Better Ads Without Behavioural Tracking
Lloyd A & Juna Hong
Privacy matters, in the words of Carissa Veliz, because it empowers us all.
And yet, so many of the digital services that we all interact with every day are predicated upon violations of individual privacy to an unprecedented degree. This assault on privacy leads to significant economic and social harms, something that is simple to diagnose but deeply difficult to resolve. In this paper, we outline for policymakers how a particular economic model, that of funding 'free' services through behavioural advertising, is directly linked to a non-trivial share of these harms, and make the privacy and economic case for an alternative model – contextual advertising – which resolves much of these problems.
