Adverts are a plague on the internet – although we’ll grant that in their current form, they’re less intrusive than in days A of yore. It’s easy to look back on the late 1990s and early 2000s web through the haze of rosetinted glasses and view it as a utopia of high-quality independent blogs, free websites for everyone, and an explosion of experimental design along with non-predatory social media.
Lay your spectacles aside for a moment and consider that most of what you recall is wrong.
The internet at the turn of the century was never a utopia. Yes, you could get a free site from GeoCities, but you can make a better one today with GitHub Pages. Visually, the web was horrific, and adverts were both gaudy and omnipresent. Pop-up ads and pop-under ads would obstruct your browsing and slow your computer to a crawl. Webmasters (as they were then known) would do anything to make a buck.
Google did a great deal to clean up the web and the advertising space in general. When was the last time your PC crashed due to an infinite stack of adverts appearing out of sight under your active window? Do you recall the whack-a-mole of fighting against endless cascade of pop-ups appearing in random locations, and hammering the big red X, only to discover that it was a trick, and you’ve actually launched a new wave of attacks?
That doesn’t happen any more, and it’s largely down to Google’s dominance in the advertising space.
Even without running any kind of ad blocker, your browsing experience is much more pleasant and less brazenly predatory than it was two and a half decades ago.
There are trade-offs, of course, and the biggest is privacy. While websites no longer assault your visual cortex with an epilepsy-inducing assault, they instead quietly note what you’re looking at. They measure how long you’re on a web page and how you interact with it. Fair enough, you may say. Website owners need to know which articles are doing well and what people like to read. They’d be shouting into the void otherwise.
But consider how many websites you visit in a day. Your metrics, engagements and interests are noted down on each one, and tied together into a profile, which if it fell into the wrongs hands, probably wouldn’t paint you in the best possible light.
The detail of a profile constructed from search and browsing data is alarming, and tracking companies can and do collect data on (deep breath) your age, location, devices, sex, sexual orientation, religion, income, contraceptive use, fertility, political views, race, health, your friends, your business dealings, how often you call your mum, and much, much more.
It doesn’t stop when you’re not using your computer either – thanks to that ever-present lump of metal, plastic and glass in your pocket. As well as the usual players, third-party companies pay impoverished developers to slip SDKs into their apps. If given appropriate permissions, these SDKs use Wi-Fi signal strength to map your location to within inches and beam that info back to the mothership. All of this means that you get ads that are tailored to your interests – it’s mildly irritating and gives you a mild sense of paranoia that you’re being
