Prompt: “a field of many different kinds of people being harvested by machines and turned into bales of fertilizer.” Via Microsoft CoPilot | Designer.
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more.
The business category harvesting the most personal data is adtech (aka ad tech and “programmatic”) advertising, which is the surveillance-based side of the advertising business. It is at the heart of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and is now most of what advertising has become online. It’s roughly a trillion-dollar business. It is also nothing like advertising of the Mad Men kind. (Credit where due: old-fashioned advertising, aimed at whole populations, gave us nearly all the brand names known to the world). As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.
Adtech pays nothing to people for their data or data about them. Not personally. Google may pay carriers for traffic data harvested from phones, and corporate customers of auctioned personal data may pay publishers for moments in which ads can be placed in front of tracked individuals’ ears or eyeballs. Still, none of that money has ever gone to individuals for any reason, including compensation for the insults and inconveniences the system requires. So there is little if any existing infrastructure on which paying people for personal data can be scaffolded up. Nor are there any policy motivations. In fact,
Regulations have done nothing to slow down the juggernaut of growth in the adtech industry. For Google, Facebook, and other adtech giants, paying huge fines for violations (of the GDPR, the CCPA, the DMA, or whatever) is just the cost of doing business. The GDPR compliance services business is also in the multi-$billion range, and growing fast. In fact,
Regulations have made the experience of using the Web worse for everyone. Thank the GDPR for all the consent notices subtracting value from every website you visit while adding cognitive overhead and other costs to site visitors and operators. In nearly every case, these notices are ways for site operators to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. And, although all these agreements are contracts, you have no record of what you’ve agreed to. So they are worse than worthless.
Tracking people without their clear and conscious invitation or a court order is wrong on its face. Period. Full stop. That tracking is The Way Things Are Done online does not make it right, any more than driving drunk or smoking in crowded elevators was just fine in the 1950s. When the Digital Age matures, decades from now, we will look back on our current time as one thick with extreme moral compromises that were finally corrected after the downsides became clear and more ethically sound technologies and economies came along. One of those corrections will be increasing personal agency rather than just corporate capacities. In fact,
Increasing personal independence and agency will be good for markets, becausefree customers are more valuable than captive ones. Having ways to gather, keep, and make use of personal data is an essential first step toward that goal. We have made very little progress in that direction so far. (Yes, there are lots of good projects listed here, but there we still a long way to go.)
Businesses being “user-centric” will do nothing to increase customers’ value to themselves and the marketplace. First, as long as we remain mere “users” of others’ systems, we will be in a subordinate and dependent role. While there are lots of things we can do in that role, we will be able to do far more if we are free and independent agents. Because of that,
We need technologies that create and increase personal independence and agency. Personal data stores (aka warehouses, vaults, clouds, life management platforms, lockers, and pods) are one step toward doing that. Many have been around for a long time: ProjectVRM currently lists thirty-three under the Personal Data Stores heading. Some have been there a long time. The problem with all of them is that they are still too focused on what people do as social beings in the Web 2.0 world, rather than on what they can do for themselves, both to become more well-adjusted human beings and more valuable customers in the marketplace. For that,
It will help to have independent personal AIs. These are AI systems that work for us, exclusively. None exist yet. When they do, they will help us manage the personal data that fully matters:
Contacts—records and relationships
Calendars—where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, where, and when
Health records and relationships with providers, going back all the way
Financial records and relationships, including past and present obligations
Property we have and where it is, including all the small stuff
Shopping—what we’ve bought, plan to buy, or might be thinking about,
Subscriptions—what we’re paying for, when they end or renew, what kind of deal we’re locked into, and what better ones might be out there.
Travel—Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, and when
Personal AIs are today where personal computers were fifty years ago. Nearly all the AI news today is about modern mainframe businesses: giants with massive data centers churning away on ingested data of all kinds. But some of these models are open sourced and can be made available to any of us for our own purposes, such as dealing with the abundance of data in our own lives that is mostly out of control. Some of it has never been digitized. With AI help it could be.
I’m in a time crunch right now. So, if you’re with me this far, read We can do better than selling our data, which I wrote in 2018 and remains as valid as ever. Or dig The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which Tim Berners Lee says inspired Solid. I’m thinking about following it up. If you’re interested in seeing that happen, let me know.
Prompt: “A panopticon in which thousands of companies are spying on one woman alone in the center with nothing around her.” Via Microsoft Bing Image Creator
In her latestArs Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates from the videotape rental age) unconstitutional because it inconveniences Patreon’s ability to share the personal data of its users with other parties.† Naturally, the EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU itself all stand opposed to Patreon on this and have filed an amicus brief explaining why.
But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to bring up the inconvenient fact that Ars Technica is also in the surveillance business. A PageXray of Ashley’s story finds this—
But will Ashley, or any reporter, grab the third rail of their employer’s participation in the tracking-based advertising business? Or visit that business’s responsibility for what was already the biggest boycott in human history way back in 2015? The odds are against it. I’ve challenged many reporters to grab that third rail, just like I’m challenging Ashley here. In every case, nothing happened.
I never challenged Farhad Manjoo, but he did come through exposingThe New York Times (his employer’s) own participation in the privacy-opposed tracking-based adtech business, back in 2019. Here’s a PageXray of tracking via that piece today:
If you think regulations are going to protect your privacy, you’re wrong. In fact, they can make things worse, especially if they start with the assumption that your privacy is provided only by other parties, most of whom are incentivized to violate it.
Exhibit A for how much worse things can get is the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). As soon as the GDPR went into full effect in May 2018, damn near every corporate entity on the Web put up a “cookie notice” requiring acceptance of terms and privacy policies that allow them to continue violating your privacy by harvesting, sharing, auctioning off and otherwise using your data, and data about you.
For websites and services in that harvesting business (a population that rounds to the whole commercial web), these notices provide a one-click way to adhere to the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit.
There’s also big business in the friction that it produces. To see how big, look up GDPR+compliance on Google. You’ll get 232 million results (give or take a few dozen million).
None of those results are for you, even though you are who the GDPR is supposed to protect. See, to the GDPR, you are a mere “data subject” and not an independent and fully functional participant in the technical, social, and economic ecosystem the Internet supports by design. All privacy protections around your data are the burden of other parties.
Or at least that’s the interpretation that nearly every lawmaker, regulatory bureaucrat, lawyer, and service provider goes by. (One exception is Elizabeth Renieris@hackylawyer. Her collection of postings is required reading on the GDPR and much else.) The same goes for those selling GDPR compliance services, comprising most of those 190 million GDPR+compliance search results.
The clients of those services include nearly every website and service on Earth that harvests personal data. These entities have no economic incentive to stop harvesting, sharing, and selling personal data the usual ways, beyond fear that the GDPR might actually be enforced, which so far (with fewexceptions), it hasn’t been. (See Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail.)
Worse, the tools for “managing” your exposure to data harvesters are provided entirely by the websites you visit and the services you engage. The “choices” they provide (if they provide any at all) are between 1) acquiescence to them doing what they please and 2) a maze of menus full of checkboxes and toggle switches “controlling” your exposure to unknown threats from parties you’ve never heard of, with no way to record your choices or monitor effects.
So let’s explore just one site’s presentation, and then get down to what it means and why it matters.
Our example is https://www.mirror.co.uk. If you haven’t clicked on that site already, you’ll see a cookie notice that says,
We use cookies to help our site work, to understand how it is used, and to tailor the adverts presented on our site. By clicking “Accept” below, you agree to us doing so. You can read more in our cookie notice. Or, if you do not agree, you can click Manage below to access other choices.
They don’t mention that “tailor the adverts” really means something like this:
We open your browser to infestation by tracking beacons from countless parties in the online advertising business, plus who-knows-what-else that might be working with those parties (there is no way to tell, and if there was we wouldn’t provide it), so those parties and their “partners” can use those beacons to follow you like a marked animal everywhere you go and report your activities back to a vast marketplace where personal data about you is shared, bought and sold, much of it in real time, supposedly so your eyeballs can be hit with “relevant” or “interest-based” advertising as you travel from site to site and service to service. While we are sure there are bad collateral effects (fraud and malware, for example), we don’t care about those because it’s our business to get paid just for clicks or “impressions,” whether you’re impressed or not—and the odds that you won’t be impressed average to certain.
Okay, so now click on the “Manage” button.
Up will pop a rectangle where it says “Here you can control cookies, including those for advertising, using the buttons below. Even if you turn off the advertising-related cookies, you will still see adverts on our site, because they help us to fund it. However, those adverts will simply be less relevant to you. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Notice on the site.”
Under that text, in the left column, are six “Purposes of data collection”, all defaulted with little check marks to ON (though only five of them show, giving the impression that there are only those five). The right column is called “Our partners”, and it shows the first five of what turn out to be 259 companies, nearly all of which are not brands known to the world or to anybody outside the business (and probably not known widely within the business as well). All are marked ON by that little check mark. Here’s that list, just through the letter A:
If you bother to “manage” any of this, what record do you have of it—or of all the other collections of third parties who you’ve agreed to follow you around? Remember, there are a different collection of these at every website with third parties that track you, and different UIs, each provided by other third parties.
It might be easier to discover and manage parasites in your belly than cookies in your browser.
Think I exaggerate? The long list of cookies in just one of my browsers (which I had to dig deep to find) starts with this list:
I know what zoom.us is. The rest are a mystery to me.
To look at just that first one, 1rx.io, I have to dig way down in the basement of the preferences directory (in Chrome it’s chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io), where I find that its locally stored data is this:
_rxuuid
Name
_rxuuid
Content
%7B%22rx_uuid%22%3A%22RX-2b58f1b1-96a4-4e1d-9de8-3cb1ca4175b0%22%2C%22nxtrdr%22%3Afalse%7D
Domain
.1rx.io
Path
/
Send for
Any kind of connection
Accessible to script
No (HttpOnly)
Created
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 4:48:53 AM
Expires
Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:48:53 AM
I’m a somewhat technical guy, and at least half of that stuff means nothing to me.
As for “managing” those, my only choice on that page is to “Remove All”. Does that mean Remove everything on that page alone or Remove all cookies everywhere? And how can I remember what I’ve had removed?
Obviously, there is no way for anybody to “manage” this, in any meaningful sense of the word.
We also can’t fix it on the sites and services side, no matter how much those sites and services care (which most don’t) about the “customer journey”, the “customer experience” or any of the other bullshit they’re buying from marketers this week.
Even within the CRM (customer relationship management) world, the B2B customers of CRM companies use one cloud and one set of tools to create as many different “experiences” for users and customers as there are companies deploying those tools to manage customer relationships from their side. There are no corresponding tools on our side. (Though there is work going on. See here.)
So the digital world remains one where we have no common or standard way to scale our privacy and data usage tools, choices, or experiences across all sites and services. And that’s what we’ll need if we want real privacy online.
The simple place where we need to start is this: privacy is personal, meaning something we create for ourselves (which in the natural world we do with clothing and shelter, both of which lack equivalents in the digital world).
And we need to be clear that privacy is not a grace of privacy policies and terms of service that differ with every company and over which none of us have true control—especially when there is an entire industry devoted to making those companies untrustworthy, even if they are in full compliance with privacy laws.
Devon Loffreto (who coined the term self-sovereign identity and whose good work we’ll be visiting in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal) puts the issue in simple geek terms: we need root authority over our lives. Hashtag: #OwnRoot.
It is only by owning root that we can crank up agency on the individual’s side. We have a perfect base for that in the standards and protocols that gave us the Internet, the Web, email, and too little else. And we need it here too. Soon.
We (a few colleagues and I) created Customer Commons as a place for terms that individuals can proffer as first parties, just by pointing at them, much as licenses at Creative Commons can be pointed at. Sites and services can agree to those terms, and both can keep records and follow audit trails.
And there are some good signs that this will happen. For example, the IEEE approached Customer Commons last year with the suggestion that we stand up a working group for machine-readable personal privacy terms. It’s called P7012. If you’d like to join, please do.
Unless we #OwnRoot for our own lives online, privacy will remain an empty promise by a legion of violators.
One more thing. We can put the GDPR to our use if we like. That’s because Article 4 of the GDPR defines a data controller as “the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data…” This means each of us can be our own data controller. Most lawyers dealing with the GDPR don’t agree with that. They think the individual data subject will always need a fiduciary or an intermediary of some kind: an agent of the individual, but not an individual with agency. Yet the simple fact is that we should have root authority over our lives online, and that means we should have some degree of control over our data exposures, and how our data, and data about us, is used—much as we do over how we control or moderate our privacy in the physical world. More about all that in upcoming posts.
† This is an example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” and Wikipedia (at that link) more politely calls “platform decay.” It’s a big trade-away of goodwill by Patreon. Says to me they must be making an enshitload of money in the adtech fecosystem.
Prompt: ” hardscrabble farms next to a suburb full of volvo station wagons”
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called “Volvo Wagons” or something.
My current zip, in Bloomington, Indiana, features five out of PRIZM’s 68 numbered types:
48 Generation Web—Low Income Younger Family Mix
47 Striving Selfies—Lower Midscale Middle Age Mostly w/o Kids
15 New Homesteaders—Wealthy Middle Age Mostly w/ Kids
51 Campers & Camo—Lower Midscale Middle Age Family Mix
66 New Beginnings—Low Income Younger Family Mix
None of which describes me or my wife.
Sort of close is 05 – Country Squires: “Members of this segment fled the city life for the charms of small-town living. Many have executive jobs and live in recently built homes.” Except we didn’t flee and our home was built in 1899 or 1915. (Sources differ.) But we are building a house, so maybe that counts.
A bit closer is 20 – Empty Nests: “Most residents are over 65 years old, but they show no interest in a rest-home retirement. With their grown-up children out of the house they pursue active, and activist, lifestyles.”
But all of that stuff is just name-calling against typified populations—a form of -ism not much different than racism, sexism, or ageism. That’s why, on the receiving end, we tend not to like it, even if it brings us ‘relevant’ messages from sellers. (This happens far less than sellers think, and typically at the cost of privacy lost to surveillance.)
All of us are as different as our faces and voices. Being different than everybody—even ourselves five minutes ago—is among our most human qualities. We all grow and change constantly, whether we want to or not.
Marketing didn’t get that when PRIZM was invented in 1980, and it doesn’t get it today, for the simple reason that marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.
Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and I all thought there was hope for marketing when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, because we saw the Internet as a radically new way to connect the demand and supply sides of markets directly, and personally.
But marketing instead saw the Internet as a great way to spy on people and to typify them more than ever. PRIZM persists, entrenched as ever. And conversations among customers and marketers happen in two very different and disconnected echo chambers, mostly using giant corporate platforms.
For a sense of how thoroughly disconnected those chambers are, see any of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons. They’re brilliant and spot-on.
They also make clear—at least to me—that Cluetrain won’t prove right until marketing gets out of the way.
Which it won’t on its own. Our side—the customers’ side—needs to obsolesce it.
The image above was generated by the prompt in the caption under it, using what currently calls itself Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer, which persists Microsoft’s long tradition of aversive and unmemorable names for products.
Bing Create’s visual answer to the prompt, “A world of open source software and hardware.”
After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until yesterday: about 27 years.
I still participate in market conversations around the many topics I covered in that span, but I’m mostly working on other stuff now. For example, in random-ish order:
blogging, such as in my three blogs here (this one, plus ProjectVRM and Trunkline), and supporting what Dave Winer is doing with Feedland and allied work,
All of those are cars in a cluetrain, about which more below.
They are also featured now and then on Reality 2.o, the podcast Katherine Druckman and I have been doing since our Linux Journal days.
For many decades now, I’ve been spoiled by success. For example, open source, an expression whose current meaning was born in 1998, is now beyond huge. Here’s VentureBeat:
Today, open-source software underpins almost everything: A whopping 97% of applications leverage open-source code, and 90% of companies are applying or using it in some way.
GitHub alone had 413 million open-source software (OSS) contributions in 2022.
“Open-source software is the foundation of 99% of the world’s software,” said Martin Woodward, VP of developer relations at GitHub.
By covering open source for Linux Journal from the start, I helped make that happen.
Same with The Cluetrain Manifesto. “Markets are conversations,” a one-liner of mine that became the first thesis in the manifesto, grew to become a meme that hasn’t gone away. The word cluetrain also appears almost daily in tweets on X, almost a quarter century after it was coined. (When Twitter was still itself, cluetrain was mentioned in tweets several times daily. The decline in cluetrain mentions is one small measure of how lame X has become.)
Also blogging!
Hmmm… I don’t think I ever blogged about my only encounter with Robin Williams. It was at some trade show in the early aughts. There was a scrum of attendees gathered around something or someone unseen in the middle. On the periphery was my old friend Tom Rielly, who quickly grabbed me and pulled me into the middle of the crowd, where stood Robin Williams, with two bags of swag. I almost said, “Hey, you look like Robin Williams, only shorter.” Then Tom introduced me, saying “This is Doc. He’s one of the top five bloggers in the world.” I said, “More like one of the top sixteen, but most of the others are duplicates.” Robin then said something funny, and I responded with something funny of my own, and an all-funny exchange ensued during which my separate self said, “Holy shit! I’m doing humor schtick with Robin Williams and holding my own!” After maybe half a minute of this, I excused myself, saying something like, “I’ll leave you to your private audience here,” and exited the crowd.
Oh, and photography. As of this moment, my photos have had 16,855,107 views on one Flickr account, and 1,470,281 on the other. Visits to those run from the hundreds to thousands per day. A search for my name on Wikimedia Commons also brings up 1850 results, nearly all of which are photos I’ve shared using Creative Commons licensing that encourages use and re-use, which is why many (or most) of them find their way into Wikipedia articles.
I’ve had less luck with the other missions I’ve listed above. But I believe in all of them, and in faith, I truck onward.
By the way, FLOSS Weekly has not slipped below the waves. I expect it will be picked up somewhere else on the Web, and wherever you get your podcasts. (I love that expression because it means podcasting isn’t walled into some giant’s garden.) When FLOSS Weekly becomes re-manifest, I’ll point to it here.
A few among the countless photos I’ve shot from United Airlines window seats.
I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We are also both lifetime United Club members and have been so for thirty-three years.
Unlike many passengers of big airlines, we have no complaints about United. The airline has never lost our luggage or mistreated us in any way, even going back decades, to when we were no-status passengers. On the contrary, we like United—especially some of the little things, such as From the Flight Deck (formerly Channel 9) on some plane entertainment systems, and free live Internet connections (at least for T-Mobile customers, which we are). And we rolled with it when United, like other airlines, changed the way frequent fliers earn privileges.
United Airlines is considering using its passenger information to help brands serve targeted ads to its customers, joining a growing number of companies trying to tap their troves of user data for advertising purposes.
Some of these targeted ads could appear on its in-flight entertainment system or on the app that people use to book tickets and check-in, people familiar with the matter said. United hasn’t made a decision yet and may choose not to launch a targeted-advertising business, some of the people said.
Airlines have long taken advantage of the captive nature of their customer base to show them plenty of ads, including commercials on seatback screens, glossy spreads inside in-flight shopping catalogs or, for some, advertisements adorning cabin walls. Offering personalized advertising would greatly expand United’s advertising business, some of the people said.
Of the 106 comments below the story, all but one opposed the idea, and the one exception said he’d rather not keep seeing ads for feminine hygiene products.
The big question here is whether and how United might share personal data with parties other than itself. Because there are lots of companies that will pay for personal data, and United does have, as Patience says, “an advertising business.”
What exactly is that business? Is it just showing ads to United customers? Or, in the process of now personalizing those ads, is it sharing data about those customers with “partners” in the adtech fecosystem, which has been hostile to personal privacy for decades, as a matter of course?
Just based on this one story (and 99+% of the thumbs-down comments it got), it should be obvious that this is a terrible idea. But, this kind of idea is terribly typical in the marketing world today, and a perfect example of what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, a label so correct that it has its own Wikipedia article. In The Guardian, John Naughton asks, Why do we tolerate it?
Two reasons—
1) It’s normative in the extreme. As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.” Today the entire .X $trillion digital advertising business can imagine nothing better than getting personal with everybody. And it totally excuses the tracking required to make it work. Which it doesn’t, most of the time.that
2) Journalists are afraid to bite the beast that feeds them. Here is a PageXray of where personal data about you goes when you visit that story without tracking protection (which most of us don’t have). Here is just one small part of the hundreds of paths that data about you travels out to advertising “partners” of The Wall Street Journal:
Click on that link, wait for that whole graphic to load, and look around. You won’t recognize most of the names in that vast data river delta, but all of them play parts in a fecosystem that relies entirely on absent personal privacy online. And some of them are extra unsavory. Take moatads.com. Don’t bother going there. Nothing will load. Instead, look up the name. Nice, huh? (As an aside, why am I, a paying WSJ subscriber, subjected to all this surveillance?)
I’ve challenged many journalists employed by participants in this system to report on it. So far, I’ve seen only one report: this one by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times, back in 2019. (The Times backed off after that, but they’re still at it.)
As for the consent theater of cookie notices, none of “your choices” are meaningful if you have no record of what you’ve “chosen” and you can’t audit compliance. (Who has even thought about that? I can name two entities: Customer Commons and the IEEE P7012 working group. My wife and I are involved in both.)
Unless United customers stand up and say NO to this, as firmly and directly as possible, the way to bet is that you’ll start seeing personalized ads for all kinds of stuff on your seat back screens, your United app, and in other places to which data about you has been sold or sent by United, one way or another, to and through who knows. (But you’ll probably find some suspects in that PageXray.) Because that’s how great real-world brands are now enshittifying themselves into the same old fecosystem we’ve had online for decades now.
Hey, it’s happened to TVs and cars. (And hell, journalism.) Why not to airlines too?
Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife, by the way.) Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic newsletters.
So I thought I’d check to see how the boycott is doing.
It’s hard to find original sources of hard numbers on ad blocking. Instead, there are lots of what I’ll call claims. But some of those claims do cite or link to sources of some kind. Here are four:
Brian Dean‘s BacklinkosourcesHootsuite, saying 42.7% of Internet users employ ad blockers. Hootsuite, however, wants me to fill out a form that I am sure will get me spammed. So I’m passing on that. Meanwhile there are other interesting stats cited. Growson Edwards on Cipio.ai surfaces a bunch of Hootsuite graphics with interesting data.
Statista last January said “the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year. While awareness of these services lies at almost 90 percent, the number of internet users actively leveraging the technology has stagnated in recent years following visible changes in online user behavior. The switch from desktop to mobile has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on ad block usage: As internet users increasingly browse the web via mobile devices, desktop ad block usage rates in the U.S. and many other parts of the world are dropping, albeit at varying speeds. While mobile ad blocking adoption is still at a nascent stage in the U.S., the global number of mobile ad blocking browser users is rapidly increasing.” On another page, Statista says marketers “can conquer ad blocking by offering personalized advertising.” Anybody want that? Give me a show of hands. Thought so.
Blockthrough, an advertising company, offers a 2022 adblock report that requires filling out a form. So I passed on that one too, but can report that its “key insights” are these: “With 290M monthly active users globally, adblocking on desktop has climbed back close to its all-time-high from 2018,” and “The average adblock rate across geos and verticals is 21%, as measured across >10B pageviews on 9,453 websites.”
Surfshark has some cool maps showing which countries hate ads most and least, based on searches for ad-blocking software. (France was at the top.)
Perhaps more interesting than any of those stats (all of which are unsurprising) is using AI to generate graphics for a post such as this one. At first, I wanted the system (Bing Creator or whatever it’s called this week) to show two separate populations: one living blissfully in a land without advertising, and one with advertising everywhere. That was a fail. I couldn’t get it not to show advertising on both sides. Then I tried to get it to depict the blocking of ads, for example with a wall. That failed too, because advertising always appeared on the wall. Finally, I got the image above with a prompt asking for people who were happy to have advertising inside a giant bottle. Isn’t it crazy how fast the miraculous becomes annoying?
See, there is an iron law for every new technology: What can be done will be done. And a corollary that says, —until it’s clear what shouldn’t be done. Let’s call those Stage One and Stage Two.
With respect to safety from surveillance in our cars, we’re at Stage One.
HeartMedia hopes to offer real-time bidding for its 860+ radio stations in 160 markets, enabling media buyers to buy audio ads the way they now buy digital.
“We’re going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side,” said Rich Bressler, president and COO of iHeart Media, during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, according to Radio Insider.
Bressler did not offer specifics or a timeline. He added: “If you look at broadcasters in general, whether they’re video or audio, I don’t think anyone else is going to have those capabilities out there.”
“The ability, whenever it comes, would include data-infused buying, programmatic trading and attribution,” the report adds.
The Trade Desk lists iHeart Media as one of its programmatic audio partners.
Audio advertising allows users to integrate their brands into their audiences’ “everyday routines in a distraction-free environment, creating a uniquely personalized ad experience around their interests,” the Trade Desk says.
The Trade Desk “specializes in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies, products, and services, designed to personalize digital content delivery to users.” Translation: “We’re in the surveillance business.”
One might think radio is ill-suited for surveillance because it’s an offline medium. Peopler listen more to actual radios than to computers or phones. Yes, some listening is online; but not much, relatively speaking. For example, here is the bottom of the current radio ratings for the San Francisco market:
Those numbers are fractions of one percent of total listening in the country’s most streaming-oriented market.
The biggest challenge at iHeartMedia isn’t attracting new listeners, it’s doing a better job monetizing the sprawling audience it already has. As part of ongoing efforts to sell advertising the way marketers want to transact, it now plans to bring real-time bidding to its 850 broadcast radio stations, top company management said Thursday.
“We’re going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side,” President and COO Rich Bressler said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. “If you look at broadcasters in general, whether they’re video or audio, I don’t think anyone else is going to have those capabilities out there.”
Real-time bidding is a subcategory of programmatic media buying in which ads are bought and sold in real time on a per-impression basis in an instant auction. Pittman and Bressler didn’t offer specifics on how this would be accomplished other than to say the company is currently building out the technology as part of a multi-year effort to allow advertisers to buy iHeart inventory the way they buy digital media advertising. That involves data-infused buying and programmatic trading, along with ad targeting and campaign attribution.
Radio’s largest group has also moved away from selling based on rating points to transacting on audience impressions, and migrated from traditional demographics to audiences or cohorts. It now offers advertisers 800 different prepopulated audience segments, ranging from auto intenders to moms that had a baby in the last six months…
Advertisers buy iHeart’s ad inventory “in pieces,” Pittman explained, leaving “holes in between” that go unsold. “Digital-like buying for broadcast radio is the key to filling in those holes,” he added…
…there has been no degradation in the reach of broadcast radio. The degradation has been in a lot of other media, but not radio. And the reason is because what we do is fundamentally more important than it’s ever been: we keep people company.”
As for consent? When you’re using a browser or an app, you’re on the global Internet, where the GDPR, the CCPA, and other privacy laws apply, meaning that websites and apps have to make a show of requiring consent to what you don’t want. But cars have no UI for that. All their computing is behind the dashboard where you can’t see it and can’t control it. So the car makers can go nuts gathering fuck-all, while you’re almost completely in the dark about having your clueless ass sorted into one or more of Bob Pittman’s 800 target categories. Or worse, typified personally as a category of one.
Of course, the car makers won’t cop to any of this. On the contrary, they’ll pretend they are clean as can be. Here is how Mozilla describes the situation:
Many car brands engage in “privacy washing.” Privacy washing is the act of pretending to protect consumers’ privacy while not actually doing so — and many brands are guilty of this. For example, several have signed on to the automotive Consumer Privacy Protection Principles. But these principles are nonbinding and created by the automakers themselves. Further, signatories don’t even follow their own principles, like Data Minimization (i.e. collecting only the data that is needed).
Meaningful consent is nonexistent. Often, “consent” to collect personal data is presumed by simply being a passenger in the car. For example, Subaru states that by being a passenger, you are considered a user — and by being a user, you have consented to their privacy policy. Several car brands also note that it is a driver’s responsibility to tell passengers about the vehicle’s privacy policies.
Autos’ privacy policies and processes are especially bad. Legible privacy policies are uncommon, but they’re exceptionally rare in the automotive industry. Brands like Audi and Tesla feature policies that are confusing, lengthy, and vague. Some brands have more than five different privacy policy documents, an unreasonable number for consumers to engage with; Toyota has 12. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to find a contact with whom to discuss privacy concerns. Indeed, 12 companies representing 20 car brands didn’t even respond to emails from Mozilla researchers.
And, “Nineteen (76%) of the car companies we looked at say they can sell your personal data.”
To iHeart? Why not? They’re in the market.
And, of course, you are not.
Hell, you have access to none of that data. There’s what the dashboard tells you, and that’s it.
As for advice? For now, all I have is this: buy an old car.
Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.*
Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include everybody with something to say, for example with blogs or podcasts. As Clay Shirky put it in the title of a very relevant book about our topic, Here Comes Everybody.
An odd fact about digital life is that its world is the Internet, which works by eliminating the functional distance between everybody and everything. Think of this habitat as a giant three-dimensional zero: a hollow sphere with an interior that is as close to zero as possible in both distance and cost for everything on it. This is a very weird space that isn’t one, even though we call it one because space works as a metaphor.
Still, we are all embodied creatures operating in a natural world with plenty of distance and lots of costs. This is why we form communities, towns, cities, organizations, institutions, and social networks of people who see and talk to each other in the flesh.
For more than a century, the information center that held a town or a city together was its newspaper. This is no longer the case. The Monroe Country History Center and the Herald-Times (our local paper) explain the situation in an outstanding exhibit at the Center’s museum called Breaking the News:
If you’re reading this on something small, click on it to see the full-size original.
But hey! There are still plenty of journals, journalists, and news sources here in town, including the Herald-Times. That’s some of their logos, gathered at the top of this page. I also listed them in my last post, calling them all, together, wide news. If their work is well-archived we’ll also have what I call deep news in the prior post.
I suggest that the answer to the question asked by that exhibit—where will it go now?— is whole news. That’s what you get when all these media cohere into both a commons and a market.
And, as it happens, we have some resources for creating both.
One is the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, where my wife Joyce and I are both visiting scholars. The workshop carries forward the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for her work on commons of many kinds. If we’re going to make a whole news commons, the Workshop can be hugely helpful. (So can other folks we know, such as Clay Shirky. Note that the subtitle of Here Comes Everybody is The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay will be here to speak in our salon series at IU in December.)
Another is Customer Commons, a nonprofit that Joyce and I started as part of ProjectVRM, which we launched when I started a fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center in 2006. Customer Commons (says here) is “a public-facing organization focused on emerging issues at the intersection of empowered individuals and the public good,” while ProjectVRM is a community with hundreds of developers and others working on new business models that start with self-empowered customers. Within both are business model ideas for journalism that have been waiting for the right time and place to try out. (Examples are intentcastinglistenlog and emancipay.)
But the first step for us is getting to know the people and organizations on the supply side of news here in Bloomington, where Joyce and have now lived for two years. We know some local journalists already, and would love to know the rest. If I don’t reach you first, email me at doc at searls dot com.
And, as always, everything I’ve written above is subject to corrections and improvements, so I invite those too.
*Put simply, journalism’s mission is to get stories right, while opinionism’s mission is to get and keep an audience. But it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, because the same labels can apply to both, and even the best journalism rests to some degree on opinions—of experts and eyewitnesses, for example.
You can see how blurry this can get by looking at Nielsen’s ratings for radio stations. Here is a table of Nielsen’s top twenty-five markets, with links to each station with a measurable audience, and labels for each station’s format. As you look at each market, click on the station link to see what’s behind its “News/Talk,” “News,” or “All News” label:
For example, in Dallas-Fort Worth, KERA and WBAP are both “News/Talk.” But KERA’s schedule is built around NPR programs while WBAP’s schedule is built around conservative talkers. Listen to both to draw or re-draw your own conclusions.
News/Talk, however, is at most a very small part of whole news, which is about how no one source of good information owns the whole space, as newspapers used to do. We haven’t yet defined this space, which is why we need to talk about it.
I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to them in prep for the call.
Both are still valid (IMHO), but don’t yet cover what A.I. will inevitably do to advertising. There are two possible ways that can go.
One is toward hyper-personalized advertising based on even more pernicious uninvited tracking than we already have, with A.I.s rather than lawyers and hired intermediaries finding loopholes in privacy law that will automate specious forms of “consent” far more efficiently than possible without it.
The other is toward finding the best vectors for targeting the right audiences rather than the most-tracked individuals—and to find those amidst the millions of podcasts, newsletters, blogs, mainstream media, and other online outlets into the ever-widening world of thought, opinion, news, scholarship, journalism, sports, and the rest of it.
The former will make tracking and personalized targeting far worse, and the latter will make advertising targeted at audiences far better. It will also do a much better job of supporting journalism in the process because more money can get through to publishers and reporters who won’t be fed by an evil hand they avoid biting.
Those two directions are the chaff-vs-wheat choices for A.I.’s future in advertising. For now, there is surely far more action happening with the former than with the latter, given the sizes of today’s spinning adtech flywheels. But this also means there will be bigger opportunities with the latter: a blue ocean away from the red one.
What makes the intention economy ocean blue is that it will exist almost entirely outside both those advertising systems—and inside horizons that are far more expansive than can be seen through the lens of advertising and marketing as we’ve known them.
Here the opportunities will be in creating better signaling from demand to supply, and better intermediation between them: forms that will safeguard the privacy needs of individuals and the legitimate needs of businesses. In some cases there will be no intermediation at all—just forms of agency on both sides that are friendly to each other and can interact directly. And, where intermediations are required, they will find a wide-open space for what we’ve long calledfourth parties.
To visualize the opportunities here, think of every customer as a boat afloat on a sea of goods and services, and friendly to the ecosystems where demand encourages supply at least as well as supply satisfies demand.
Remember FreePC? It was a thing, briefly, at the end of the last millennium, right before Y2K pooped the biggest excuse for a party in a thousand years. This may help. The idea was to put ads in the corner of your PC’s screen. The market gave it zero stars, and it failed.
And now comes Telly, hawking free TVs with ads in a corner, and a promise to “optimize your ad experience.” As if anybody wants an ad experience other than no advertising at all.
Negative demand for advertising has been well advertised by both ad blocking (the biggest boycott in human history) and ad-free “prestige” TV, (or SVOD, for subscription video on demand). With those we gladly pay—a lot— not to see advertising. (See numbers here.)
But the advertising business (in the mines of which I toiled for too much of my adult life) has always smoked its own exhaust and excels best at getting high with generous funders. (Yeah, some advertising works, but on the whole people still hate it on the receiving end.)
The fun will come when our own personal AI bots, working for our own asses, do battle with the robot Nazgûls of marketing — and win, because we’re on the Demand side of the marketplace, and we’ll do a better job of knowing what we want and don’t want to buy than marketing’s surveillant AI robots can guess at. Supply will survive, of course. But markets will defeat marketing by taking out the middle creep.
The end state will be one Cluetrain forecast in 1999, Linux Journal named in 2006, the VRM community started working on that same year, and The Intention Economy detailed in 2012. The only thing all of them missed was how customer intentions might be helped by personal AI.
Personal.* Not personalized.
Markets will become new and better dances between Demand and Supply, simply because Demand will have better ways to take the lead, and not just follow all the time. Simple as that.
