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The scale of the privacy crisis hasn't been much of a secret for a few years now. The findings that the ICCL documented in their latest report on RTB-based data exfiltration feel chilling because of their ruthlessness but it's not like we didn't know.
In an equally sobering display of Sinclair's law, every time one of these reports are published someone on the Orange Site (it's always the Orange Site) will ask the one rhetorical question half of Silicon Valley keeps trying to ask itself: what happened to 'don't be evil'!? Wasn't it, like, a thing?
Nothing happened to "don't be evil", my good friends. If you think something happened to it please drop me a line, I have a bridge, it's in pristine condition and I'm looking for buyers.
There is no way to "do no harm" through behavioral profiling.
The highest-margin customers are the ones in the worst distress. Those who are lonely, those who are sick, those who lost a loved one, those who are addicted to gambling or psychoactives. The whole point of an advertising company is to help companies that sell goods and services reach their highest-margin customers. By company running standards, if you run an ad company and you can't match these target groups with your customers, you're running a shit company.
No, sticking to things that are good for you won't fix it. You think forcing Google to stop brokering data for gambling suites and focus on brokering data for, say, sports stores instead, would help?
Who do you think is the prime impulse shopper for sports stores? Outdoorsy people? Think again. Those of us for whom outdoor activities are a profession or a serious hobby are practically immune to ads. Between experience and preferences, self-crafted equipment, and the learned-the-hard-way need for frugality (whoever talked me into hiking for four days with a cast iron strapped to my back can go fuck a bear for all I care) our spending habits are equally divided between fierce loyalty to a few pieces of equipment that we'll spend a fortune on, and thrifting.
You know who spends a fortune on water bottles, expensive brand hiking shoes, umpteen-layer survival jackets, with three-figure price tags, that they'll wear on two-hour hikes for which a ten-dollar sweater from the thrift store will be enough? Not the thrifty hikers. It's the lonely and the depressed — I know, I've been there — whose friends or therapists suggested some sports will do them good. It's the overworked young men and women who get maybe five days off a year and buy outdoor gear impulsively to quench their thirst for actual outdoors, wearing thick jackets on rainy days so it doesn't feel like they're wasting their lives away in a concrete jungle. It's people who feel they aren't young anymore and hope hiking will be a little more friendly to their joints than running, and people who are taking it up not so much because they want to do some sports, but because they've been fat-shamed and bullied into it.
Yes, the ads will also get to people who don't struggle with any of this. But there will be no way to control that. You can't run an ad business that only does good. The foul rot of coercion is at the core of any business built on manipulating people into buying things. The fact that, in some cases, it won't hurt them, or that it's for their own good — no wonder that particular phrase is associated with psychos — can't take the rot away. Don't be evil, do no harm — nothing happened to these things at Google, the spirit of these mantras hasn't "gone" anywhere. It was always a lie.
