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Entirely the wrong framing. The digital advertising community has endangered itself by using tactics known to be unfriendly to consumers, and unethical. Then they continually shot themselves in the foot by ignoring these changes coming at them for years. prescottenews.com/index.php/2022…

None of the FTC's actions should be a surprise & while attempting to make yourself too big to fail has been an obnoxiously common tactic in the US economy lately, I have no sympathy for those who try it and even less for those who, as it seems will happen with ad tech, fail at it
At any time in the last 5 years ad tech could have self regulated or reformed & no one was better placed to lead that process than the IAB. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published in *2018*. It wasn't the beginning of this clear loud criticism, it was a culmination.
3rd party cookies have been gone from every browser but Chrome for around as long. By some reports that's 40% of web users. This could have been incentive to change, but instead ad tech has doubled down on its most invasive tactics...
An increasing number of people have voted for privacy laws in their states and countries. The number of web users adopting privacy technology has grown significantly. The ad tech ecosystem is continuing to double down on its most invasive practices...
Ad tech as an industry is putting *everything* at risk. As the author notes ad tech has wormed its way into almost every level of commerce and web operations. It's operation has become a part of everyone's every day lives...
It now operates everywhere on an endangered practice that will come crashing down any day as it becomes clear that ad tech relies on lying about the size of a vanishingly small percent of users who continue to support the web through not having the privilege of disabling tracking
The author is right that this is a huge threat to the economy. Without any self regulation the ad tech economy has put itself in a ludicrous bubble that is expanding exponentially and puts every consumer at risk with ad tech's both precarious and unethical practices...
Every day the percent of the population that is track-able decreases and the lie of ad tech's omnipresent surveillance that is at the core of the ecosystem's efforts comes a little closer to popping and taking down the US economy along with it...
Like I've said before, the technology of ad tech can be both bad for society and spectacularly ineffective at supporting an increasingly fragile economy piled on top of it. twitter.com/Chronotope/sta…
The thing that most people don't seem to understand is that surveillance capitalism means that the systems of ad tech can be very good at tracking you individually, great for use by cops, pretty nifty for propoganda, and still terrible for satisfying standard marketing outcomes.
Our government must act because the ad tech community has made it clear that reckless pursuit of capital is its only mode of operation. It has resisted any attempt to work with it towards safer operation, it has refused to self regulate, it has refused to moderate...
Our society is more than cheap ads. Our economy is more than surveillance. When an entire category of businesses refuse to moderate their own excesses, excesses which are endangering our economy and our society, which are endangering our human rights, the FTC *must* step in.
Who cries for Enron's profits? Who weeps for wages of slave owners? Who regrets the end of profit at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory? Not me. Ad tech now is in the same place: a moral vacuum with its only defense its profitability. The end has been coming for a long time.
At any time ad tech *could* self regulate, but that time is running out. Ad tech's refusal means it is almost entirely composed (if we go by capitalization) by fraudsters, invasive anti-user practices, outright liars, & fakes clinging on to the illusion of functional operation...
Everyone who operates inside this space understands that massive fraud is the rule, not the exception, and it has been happening out in public for years. twitter.com/Chronotope/sta…
The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
At the same time that massive fraud is happening, the industry is constantly attacking users. It is obfuscating, invading, creating dark patterns, selling data, and making our society worse and more dangerous...
Ad tech is the perfect storm of bad economics, bad for the state, bad for society and bad for the market in the long term that is ripe for government intervention. twitter.com/Chronotope/sta…
The ad tech ecosystem doesn't need to be pruned. It needs to be burned to the ground. Until that happens everything that's wrong with the internet will continue to just get worse, because ad tech creates the *incentive* to make it worse.
Ad tech isn't the economy's golden egg. Ad tech is the economy's poison pill.
Aram Zucker-Scharff | @Chronotope@indieweb.social
AramZS. he/him. Privacy Engineer. Tech for journalism. Ad Tech. Prev: Fullstack, strategy, econ/game journo, storytelling, altac. Views are only my own
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