So many interesting questions around ‘targeted adverting’ - starting with terminology. Car ads in a car magazine are ‘targeted advertising’, as are gadget ads in Wires. So what *exactly* are we objecting to? 1/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/

Do we mean ‘tracking your behaviour across the internet over months and working out the right ads’? Or, do we mean ‘you searched for hotels in Barcelona so here are some ads for hotels in Barcelona’, or ‘this story is about Barcelona so here are some travel ads’?

So do we meant that ads cannot be relevant *at all*- no car ads in a car magazine? Or that they have to protect ‘privacy’ - another term with infinite meanings?

I would hope that everyone understands that if you’re not allowed to track people across the web in any way at all, Google, Facebook and Amazon will make more money, the NYT will be fine, and every small publisher will make no money at all from ads. Is that the objective?

That is, if you argue that any kind of targeted advertising should be banned, I will disagree with you. But if you argue that would be good for anyone other than tech giants and maybe a few giant publishers, you are a fool

(Side note - DHH is almost as skilled a troll as Ted Cruz)

Part of the challenge of these conversations is that terms like ‘privacy’ and ‘targeting’ are so vague, and so prone to redefinition to mean whatever you want. So here we have Wired arguing we should ban ‘targeted ads’, when every ad in Wired is ‘targeted’.

If you cannot target ads based on browsing history, search ads are worth more

If you cannot track people across different sites, Instagram ads are worth more

Small publisher make far more of their money from tracking than big publishers or tech companies

And finally...

ALL ADVERTISING IS TARGETED