I quit AdTech because of these thoughts. I couldn’t, in good conscience, work in an industry that I felt was actively making the world worse. Pervasive tracking is fundamentally encouraged by these systems and power structures. Tracking is bad, because even if you don’t have anything to hide now, you may find that your past activities make you a target under a future political system.
What can be done? I feel like there may be a legislative solution. I feel like GDPR is a good start. I’d love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and discarded often to minimise risk. I also think it’d be great if companies had to notify you every time they transferred data to a third party, whether that’s uploading an audience to Facebook, or selling your pizza delivery address to Experian. I think off the back of that, the sudden public realisation at the scale of data transfers and selling would be enough to make change.
Related:
https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.html