Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
“Privacy is rarely lost in one fell swoop. It is usually eroded over time, little bits dissolving almost imperceptibly until we finally begin to notice how much is gone.”*…
… And now, indeed, we’re beginning to notice. Hana Lee Goldin surveys the state of play– who’s buying our personal information, what they’re using it for, and how the system works behind the screen– and considers our options…
Sometime in the mid-2000s, most of us started handing over pieces of ourselves to the internet without giving the exchange a second thought. We created email accounts, signed up for social media, bought things online, downloaded apps, swiped loyalty cards, connected fitness trackers, stored photos in the cloud, and agreed to terms of service that almost none of us have ever read in full. We did this thousands of times over two decades and counting, and each interaction felt small enough to be inconsequential.
But the accumulation is enormous. More than 6 billion people now use the internet, and each one makes an estimated 5,000 digital interactions per day. Most of those interactions happen without our conscious awareness: a GPS ping, a page load, an app opening, a browser cookie refreshing, a device checking in with a cell tower. The average person in 2010 made an estimated 298 digital interactions per day. In fifteen years, that number multiplied more than sixteenfold. Those digital interactions produce records that can persist indefinitely, stored, copied, indexed, bought, sold, and combined with other records to build profiles of extraordinary detail.
If we’ve been online since the late 1990s or early 2000s, our data footprint can include social media accounts we’ve created, online purchases we’ve made, forums we’ve posted in, loyalty cards we’ve used, and apps we’ve installed going back decades. Some of that information lives on platforms we’ve long forgotten. Some of it was collected by companies that have since been acquired or dissolved, with our data potentially passing to successor entities we’ve never heard of. The digital life most of us have been living for 15 to 25 years has produced a layered, evolving archive that only grows more valuable to the people who buy and sell it as time goes on.
Most of us sense that something is off about all of this. In a 2023 survey, Pew Research found that roughly eight in ten Americans feel they have little to no control over the data companies collect about them, 71% are concerned about government data use, and 67% say they understand little to nothing about what companies are doing with their personal information. The concern is real and widespread. And so is the feeling of helplessness: 60% of Americans believe it’s impossible to go through daily life without having their data tracked. The unease is there. What’s missing is a clear picture of what’s happening on the other side of the transaction…
[Goldin explains what data is being collected and shared, and by whom; how the data is managed and trafficked; how its being used (by insurance and financial companies, employers and landlords, retailers, AI companies, governments, and criminals); and how “inferred” data is used to augment the “hard” data. It’s chilling. She then puts the issue into context, and discusses we we can– and cannot– do about it…]
… The philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has a framework for what’s happening here: contextual integrity. The idea is that privacy isn’t about secrecy. We share information willingly all the time, when the context fits. We tell our doctor about a health condition because we expect that information to stay within the medical relationship. We search for symptoms on a health website because we assume that search won’t follow us into an insurance application. In the current data economy, that’s exactly the kind of boundary that dissolves, because the company collecting the data and the company buying it are operating in completely different contexts.
This is an information literacy problem as much as a privacy problem. Information literacy is usually framed around consumption: evaluating sources, questioning claims, recognizing bias in what we read and watch. But every time we interact with a digital service, we’re also producing information: generating a record that will be read, interpreted, scored, and acted on by organizations we may never interact with directly. Many of us have gotten better at questioning the information that comes at us: checking sources, noticing bias, and recognizing when something is trying to sell us a conclusion. But we haven’t developed equivalent habits around the information that flows from us: where it goes after we hand it over, who reads the record, what incentives they have, and what conclusions they draw. The gap between what we think we’re consenting to and what we’ve agreed to in practice is where the real exposure lives, and the system is designed to keep that gap invisible.
One of the reasons the “so what” question is hard to answer with action is that opting out of data collection often means opting out of participation. Declining a social media platform’s terms of service means not using the platform. Refusing location permissions can mean losing access to navigation, ride-sharing, weather, and delivery apps. Choosing not to create an account can mean paying more, seeing less, or being locked out of services that have become essential infrastructure for work, communication, healthcare, banking, and education.
The architecture of digital consent treats data sharing as a binary: agree to the terms or don’t use the product. There’s rarely a middle option that allows us to use a service while limiting what data gets collected and where it goes. The result is that the “choice” to share data often functions as a condition of entry into daily life rather than an informed negotiation. We’re not handing over data because we’ve weighed the tradeoff and decided it’s fair. We’re handing it over because the alternative is exclusion from services we rely on.
This is the structural context behind the Pew Research Center finding that more than half of Americans believe it’s impossible to go through daily life without being tracked. For many of us, it isn’t possible, at least not without significant inconvenience or sacrifice. The question isn’t whether we can avoid data collection entirely, because for the vast majority of people who participate in modern life, the answer is no. The question is whether we can make more informed decisions within the constraints we’re operating in, and whether the system can be pushed – through regulation, through market pressure, through better tools – toward something more transparent.
California’s Delete Act, which took effect in January 2026, is the strongest example of what’s emerging. It created a platform called DROP (Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform) that lets California residents submit a single deletion request to every registered data broker in the state. Brokers are required to process those requests, maintain suppression lists to prevent re-collection, and check the platform regularly for new requests. The European Union’s GDPR provides similar individual rights, and a handful of other U.S. states have enacted their own privacy laws with varying levels of protection. But the coverage is uneven: what’s available to a California or EU resident may not extend to someone in a state without comparable legislation.
Some services now automate parts of the opt-out process, submitting removal requests to dozens of brokers on our behalf. These can’t erase the data trail entirely, but they can narrow what’s actively available for sale.
Beyond deletion, there are smaller choices that reduce how much new data we generate. We can audit which apps have permission to track our location or access our contacts, since a surprising amount of behavioral data comes from apps that don’t need those permissions to function. We can treat “sign in with Google” and “sign in with Facebook” buttons as what they are: data-sharing agreements that can link a new service to an existing profile. And we can glance at the first few lines of a privacy policy before agreeing, looking for some version of “we may share your information with our partners,” where “partners” just means anyone willing to pay.
Most of us don’t read privacy policies, and the policies aren’t built to be read. They average thousands of words of dense legal language filled with terms like “legitimate interest,” “data processor,” and “de-identified data.” Studies consistently put them at a late high school to early college reading level (grade 12 to 14), but the difficulty goes beyond reading level: the concepts are abstract, the volume of agreements we encounter is enormous, and the design of the consent process itself pushes us through as fast as possible. Pre-checked boxes, auto-scrolling agreement windows, “accept all” buttons positioned prominently while “customize settings” options sit behind additional clicks. These are dark patterns, design choices that make the path of least resistance the path of maximum data sharing.
The result is a gap between the moment we share a piece of information and the moment that information shapes a decision about our lives. We don’t connect the app to the insurance premium or the loyalty card to the rental application because the chain of custody between them is long, complex, and designed to stay out of view.
The same critical thinking we’ve learned to apply to the information flowing toward us (checking sources, questioning claims, looking for bias) applies to the information flowing from us: who’s collecting this, what will they do with it, who else will see it, and what did we agree to? The difference is that in the data economy, we’re the product being evaluated, and the questions are being asked about us rather than by us.
So can we get it back? Not entirely. Data that’s already been collected, copied, sold, and processed across multiple systems can’t be fully recalled. What we can do is reduce what’s actively available for sale, slow the flow of new data going forward, and take advantage of legal tools that didn’t exist a few years ago. The archive of our past digital lives is too distributed to undo, but the file is still being written, and we have more say over the next page than we did over the last twenty years of them.
So what if they have our data? The tradeoff extends well beyond better ads. It reaches into the prices we’re charged, the credit we’re offered, the jobs we’re considered for, the insurance premiums we pay, the AI systems trained on our behavior, the accuracy of the profiles used to make decisions about our lives, and the degree to which government agencies can monitor our movements without a warrant. Every new service we sign up for, every permission we grant, and every terms-of-service agreement we accept adds another layer to that file. We can’t close the file entirely, but we can make more informed decisions about what goes into it next…
Eminently worth reading in full: “So What if They Have My Data?“
See also: “Why Do We Care So Much About Privacy?” (source of the image above) in which Louis Menand suggests that our concern should be with the “weaponization” of data…
* Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security
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As we reinforce our rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1996 that the internet-as-we’ve-come-to-know-it broke big into the mainstream: Yahoo! launched the national campaign that asked “Do You Yahoo?” advertising its web-based search service on national television. The campaign was created by ad agency Black Rocket and Yahoo Marketing Head Karen Edwards (whose many awards for the work include a seat in the Advertising Hall of Achievement).
An early spot from the campaign…
“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”*…
Julia Barton on a question that haunts us still…
After yet another day reading about audio industry layoffs and show cancellations, or listening to podcasts about layoffs and show cancellations, I sometimes wonder, “With all this great audio being given away for free, who did we think was supposed to pay for it all?”
I find some consolation in the fact that that question is more than a century old. In the spring of 1924, Radio Broadcast posed it in a contest called “Who is to Pay for Broadcasting and How?”The monthly trade magazine offered a prize of $500 (more than $9,000 in today’s dollars) for “a workable plan which shall take into account the problems in present radio broadcasting and propose a practical solution.”
The need for such a contest more than 100 years ago is revealing enough, but the reaction of the judges to the prize-winning plan turned out to be even more so — and it says a lot about why business models for audio production and broadcast remain a struggle.
Back in the mid-1920s, radio was just starting to catch on in America. For a couple of decades, the medium had been used mostly for logistics, to help ships communicate with each other and the shore. But after World War I, new technology allowed Americans to send and receive the sounds of music, lectures, and live events over “the ether.”
By all accounts, Americans — whiplashed by war, a flu pandemic, and massive social changes like Prohibition — went crazy to hear what the ether could deliver to the privacy of their homes. They started buying or building their own radio receivers at a pace that shocked observers. In his book This Fascinating Radio Business, Robert Landry recalls curious customers lining up behind velvet ropes to see and place orders for the latest receivers. “The size, cost, gloss and make of one’s radio was, with the family car and the family icebox, an index of social swank.”
Many stations at the time were run by department stores that wanted to demonstrate the miracle of the expensive radio sets they sold. One of the first broadcast radio stations in the country, WOR sat in the furniture department at Bamberger’s in Newark, and its first announcers were also the employees selling furniture. But as the consumer market started to be saturated, those early stations were either bleeding money or shutting down entirely. The equipment needed constant updating, the workers expected salaries, and the performers who’d once been persuaded to fill airtime “for exposure” now demanded payment.
To make things more complicated, the government required so-called “clear channel” stations (high-powered, with signals that reached far and wide) to be on the air live for 18 hours a day, forbidding the use of “mechanically reproduced” music (as in, phonograph records) to fill the time. All this made broadcasting a very expensive proposition by 1924.
I first read about the “Who Is To Pay” contest in the 1994 book Selling Radio by Susan Smulyan, who starts off noting that from the beginning, “no one knew how to make money from broadcasting.” What about advertising, the solution that seems most obvious in hindsight? The man in charge of regulating radio, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, hated the idea.
“I don’t think there is anything the people would take more offense at than the attempt to sell goods over radio advertising,” Hoover declared, as part of a full-page spread in The New York Times on May 18, 1924, the same month that Radio Broadcast first announced its contest.
The Secretary had been speaking out against advertising for a few years by this point. Indirect advertising (or sponsorship, as it would soon be called) was acceptable in his mind — and via some math that’s hard to figure out, he guessed sponsorship could support about 150 stations nationwide.
Consumers in the 1920s were used to paying for telephone calls and telegrams, and there were other experiments to get listeners to pay for radio. One, dubbed “wired wireless,” licensed special devices to subscribers on Staten Island, who then got programs delivered via their power lines — a proto-version of cable TV that didn’t last long…
… Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest. They proposed everything from a 30-day fundraising drive to the sale of copyrighted radio programming bulletins. The winner, announced in the March 1925 issue, proposed a $2 federal tax on vacuum tubes, at the time the cutting-edge technology for radio reception. The prizewinner, HD Kellogg Jr. of Haverford, Pennsylvania, reasoned that vacuum tubes were the best index of high-quality gear — the better the gear, the more radio a household could consume. Kellogg also argued that only the federal government, which already regulated radio, could collect and administer such a tax. His idea was basically a less regressive version of the licensing fee the British government already levied U.K. households to fund the BBC.
Though the contest’s judges awarded Kellogg’s proposal their prize, they were ambivalent about, if not downright hostile to, his plan. One can only imagine young Kellogg’s feelings as he read the many dismissals of his idea in later issues of Radio Broadcast. “A Government tax would be obnoxious,” wrote Paul Klugh, executive chairman of the National Association of Broadcasters. “I do not believe your prize-winning plan is feasible under conditions as they exist in this country,” wrote Secretary Hoover.
America’s radio brain trust would go on to denounce almost any federal funds for broadcasting, fearing such a model could lead to censorship. Some of that aversion makes historical sense, given that Americans could still vividly remember the ugly and heavy-handed wartime censorship of Wilson-era U.S. postmaster Albert Sidney Burleson. As Adam Hochshild writes in his chilling history American Midnight, Burleson — until he left Washington with his boss Woodrow Wilson in 1921 — used his office to seize socialist and foreign-language publications, and revoke the postal privilege of other publications that reported on the war. So when broadcasting advocates in the 1920s talked about government “censorship,” the term was not abstract — it was a recent fact.
But rather than try to figure out a smarter way to fund public-minded, high-quality broadcasting, the men behind the Radio Broadcast contest decided the real winner should be: Nothing. “For the present, I think it is better to let things ride along as they are,” wrote columnist Zeh Brouck in May 1925.
Things did ride along, straight to direct advertising. Within a few years, huge swathes of the airwaves were the province of Lucky Strikes and Jergen’s Lotion, racial minstrelsy and unbelievable quackery…
… For many happy decades of the 20th century, advertising did make commercial broadcasters a ton of money. But as historians from Robert McChesney to Susan Douglas to Michele Hilmes have pointed out, the “American system” is uniquely unstable, and it leaves public-interest programming — or, at times, any programming at all — hard to sustain.
While researching this piece, I learned I’m not the first writer to notice an anniversary of Radio Broadcast’s contest. Back in 1995, Todd Lappin explored it in Wired. He marveled at how much the nascent Web was following the same chaotic business arc of radio. But he held out hope that things might turn out better. “Perhaps radio wasn’t the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be,” Lappin wrote. “Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn’t get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.”
In retrospect, that’s a depressing read. But there is something irresistible about the original contest, and the era when all ideas were still up for debate. We’ve had a century of letting things “ride along.” It seems like a good time to open the contest again…
An all-too-timely read: “In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question,” from @bartona104 in @NiemanLab.
* Digg commenter blue_beetle (Anthony Lewis)– now a meme.
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As we contemplate culture, we might recall that it was on this date in 2007 that two local television helicopters covering a police chase in Phoenix, Arizona collided in air. Pilot Craig Smith and photographer Rick Krolak from KNXV-TV, and pilot Scott Bowerbank and photographer Jim Cox from KTVK were killed; there were no reported casualties on the ground.
“Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.”*…
When things go wrong– very, very wrong: an example from your correspondent’s childhood…
When Beach Park’s Howard Hilton was planning the Great Tampa Snow Show, he envisioned smiling kids, Santa Claus spreading good cheer, frolicking reindeer and lots of snow. A giant Christmas tree would hulk over the festivities, and there would be a massive, five-story ski slope.
Instead, Hilton’s eight-day event turned into the most flawed spectacle in Tampa history.
The event… was designed to promote downtown businesses during the Christmas season. Even though hundreds of thousands came to the show, it resulted in 47 lawsuits, three dead deer and several sunburned seals…
It was supposed to be a winter wonderland: “Tampa’s 1958 Snow Show was an epic fiasco” from @TB_Times.
(TotH to Rusty Foster and his glorious newsletter, Today in Tabs, which reminded me of a singular event in my first Christmas season in Central Florida… one that I had, I guess, repressed…)
For more (laugh out loud) stories of snafu: “Fiasco,” from This American Life (especially “Act One,” which is possibly the funniest true story I’ve ever heard.)
* Orlando Bloom
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As we celebrate shambles, we might note that today is Twilight Zone Day, a celebration of Rod Serling’s masterful series, The Twilight Zone (See also here and here)– in which, of course, unintended consequences feature centrally.
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are”*…
… and then I’ll sell you something.
D. Graham Burnett on how an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention…
Our eyes are worth money. We know that, now. It has become a commonplace that our “attention economy” is functionally an eyeball economy. But how did eyeballs come to look like dollar signs? Let’s dig into what we might think of as the original Faustian Bargain by which the sciences of human perception (with their sophisticated technologies of precision monitoring and measurement) cut a deal with those who move the money around…
An illuminating account of the history of a powerful– and profitable– alliance: “Fracking Eyeballs,” from @asterisk_mag_.
* Jose Ortega y Gasset
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As we analyze attentiveness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that Laurence Cantor unleashed the “Green Card” spam (advertising the law firm that he operated with his wife, Martha Siegel, and its immigration law services) on the Usenet. While it wasn’t the very first instance of spam, it was the first commercial Usenet spam; and its unapologetic authors are seen as having pioneered the modern global practice of spamming.
“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else”*…
It’s all too clear that the fourth estate in the U.S. is in trouble. Indeed, the wrenching contraction of the field has become one of journalism’s most covered stories. Here, for example, Alex Weprin on the sorry state of things…
It wasn’t all that long ago that a billionaire buying a storied news publication was a sign of hope and optimism. After all, they had money to lose, and they earned their fortunes by creating something new. Maybe they could figure out how to make media work?
And what about private equity? It’s an industry premised on turnarounds: acquiring underperforming companies, reimagining them and making them succeed.
Or the classic family-owned publication: Keeping a business in the family with no goal of excessive profits, just a certain amount of stability to keep the legacy alive.
Unfortunately, it seems, no category of owner appears able to salvage a media business in decline, with business models still stuck in the past (programmatic, anyone?) and editorial models built for a world before Facebook, TikTok and artificial intelligence.
The media sector is facing a crisis unlike anything seen since the 2008 financial mess, with layoffs and cost-cutting at every turn. The cuts have all occurred in the backdrop of declining web readership at many major publishers over the past year, as tech giants like Meta (Instagram, Facebook) and Google try to keep consumers on their own platforms while old standby referrers like Twitter/X no longer deliver as many readers and the social media landscape fractures.
The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, Condé Nast, Sports Illustrated, Business Insider, New York Daily News, National Geographic and The Baltimore Sun have all been in the news just this month for layoffs, cost-cutting, labor walkouts or bleak prognosticating…
“The Media Is Melting Down, and Neither Billionaires Nor Journalists Can Seem to Stop It” Hollywood Reporter
There are other– so many other– examples of this kind of grim survey I might have cited, e.g. here or here…
But as Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones + Reveal, explains, news– like democracy– can be saved. After recounting several of the same examples, she stipulates to the issue, and then offers a way forward:
… What is—to use a word smart men love to toss out—the gamechanger for the news business?
There isn’t one. Period. End of story.
That’s not a doom prediction. It’s just a reality check. Because the news “business” is over. Dead. No smart guy or better mousetrap is going to get us to a world where quality journalism makes enough money to survive as a for-profit business.
And the truth is, it never did. There was a period when publishers and broadcasters raked in the dough because they were the only ones who could get ads in front of eyeballs. But even then, what made the money was not the shoeleather accountability work. It was the sports section, the real estate supplement, the bar ads.
That model did start creaking in the late 20th century. And then, sometime later, it stopped creaking. Because it was dead.
Sure, there are zombies walking around: hedge fund–owned newspapers, digital startups trying to party like it’s 2009, magazines run by Anna Wintour. But they are getting shakier with each year, sometimes each week. The Messenger, which launched last year with a promise to assemble a giant audience with viral stories and softball Donald Trump interviews, was still publishing when I started writing this column. By the time I found a closing sentence eight hours later it was gone, having set on fire $50 million in startup capital—enough to run Mother Jones well into 2026.
Some news companies have managed to avoid zombification, most notably the New York Times. But that’s because the Times found a business model as a lifestyle brand for the literate, cosmopolitan, and somewhat liberal. How many news-based lifestyle brands can there be?
No doubt there will be a handful of other commercial news organizations that thrive as for-profit companies. But a handful is nowhere near enough. We need thousands of robust newsrooms to serve the many different audiences that make up our democracy. And to get there, we need to stop pretending journalism can make anyone rich, and instead try like hell to serve the public interest… while breaking even.
That’s it. No fancy mousetrap, no shiny object for investors or funders. No billionaire owners who might push out the editor-in-chief because they’re upset with coverage of their friend’s dog. No faux centrist news from conservative heavyweights. Just a hard slog of putting together the money, one dollar at a time, to give people the information they need to change the world, one heart and mind at a time.
That’s what Mother Jones has been trying to do for the past (nearly) half-century. It’s the toughest model to make work. Except for all the others.
Here’s a proposition to all those funders, donors, and investors looking for the Next Big Thing. It’s not quite “one weird trick,” as the internet used to say, but there is a pretty simple formula for survival in the news business. The Next Big Thing, it turns out, might be the Big Thing That Was There All Along:
- Create solid journalism that earns the trust of a community—geographic, identity-based, or interest-based (for example, Mother Jones’ community is one of people who want to see the world change for the better).
- Give folks a chance to support that journalism with their money, attention, and input
- To that foundation of trust and support, add an honest, smart business operation that brings in whatever other forms of revenue are available so long as they don’t undermine #1.
That’s it! No white papers, no pitch decks, no BS…
“It’s Not Just the End for Journalism. It’s a Beginning.” from @MonikaBauerlein and @MotherJones. Eminently worth reading in full (and supporting MJ‘s important work).
* Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
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As we contribute to clear-sighted civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that Walter Cronkite, who had anchored the CBS Evening News for 19 years, signed off for the final time. A journalist since 1935, Cronkite had joined CBS in 1950 (though he’d been offered, but refused a chance to join the “Murrow Boys” team of war correspondents in 1943). He did reportage, anchored political convention coverage, hosted You Are There and CBS’s Morning Show (its answer to NBC’s Today), and was the lead broadcaster of the network’s coverage of the 1960 Winter Olympics, the first-ever time such an event was televised in the United States (replacing Jim McKay, who had suffered a mental breakdown).
Then, on April 16, 1962, Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards as anchorman of the CBS’s nightly feature newscast; in September of 1963, that 15 minute show was expanded to a half hour. Cronkite also hosted the network’s special coverage– perhaps most notably, of the Kennedy assassination and of NASA missions. He became “the most trusted man in America” and received numerous honors including two Peabody Awards, a George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and in 1981 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
Except on nights when he closed with opinion (as, famously, his observations on the Vietnam War), he ended every newscast with the words “… and that’s the way it is,” followed by the date of the broadcast.
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