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Ad Industry's Dangerous, Misguided Policy


A coalition of advertising trade associations joined the Trump administration yesterday in calling for the rejection of an FCC regulation created to protect consumers by restricting the collection and sharing of personal information by internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T.

The regulation would have given consumers far more control over their personal information by requiring them to opt-in before the ISPs could use or sell their personal information.

The actions of the advertising industry in this instance are deplorable -- but hardly surprising. The ad industry is losing its grip. We can't control ourselves.

Jonathan Schwantes of the Consumers Union has said,  "Consumers deserve to know—and have a say in—who is collecting certain information about them and how it’s used."

Listen to this bullshit from the 4A's, AAF, ANA, DMA and IAB...
"Without prompt action in Congress or at the FCC, the FCC's regulations would break with well-accepted and functioning industry practices, chilling innovation and hurting the consumers the regulation was supposed to protect."
Yeah, right. Well-accepted practices like stalking us, selling our personal information to the highest bidder, enabling creeps and criminals to hack info about us. We wouldn't want to deprive them of innovations like that. Heck no.

It's not bad enough that the amount of information online marketers and media companies now have about us is alarming. Now we have to let Comcast and AT&T into our pants.

Adtech - the computerized media exploitation of the fruits of tracking - is allowing criminals to steal our personal information, and governments to spy on us by tapping into marketing data. It is destroying our trust in the news, and repulsing our customers.

What is it going to take to make the ad industry understand what we are enabling?

Everything the ad tech industry and the online media honchos have ever told us about privacy and security has turned out to be 100% undiluted horseshit. They are incompetent, irresponsible, and dangerous. They cannot be trusted with private information about us.

It's time for sensible, responsible people in the advertising and marketing industry to get off their asses and do something about this.

Along with some others, I am speaking at the World Federation of Advertisers next month in Toronto on the subject of tracking and adtech. It will be an audience of hundreds of the world's largest marketers who are unlikely to be sympathetic to my point of view.

I can't wait to give it to them with both barrels.

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