I want to start this presentation explaining that I'm not exactly an expert in privacy and advertisement - although I've graduated more than 20 years ago in Marketing and Advertising, I've never actually worked in this field. The fact is that my interest and involvement in the issues of ICTs and human rights has led me to invest more and more time and energy in understanding the challenges and impacts of the current violations to the right to privacy, especially in digital networks.

As I am not a specialist in the most technical and legal aspects of privacy protection, I brought a more theoretical approach to the issue of target advertising, hoping that this would enrich and feed the discussions we'll have today, while provoquing a philosophycal reflection.

A perspective that helps me a lot in reflecting about the actual meaning of advertising is offered by the political economy of communications - more precisely, by the work of Dallas Smythe, in an article published in 1977 - “Communications: The blindspot of western marxism1". In this text, the central argument presented by Smythe is that the core media business is to sell customers to advertisers. In defending this idea, Smythe proposes a number of interesting reflections that help understand the central role of the advertising industry within the communications industry itself. I've selected two of the questions presented by him that I think that are useful to our reflection on the phenomena of behavioural targeted advertising.

The first of the questions is: What do advertisers buy with their advertising expenditures? According to Smythe, the answer is “audiences". And he explores some of the techniques that made this business more profitable and specialized in the 70s: the surveys that resulted in demographic information about selected audiences - specificities which made this commodity more valuable and easy to sell to advertisers. Today, the advertising industry continues to seek for the detailed knowledge of the consumer in order to sell him or her continuously, with a level of specifity that transform the individual in uncountable different profiles that vary according to the interests of the industry. So, we're not individual anymore - we are dividuals, modulated according to the interests of those who buy our attention and intentions.

Smythe also presents another question that I find useful for our debate - it's known that effectively selling audiences to advertisers need sophisticated tools and strategies. are advertisers assured that they are getting what they pay for when they buy audiences?

In the 70s, this answer was offered by research companies and advertising agencies which conducted surveys, tests, focus groups and other methodologies used to assure that specific desired groups were reached by the messages of the ads. Today this information is much more easily and instantly obtained - it's in the databases that register all our movement online, our choices, our preferences, our actions.

In this perspective, the databases can be seen as spaces of knowledge in which the object of representation (e.g. the consumer) becomes observable, measurable, quantiﬁable, and in short, known.

The sophistication of the technologies that “discover” the consumer is amazing. Techniques such as neuromarketing, for example, study people using the patterns revealed in eletroencephalograms, eye-tracking equipment and inteligent video - which uses the images of CCTV in order to analyze movements and behaviour.

Thinking on how these technologies make possible some of the promises offered by companies which build customers' profiles for target advertising, it's interesting to hear what a senior data analyst at a company that “discover” profiles to advertisers says about their business:

Our company delivers customers ‘that work’: Most of our work now deals with identifying customers for whatever it is companies want to promote and sell. This is really where we see our value added to the client and so we push that capability on to them. Basically, we tell them, ‘Look, we don’t care what you’re trying to sell, you know, how good or bad or whatever it may be, we will ﬁnd you customers with the highest probability of success2.f

This commodification of the subject is incredibly facilitated by the interactive character of the Internet as it is now - an aspect of the web that stimulates our productivity online - in the name of participation, we are constantly feeding companies with our information and preferences. Of course I'm not against participation in online spaces. What I want to propose is the idea that some of the main trends and aspects of the Internet - such as the growing, immediate and ubiquotous interactivity made possible by some services that are very familiar to most of us here, such as Amazon (to give a classical example) - play a critical role in maintaining this system of online productivity. As we respond to the offers of participation, customization and inclusion in online services and spaces we provide feedback to the system that can now offer us more precise, directed offers and products that are more likely going to catch our attention (one of the most scarce goods in our present time), seduce, provoque an intention and lead us to act - what may be, in the end, to buy.

One of the major problems that exists in this dynamic is its opacity: we dont know when and how we're being observed, we don't what is going to be done with all the feedback we provide, we have no chance to disguise the permanent observer - if we do, our experience online won't be satisfactory, because it won't be spontaneus.There is an assymetry in this relation that is unfair and has huge impacts on our autonomy.

The performativeness of this techniques is something worthy to analyse - the more they know our choices, the more they can predict behaviours - and, in a second moment, they can produce behaviours by inducing us to actions provoqued by the seduction of messages that reach our inner feelings and answer to our inner desires - revealed in our movement and choices online.

All these practices have huge impacts on our subjectivities. conﬁguration of our identity is no longer in our hands. Our electronic profiles can be combined, dissected, bought and sold, and otherwise manipulated without the knowledge or consent of the individual subject. In this sense, computerized databases are actually identity-producing engines. Computer databases have reconfigured the subject and this in a way undermines the stability of the figure of the rational autonomous individual3.Our rationality doesn't serve us that much today, in the environment of digital networks.

To finalize, i'd like to quickly share with you some of the concerns I have in relation to these practices that are impacting so much on our subjectivity while violating our human rights.

One of them is the possibility that, in a world that commodifies everything, privacy itself comes to be in a near future, a commodity. The pervasiveness of these dynamics descibed here, together with the profoundization of the level of interference they provoque in our autonomy may lead us to valorize privacy so much that some people will be willing to pay for it - and create a privacy market where only the priviledged will be able to pay to enjoy the benefits of 5 minutes of invisibility.

This is directly linked to the need of defending our right to be human, not a commodity. And this stresses even more the centrality of human rights in our contemporary information societies - and surveillance societies.

One last remark: Instituto Nupef supports the Civil Society Madrid Declaration - http://thepublicvoice.org/madrid-declaration/. It's a very important document and we must add as much of our support for it as possible.

Author: Graciela Selaimen
Published by: Instituto Nupef1
Year of publishing: 2009
Type: Policy Papers
Process: Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
Languages covered: English
Regional and country focus: Global
Issues covered: Communication Rights

Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

APC Women's Network Support Programme