On privacy in 2024 

There is more than one angle on privacy. Obviously, we all feel that respecting it is important - but what does that actually mean, from a moral standpoint, in the adtech/martech industry? 

Why don’t we start with what people hate? We hate being chased, we hate being treated as idiots and we hate having our actual privacy violated. But these three things are not necessarily the same. 

If you browse a pair of red shoes on an e-commerce website, decide not to buy them, or at least not right now, and the whole of the internet turns into ads for red shoes for weeks to come, you feel chased. Leave me alone! 

If you browse for a new front door to your house, decide to actually buy it, and the whole of the internet turns into ads for front doors for weeks to come, you feel you are being treated as an idiot, because front doors are literally the one thing you won’t be buying for a long time. 

The above examples are similar but different. The good thing is that they are both disappearing as third-party targeting becomes impossible. And this is a relief - not so much because ads like these invade people’s privacy, but because they were always utterly annoying; also, by the way, quite ineffective, according to outcome data such as the kind Brand Metrics provides. 

If, on the other hand, you're being served ads for baby products because advanced AI has predicted you are pregnant, before you yourself are aware that you are - an often-quoted example - then it’s not the chasing or the treating you as an idiot that is upsetting, but the violation of something that is properly personal. 

Stories like this last one make for good copy, but in the ad tech community, outside of social media, they don’t add much to the moral debate, for a simple reason: this community has never got anywhere close to such precise predictions. If we can predict that a browser has a 55% likelihood of being operated by a woman, we are quite proud.

We wouldn’t admit this from a conference stage of course, but what we are doing is matching ad impressions to machines, which may be used by a woman. Is she pregnant? Ha ha - we don’t even know for sure if she is a woman. She could just as easily be a bot clicking on ‘female coded topics’. 

My impression is that most people are aware that when it comes to properly private/personal data, the two industrial aggregators - the villains, if you will - are social media and the government. The former consists of platforms where we choose to browse, share, like, reshare and comment on personal things, being perfectly aware that the platform owners can use it as actionable data. And the latter is operated by political parties that we vote for because they use all the monitoring, the cameras and whatnot, to keep us safe from terrorism and crime.

We don’t have to use social media and we can vote for political parties that decline to use those methods. But we do, and we don’t, and that is how we willingly sign our privacy away. 

There is one aspect of publisher and ad tech data that will become increasingly important though. The question is the same: how much data is it reasonable to collect, store and process? In this case, the reason for the question isn’t privacy. It comes from a different realisation - that collecting, storing, and processing data has a large carbon footprint. Massive, in fact. Without getting into the details, it is already in the same ballpark as the airline industry. 

Our hope is that in 2024 we are going to be leaving the current, longstanding paradigm - to collect and store as much as we can get our hands on, in case one day we crack how to monetise it - and move into one in which we do what we have to do, and no more. 

The purpose of this moral debate is to look for sustainability and decreased carbon emissions, and if it can take advantage of the residual swell of privacy opinion to get there, that will benefit all of mankind. 

Brand Metrics is a no Personal Identifiable Information (PII) company with a Minimum Data Strategy. We hope this will be the path the industry embarks on in 2024 - for privacy reasons, and for the love of our one and only mutual planet. 

Also published in: MartechOutlook