. This sounds dismal and awful—ads according to the faufreluches so the big shots get ads for sweet cars and good jobs, retirees get precious metals scams, those with money get legit investments, those without get predatory finance, you know, all the same tricks and discrimination but with more math to make it harder to understand. So instead I’m going to do some Internet optimism today. What happens if instead of reimplementing surveillance advertising, we just get rid of it?

Step one: people start buying better stuff. If you figure out how to turn the surveillance advertising off, you start buying goods and services that you are more satisfied with (Lin et. al) and buying less overpriced crap (Mustri et al). The main reason I’m pretty confident about this effect is because of some research that hasn’t been published. If people who use ad blockers and privacy tools were making worse purchases, then someone in the surveillance business would have published research saying so.

Step two: marketers look for alternatives. If I can somehow avoid being exposed to the surveillance ads, that doesn’t mean that people still aren’t going to try to sell me stuff. But instead of surveillance ads, which let them target the most valuable possible audience for the lowest possible ad rates, they have to fall back to the next most profitable options, which might be

  • contextual ad placements, funding better ad-supported content

  • reviewer and influencer programs

  • content marketing

  • increase product quality

  • lower price

Those options probably have less attractive profits or predictability for the company than the surveillance ads do, or the company would have chosen them in the first place. But by removing the surveillance ad option, as a shopper I can get more money to flow to more win-win options.

Step three: what happened to the ad-supported content? A lot of ad-supported content does get money from surveillance ads. It could turn out that the legit ad-supported sites end up better off, just by supply and demand. The number of available crap ad spots—that are only salable because of surveillance—will go down. And after steps one and two, the customers will be sitting on more money, and can put some of it into subscriptions and crowdfunding. And subscription and crowdfunding models tend to send a higher percentage of the money to the content creator than advertising models do.

Of course, the market isn’t going to change because one person is harder to reach with surveillance ads. Ad reform is a collective problem, and needs tool building, education, and lobbying work.

We might be able to get some good data about this soon, thanks to the EDPB decision on Facebook ad tracking. It looks like some users are going to be able to use the exact same social site, but with random ads instead of personalized ones. When the users who picked Facebook’s non-personalized option turn out to own better stuff that they’re more satisfied with, that will help build toward a surveillance advertising ban. It’s a lot easier to justify a ban when it’s not about balancing harms and benefits, but more about stacking consumer benefits on top of the existing privacy and national security benefits.

More: journalist-owned news sites (Sunday Internet optimism, part 2)