Don Marti
Fri 29 Aug 2014 06:16:08 AM PDT
Don't punch the monkey. Embrace the Badger.
One of the main reactions I get to Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful is: why are you always on about saving advertising? Advertising? Really?
Even when I do point out how non-targeted ads can be good for publishers and advertisers, the obvious question is, if I'm not an advertiser or publisher, why should I care? As a member of the audience, or a regular citizen, why does advertising matter? And what's all this about the thankless task of saving online advertising from itself? I didn't sign up for that.
The answer is: Because externalities.
Advertising can have positive externalities.
The biggest positive externality is ad-supported content that later becomes available for other uses. For example, short story readers today are benefitting from magazine ad budgets of the 19th-20th centuries.
Every time you binge-watch an old TV show, you're a positive externality winner, using a cultural good originally funded by advertising.
I agree with the people who want ad-supported content for free, or at a subsidized price. I'm not going to condemn all advertising as The Internet's Original Sin. I just think that we need to fix the bugs that make Internet advertising less valuable than ads in older media.
Advertising can have negative externalities.
On the negative side, the biggest externality is the identity theft and other fraud risk inherent in large databases of PII. (And it's all PII. Anonymization is bogus.) The costs of identity theft fall on the people whose information is compromised, not on the companies that chose to collect it.
In 20 years, people will look back at John Battelle's surveillance marketing fandom the way we now watch those 1950s industrial films that praise PCBs, or asbestos, or some other God-awful substance that we're still spending billions to clean up. PII is informational hazmat.
The French Task Force on Taxation of the
Digital Economy suggests a unit charge per user
monitored
to address the dangers that uncontrolled practices
regarding the use of these data are likely to raise
for the protection of public freedoms.
But although that kind of thing might fly in
Europe,
in the USA we have to use technology. And that's where
regular people come in.
What you can do
Your choice to protect your privacy by blocking those creepy targeted ads that everyone hates is not a selfish one. You're helping to re-shape the economy. You're helping to move ad spending away from ads that target you, and have more negative externalities, and towards ads that are tied to content, and have more positive externalities. It's unlikely that Internet ads will ever be all positive, or all negative, but privacy-enabled users can shift the balance in a good way.
Don't punch the monkey. Embrace the Badger.