On often wonder if our smartphone is listening to us, as the advertisements offered to us on social networks and other sites can reflect a conversation held the day before.
The reality is otherwise disturbing: online advertising and tracking companies have no need to listen to us, as they have for years reveled in the plethora of personal information harvested every time we surf the Web. Thanks to these masses of data, they can predict, with more or less precision, our most buried and unconscious consumerist desires. It’s the digital gold mine created by the AdTech industry – that is, the software and tools used by advertisers to buy, manage and analyze digital advertising.
Real-time bidding
This bargaining over our privacy takes place in an auction system known as real-time bidding [RTB, ou enchères en temps réel]. There are hundreds of advertisers involved who have, over time, built extremely detailed profiles on each of us, with our interests, tastes, habits, health problems, most intimate questions, our socio-economic situation, our ethnicity, our sexual practices, weaknesses, etc.
Each time a user visits a web page with available advertising space, these companies offer a price to display their ad there, depending on the nature of the advertising space and the presumed compatibility between their product and the profile that they have user who will see this ad.
Beyond the feeling of being constantly watched, targeted advertising can have disturbing consequences. We have seen women who have had a miscarriage receive advertisements for maternity clothes and then for nursing bras; the potential depression of an Internet user used as a targeting factor in the market of real-time bidding ; or anorexics being sold extreme fasting diets.
Non-digital advertising has never needed to know very intimate details about its audience. Even today, a good creative team and a well-chosen location – highway, television, bus – can be enough. Online advertising, on the other hand, has identified a golden opportunity (for it): knowing minute details about its consumers and manipulating them in extremely precise ways.
Privacy and security at risk
But this targeting does not only lead to the exploitation of psychological biases and consumerist weaknesses, it can also expose Internet users to content that will reinforce existing traumas and contributes to the creation of databases full of user profiles. extremely detailed.
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