Look the ad tech industry is a garbage fire of technology most of which is not fit for the purpose of marketing, but is fit for invasive tracking and data collection for eventual sale and even if it manages to increase sales that would be reason enough to fundamentally change it.
Even if the invasive data tracking is a total failure at making coherent useful data profiles because the garbage fire fractures any user's identity by accident of dumb badly designed competition in the marketplace and fraudsters unchecked at any level that would be reason enough
Even if the data tracking can't build targeting in the middle of the system but is enough that one could track data points to understand a user's physical travels and make arbitrary assumptions on that basis about what to target people with, that would be enough reason to reform
Even if the data tracking isn't invasive enough to track you walking through the mall but is invasive enough to create discriminatory categories based on bad demographic assumptions and less than precise geodata and make acting on that profitable, that would be reason enough
Even if the shitty filtering that turns users into opportunities to do untraceable discrimination wasn't profitable but all that data got pulled into state agencies as part of building strategies for propaganda or just plain state level tracking, that's reason enough to reform
Even if ad tech emitted nothing that could be useful to state entities and just was a bad data set, riddled with fraud, used by credit agencies to deny you a loan or housing, that's reason enough to reform.
Even if no credit agency sipped at the flow of shitty ad tech data and the garbage fire just takes 50-70% of the money in every ad but for nothing & starved our journalism outlets, robbing democracy of their needed function in the infor ecosystem, that would be reason enough.
Even if no ad tech middleman were unaccountable and none were taking the majority of money flowing through the ad tech garbage fire and it was just empowering a bunch of fraud publishers to take up space and likely clean money for criminal organizations, it would be reason enough
Even if none of that was happening and one person said: I don't want to be tracked by a bunch of unaccountable unaccessible and baffling commercial entities without my consent and had no way to enforce their decision to say no, that's reason enough to reform ad tech.
For all of these reasons and more I'm sure I'm forgetting atm, there's reason enough to reform ad tech. I'm so sick of people disrupting the conversation by constantly moving and changing goalposts. All these reasons are sufficient. Dayenu. It's enough!
Let go of the status quo or find yourself on the wrong side of history, because there is more than reason enough at every level to reform ad tech.
(Pages of sources, for the curious: chronoto.pe/tag/ad-tech-cr… )
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