Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
In one sense there was some level of tracking, just not to the extent there is today. Fairly early on they stopped just throwing up billboards and hoping the right people would see them. They generally weren’t putting billboards for luxury cars up in the slums. Advertisers would try to place ads in the neighborhoods of their targeted socioeconomic demographic. Media companies started funding surveys to learn who their readers or viewers or listeners were. If you’re an American you may have heard of the Nielsen ratings for TV or less likely the Arbitron ratings for radio. Those companies would use statistical sampling to send journals to households in a market and over the period of a week or several weeks ask the household to record every TV show they watched or every radio station they listened to. They would also ask what age each person was, gender, how much money did they earn, what level of education had they completed, etc. With enough responses the companies could say, “okay, only 10% of the people in this market were watching this show, but 60% of the men between the age of 35-54 who were watching TV at that time were watching this show.” If an advertiser wanted that demographic, that’s the show they would pick. Newspapers would even change the fliers they would put in the newspaper depending on what part of the city they were going to. Discount stores for the poor neighborhoods, jewelers for the rich.
Of course, unless you were filling out the survey journal or had the reporting box on your TV, they weren’t tracking you directly. But you were being targeted based on your neighbors who had responded and more public demographic data about your age and likely income. This started surprisingly early on, because most business owners couldn’t afford to do a lot of slapping something up and hoping they’d get new business; they wanted to have some reason to be confident they’d see a return on their investment. It wasn’t anywhere near as invasive as what online tracking has become today, but that’s what advertisers have long wanted.