Thread · 6 tweets · 20 Nov 2020

What saddens me most about the adtech world is that what passes as innovation there is basically just monkeying Google — already not an innovative company — but without the scale. Is this a good strategy? 🧵

Google is hands down the biggest privacy violator, easily worse than Facebook and most of adtech put together. And the alternative that the adtech industry is proposing is… let’s try to be just as bad and user-hostile!

This would all be quite funny (almost as funny as proposing a “Transparency & Control Portal” as a privacy measure) except that we actually need advertising to work. Societally. This is a race to the bottom that we’re all losing.

The logical next step would be for adtech companies to align with users instead of against them. That way regulators (and buyers!) could intervene against the platforms for their egregious data practices without flattening the whole of adtech at the same time.

But that creates a collective-decision problem: the current market has certain expectations and all would benefit from change (adtech, publishers, and users), but most of adtech would have to change at once. That’s a problem for a standards organisation!

Unfortunately, standards in adtech are still set by the @IAB. So we seem to be stuck with losing strategies like “Unified ID 2.0”. I hope more non-adtech web techies will get involved in trying to fix this mess — because that’s the only way out of this nonsense! TGIF!