Surveillance advertising is a business model based on persistent and invasive data collection. At its core, surveillance advertising uses data to try to find ever more effective ways to predict and influence people’s behaviors and attitudes: to build consumer profiles, sortpeople into various categories and rating them against any number of predictive benchmarks such as creditworthiness, propensity to buy a luxury car or risk for alcoholism. Today’s regime of surveillance advertising on the Internet is not so much a new development as an acceleration of long-standing social trends at the intersection of technology, marketing, politics and capitalism at large.
Advertising is old; companies, politicians, and other groups have long been interested in knowing and influencing many kinds of publics. Though widespread popular scrutiny of Internet tech companies has exploded only in recent years, the key moments in the historical construction of surveillance advertising unfolded in the mid-1990s, when the new technology of the World Wide Web was transformed from an outpost on the fringes of business to a central nervous system for commercial monitoring. The massive data collection infrastructure that undergirds the Internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Surveillance advertising was created by marketers, technology start-ups, investors, and politicians, a coalition bound by the desire to commercialize the web as quickly as possible. Through bouts of competition and collaboration, private and public sector interests steered digital networks toward maximizing their monitoring and influence capacities, tilling the soil for all manner of deceptive communication practices and wreaking havoc on less invasive media business models. The legacy of this period is the concentration of surveillance capacity in corporate hands and the normalization of consumer monitoring across all digital media platforms we have come to know today.
Today more money is spent on digital advertising—meaning online and mobile formats—than on any other media channel in the United States. Analysts estimate that more than half of global ad spending goes to digital platforms. Consumer monitoring is now effectively ubiquitous under what investigative journalist Julia Angwin calls a “dragnet” of surveillance. This system depends on an infrastructure of data collection and targeted messaging that undergirds nearly all modern digital media. Leading ad platforms like Google and Meta operate vast networks of surveillance that extend well beyond their own sites and applications. A study of 1 million popular websites found that nearly 90 percent collect and exchange data with external third parties of which most users are unaware. From period-tracker apps to porn sites, ad platforms scoop up all manner of sensitive personal information in order to power their “digital influence machine.” Privacy has been obliterated as surveillance advertisers have created countless ways to link online and offline information.
The business objective of all of this data collection and profiling is to sell the capacity to influence people’s actions and attitudes, what Shoshana Zuboff, in her recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), calls the “means of behavioral modification.” Today the cutting edge of this practice uses data signals to forecast and test people’s vulnerability to different kinds of appeals. Advertising that is designed to exploit emotions and personality traits has been found to be particularly promising.
In 2022, constant surveillance is the essence of the $600 billion digital advertising economy.
The surveillance advertising industry is dominated by a handful of companies including Google, Meta, and Amazon, which together control nearly three-quarters of the global digital advertising market. These firms are the world’s foremost purveyors of commercial surveillance and, despite recent market turbulence, among the most valuable corporations in existence. Market power and political power are deeply intertwined. Meta, followed closely by Amazon, is on track to spend more money on lobbying than any other U.S. company this year. Google, ranking a few spots lower on the spending list, maintains a “55,000 square foot office, roughly the size of the White House, less than a mile away from the Capitol Building.”
Meta maintains profiles not only for its 2.7 billion users but also for people who have never signed up for any of the company’s services. And all this data can be used to make startling and intimate predictions.