Swamped like everything else by Trump’s black tariffs farce, Tanya O’Carroll’s landmark privacy case against social media giant Meta at the end of March received little follow-up.
Yet the London human rights worker may have just put the first serious dent in the armour of the social media platforms that have done so much to poison our politics, wreck public discourse and, although much less widely appreciated, enable online grifters and criminal organisations to make off with billions of dollars in what is quite possibly the biggest fraud the world has ever seen.
Although O’Carroll’s case was settled before it could come to court, one thing shines through: Meta has accepted that under current data protection laws it can no longer use the personal data it has collected on O’Carroll to target her with personalised advertising.
Why is this a big deal?
Personalised advertising and the tracking that enables it – adtech’s ability to record every click we make and website we visit on the internet – are the dark heart of surveillance capitalism: the engine of a digital advertising industry that will rake in an estimated $700bn in 2025 and in a couple of years will likely pass the $1tr mark. (Online now takes two-thirds of all ad spending.) Meanwhile, the lung that supplies the oxygen to feed that dark heart is our new frenemy ‘free speech’, in the form of the fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative facts and radicalisation that flourish like weeds on the internet courtesy of the notorious Section 230 of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act, which shields website owners from responsibility for content supplied by their users by designating them as ‘intermediaries’ rather than the publishers that they really are.
Since its birth in coffee houses centuries ago, old-style print and broadcast advertising unproblematically supported generations of ‘legacy media’ – press, radio, TV. It could equally well pay for a free internet, too. But it was swept aside by the adtech-powered surveillance and targeting business model pioneered, developed and now completely owned by Google, Meta and Amazon, a dominance they have no intention of giving up.
For them, the model is a perpetual-motion cash machine. Trackers hoover up every trace of the digital exhaust we leave behind as we move around the internet, feeding the data into algorithms that ‘learn’ from it what content is most likely to keep us hooked on the site where we can be fed as many of their business customers’ ads as possible. Hey presto! Naturally, the ‘freer’ and more controversial the speech featured on their pages – the more toxic the message – the louder the cash machine rings, simultaneously delivering more juicy personal data for the algorithms to learn from and digging deeper rabbit holes for viewers to fall down. So much for ‘Don’t be evil’.
The ad industry’s bland assertion that ‘precision targeted advertising’ is ‘more effective’ is twaddle of Trumpian proportions. As every poll confirms, people hate targeted ads even more than they do other kinds. Far from making them better, tracking just makes ads creepier and more intrusive. To avoid seeing them, an estimated half of all web users have installed ad blockers on their computers, and when Apple gave them the ability to turn off tracking on their iPhones, 80 per cent of US customers thankfully did so.
They are right to be mistrustful, even if not nearly as much as they ought to be. Not only do companies such as Oracle and Google boast databases containing as many entries as there are people on the planet, the data in them is broadcast daily all over the internet by the constant information flux that makes up the advertising process. 60 per cent of online advertising is automated or ‘programmatic’, mediated through an auction process called Real Time Bidding (RTB). But whereas in old-style advertising what’s sold is a designated space or spot in a publication or TV or radio schedule, in an RTB auction each lot is a kind of viewer, wherever they might be on the internet. RTB wouldn’t work without tracking, profiling, trading and sharing people’s data, including on race, sexuality, health status and political affiliation, on a massive scale every day, all without consent or control. According to marketing activist Bob Hoffman, the online activity and location of the average US or European web user are broadcast to thousands of companies hundreds of times a day. Many doubt whether it is actually legal – but even if it is, at least it is now a bit less useful, thanks to O’Carroll’s case.
But the trading of personal data isn’t the limit of adtech’s horrors. Online advertising is a sink of almost unimaginable fraud and waste. It’s impossible to know exactly, but of the $700bn a year spent on web ads, it is generally agreed that around $100bn is fraudulent, making it second only to drugs as a source of criminal profit. This is largely because the mind-numbing complexity of the system makes it trivially easy for a profusion of scammers to insert themselves into the supply chain and help themselves to advertisers’ cash on the ad’s way to the intended website – or not. Many ads are never seen by a living person. Others end up on porn or other clickbait sites, or fake ones created for the purpose. The ease with which even small-time villains can create fake websites, audiences and clicks means that an estimated third of online ad spend simply vanishes into thin air. When Uber switched off two-thirds of its $150m ad budget, its suspicions of fraud were reinforced when its business levels changed not one jor. Data security firm Barracuda Networks reports that more internet traffic is produced by malicious bots than by humans.
Once the most glamorous side of capitalism, its creatives feted like rock stars, advertising is now its seediest. Surveillance marketing is just a decade old. Yet in that time, the power of adtech has turned the industry of advertising from a bit of a joke into a monster from hell that that is a potent threat to our democracy. Would Brexit or Musk or Trump have happened without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google or TikTok? The ramifications for both individuals and nations are hair-raising. In a recent TED talk, journalist Carol Cadwalladr, who did much to uncover the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal around Brexit, notes that when she asked ChatGPT to write an article in the style of Carol Cadwalladr it turned out an ‘creepily plausible’ piece, using LLM learning from her IP and personal data, entirely without her consent or knowledge. She calls this data rape, and the tracking of children, who by the age of 13 will have dossiers containing millions of data points logged against them online, child abuse. This is the infernal machine in whose fuel line O’Carroll has just made a puncture. Small, admittedly, but growing every day as more people take advantage of campaigning organisation Ekō’s web page allowing others to follow her example and demand not to have their personal data used to serve them targeted advertising, as I just have. I urge you to do the same.