Ever been served an online advertisement that seemed to know you a little too well? You’ve experienced the nuisance of “surveillance advertising”: a pervasive business model based on mass data collection from users.
Privacy advocates are demanding action from the federal government on invasive ads, but they’re up against a surprising foe: major news outlets, who increasingly depend on aggressive ad technology for revenue.
Digital publishers are now lobbying the Federal Trade Commission against a ban on privacy-invading ads, admitting their business model doesn’t work without them — despite their own coverage of the harms these technologies cause.
At The Intercept, we don’t just cover surveillance and privacy: We practice what we preach. We don’t have ads on our website, and we don’t sell readers’ information to predatory data brokers.
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Major media corporations increasingly rely on a vast ecosystem of privacy invasions, even as the public relies on them to report on it.
In a rare moment of transparency, a New York Times column titled “This Article Is Spying on You” showed readers how they might encounter tracking technology from nearly 50 different companies on a single NYT article.
Meanwhile, the Times and other news sites including CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and more all belong to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a powerful trade group that is aggressively lobbying against a proposed FTC ban on surveillance advertising, as Intercept journalist Lee Fang recently reported.
