Our industry has never really questioned the notion that one-to-one marketing is a worthy goal. Rather than learn the lessons of the consumer rebellion that led to GDPR, CCPA, and countless other regulations, we are embarking on a new style of consumer spying based on a new set of private signals. Today we are leveraging those signals to bully people into buying stuff they don’t need as well as instill in them irrational fears in order to prompt them to support anti-democracy candidates.
Why are we repeating the same mistakes? And make no mistake about it, the “alternatives” to third-party cookies function in the same way; they log a consumer’s private behavior and use it to follow them around the internet. Today we stand on the dawn of cookie-free advertising, tasked with reimagining the world. Instead, we are dangerously close to a colossal failure of imagination. Our focus is on identity resolution graphs and hashed emails — the exact kind of tracking we had with third-party cookies. Call it surveillance capitalism 2.0."
