How Companies Turn You Into Money

The best description of the data economy comes from AOL, of all places.

- Max Eddy

The once-mighty internet service provider now runs a tidy business in the ad-exchange space. The site promoting the service is hip and tasteful, showing happy, partying people and white text that spells out things like “Monetize your most valuable asset” in all caps.

“A publisher’s audience is their currency,” the site says. “No matter how they make money from content—be it through advertising, paid subscription or syndication, a publisher’s core asset is audience and audience data.”

This is weapons-grade marketing speak, but it’s also a surprisingly honest assessment of digital media’s beating heart. One that pumps out content and takes in reams of data from the people who consume it. And somewhere, unseen, money is being made from what we see and do online.

TARGETING AND RETARGETING

Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sees the avenues for data gathering everywhere: advertising identifiers in the headers of mobile web traffic, fingerprinting browsers, customer tracking in stores using Wi-Fi probe data, SDKs inside mobile apps, and ultrasonic tones from TV that are outside the range of hearing but can be detected by apps on smart devices to track viewing habits. Some data isn’t being used yet—he said, for example, that the genetic information gathered by 23andMe could one day be used for advertising or for discrimination. Genetics being used for advertising is something from a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk fever dream; and yet, it’s plausible.