ABSTRACT
Online advertising practices have outpaced critical advertising studies due to the changes brought by an online environment characterized by ubiquitous surveillance (tracking, monitoring), big data (mining, collecting, proling, sorting), participatory cultures (user-generated content production and social sharing), and behavioral advertising (serving, personalizing, targeting). Behavioral advertising is a subset of online personalization services that caters to the prior actions of the user in an algorithmically generated feedback loop. Examples of personalization services include targeted ads (Turow 2011), Google’s personal search (Luca, Wu, Yelp Data Science Team 2015), featured recommendations on Amazon.com, taste preferences on Netix, Twitter Trends, and Facebook’s News Feed. Personalized marketing and advertising can be useful, relevant, and entertaining, when served with content that we ourselves help to generate. However, personalization requires identication, tracking, and predictive analytics and should be considered a new and important modality of surveillance (La Rue 2013). Negative consequences of commercial surveillance can include online discrimination, nancial manipulation, labor exploitation, coercion, political polarization, the erosion of personal autonomy, and the loss of political freedom.
