Commercial ad surveillance by mid-2010s exceeded disclosed NSA data collection in invasiveness

Evidence

And that was just the content; the advertising, meanwhile, was epically worse. By the mid-2010s the average reader on news sites like the Boston Globe’s boston.com would be subjected to extraordinary surveillance methods, with only the barest degree of consent. Such operations would be invisible to the user, except for the delays and solicitations they triggered. Online tracking technologies evolved to a point that would have made a Soviet-era spy blush. Arrival at NYPost.com would trigger up to twenty or more urgent “tracking” messages to online ad agencies, or “ad networks,” advising them of any available intelligence on the user, in addition to specifying what stories they were reading. Attention merchants had always been ravenous for attention, but now they were gobbling up personal data as well. Perhaps the oversharing on social media had simply lowered the standard of privacy. Perhaps the Internet, with its potential to capture every turn of our attention, made this inevitable. Whatever the case, several commercial entities were now compiling ever more detailed dossiers on every man, woman, and child. It is a more thoroughly invasive effort than any NSA data collection ever disclosed—and one of even more dubious utility. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1079

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader surveillance-industry history the reader is building, and to the ‘creepy line’ tension with platform ideals. — connects to: Surveillance capitalism expanded from online advertising to offline bodily and financial life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 42; State surveillance depends on corporate data collection — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 40
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the comparison to NSA collection — what does Wu mean by ‘more thorough,’ and is the utility critique measurable?

Broader Connections

• State surveillance depends on corporate data collection #corroborates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 40
• Surveillance capitalism expanded from online advertising to offline bodily and financial life #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 42