MarTech and AdTech are the true global surveillance superpowers
Great reporting by Brian Krebs:
Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.
I’ve always held that 99.9% of us shouldn’t worry about the NSA, but 100% of us should worry about marketing (MarTech) and advertising (AdTech).
The Government™ has tremendous resources, but is also a massive bureaucracy saddled with myriad political, legal, and resource constraints. So, while the national technical means (read: spy tech) exist to hoover up and store limitless amounts of data, what they can practically do to and with that data is subject to some limits. Most notably, it’s not in the intelligence community’s interest to try to look at everyone.
Precisely the opposite is true of marketing and advertising. For every human with a dollar to their name, now or in the future, there is someone who wants to sell them something.
To borrow some intelligence jargon, the “targeting list” is effectively the whole of the developed world, and there is so much unregulated signal that two things are true:
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Virtually any entity within the ecosystem can truthfully say things like “we don’t share X with Y” or “we use privacy-preserving consumer identifiers”
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Virtually any entity within the ecosystem can piece together enough “anonymized” data to associate a name, place, and much more to any identifier, if they choose