Marketers, not states, pioneered cross-device tracking of individuals as a commercial necessity.

Evidence

Combine vastly extended interconnection with that basic feature of computers (they capture data), and the result is the beginning of a radical new possibility: that each computer’s archive of its own history becomes available to be tracked and influenced by any other computer anywhere in the internet’s vast universe of networks. Human beings themselves, as regular users of those computers and their archives, became, in principle, “trackable and tractable.” The actualization of this theoretical possibility resulted from multiple commercial innovations, spurred by various forms of necessity and opportunism. It was marketers, plagued by the perennial difficulty of reaching customers with their messages, who took advantage first with the humble cookie, capable only of tracking people on single devices, and more recently with techniques that link online data with offline behavior or use a social media ID to combine data about various online selves. The invention of social media platforms in which every user move is automatically tracked was a major further step. The data benefit unleashed to social media providers such as Facebook was huge: through its Open Graph program, Facebook gained access to what users did not only on Facebook but also on every platform that users accessed via their Facebook ID—for example, Spotify. The result is what the industry, without irony, calls “people-based marketing.” Meanwhile, Google’s alliance in 2008 with online advertising company DoubleClick brought together Google’s mastery of linking search activity to searchers’ interests and DoubleClick’s tracking of individuals based on their unique data profiles. Under Google’s control, the combination of the two approaches greatly increased the information that could be matched with unique individuals. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 114

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marketers pioneered tracking through cookies before social media platforms refined it — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114; Targeted advertising was foundational to surveillance capitalism’s origins — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 202

Broader Connections

• Marketers pioneered tracking through cookies before social media platforms refined it #expands (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 114
• Targeted advertising was foundational to surveillance capitalism’s origins #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 202