Take Back Control of Your Online Identity

Online advertising isn’t just something you watch, like traditional TV commercials. Online advertising watches you back. More and more users are installing adblockers—and it's not just to avoid annoying commercials.

By uniquely identifying a web browser or device, ad companies can track the same user from place to place. In doing so, these companies can build a profile of who that user is and what their interests are. Some advertisers—or the data brokers with whom they share information—have profiles that place users into very specific categories, such as “on-the-fence liberals” or “confident spenders.” At their worst, these categories are explicitly race-based or involve sensitive information like whether the user lost a daughter in a car crash, is HIV-positive, or survived a sexual assault.

The very existence of these profiles is a threat to user privacy. Not only do marketers see these profiles, the actions of marketers may also reveal this information to others—such as when Target’s advertising to an expectant mother revealed to her father that she was pregnant. And this sensitive data collected by advertisers may be leaked to the public or stolen by hackers due to poor security practices. Furthermore, these profiles are sometimes inaccurate. These inaccuracies can lead to serious consequences, like job candidates being falsely labeled as sex offenders.

The problem with targeted advertising

Online advertisers use profiles to display “targeted” ads, which have content determined by a user’s interests. Sometimes this is harmless, or even helpful: for instance, after visiting a site about Puerto Rico a user may see ads for flights to Puerto Rico.

But these profiles also provide advertisers with the opportunity to discriminate against vulnerable communities. America has a long history of this: minority communities and consumers are disproportionately targeted for ads that feature alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and poorly-performing for-profit colleges. These communities are also often charged higher interest rates for bank loans and other products, a practice called “redlining” in the offline world. These kinds of targeted commercial discrimination undermine efforts in those communities to combat addiction, disease, and poverty.

The massive amount of information collected by online advertisers permits not only these older forms of discrimination, but new and more dangerous forms as well.

For instance, web users running different software, or who are located in different places, are being offered different prices on the same products—a new form of redlining called “weblining.” Facebook recently applied for a patent to determine a person’s credit score by looking at who was in that person’s social media network. Concern over risks like these helped prompt the ACLU to endorse the Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data and petition the Federal Trade Commission to regulate targeted advertising. But another way to protect users is to make sure that their information isn’t gathered in the first place.

Enter adblockers

Adblockers give users the power to decide who can track them and which ads they see. It is only after the advertising industry spent years denying users this sort of control by refusing to honor requests not to track that adblockers have reached widespread availability and use. Not only is this great for user control over privacy, it opens up a market for online business models that respect user choice—a market already being explored by innovators like Adblock Plus, TechDirt, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Yesterday, a trade organization representing some of the biggest online advertisers on the web was forced to admit that the advertising industry “messed up” when it designed the standards for online ads. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced that it will create a new standard to make online ads less distracting and repetitive. While this would be a welcome change for many, the IAB is silent on the much more important issue of whether this new standard will allow tracking and profiling of users. These practices can bring to the Internet the same discriminatory tactics that advertisers use offline. Until the IAB and other online advertisers are willing to create ads that respect user privacy, adblockers are more than a way for users to control what they see: they are a tool for users to take back control of their online identities.

Discrimination and racism will not be solved by adblockers alone. But giving users control over their data and their online world is a powerful way to ensure that people don’t face the same discrimination online that they struggle with in the rest of the world. The Internet is still relatively young, and we should do everything we can to keep it free of the biases that exist in the real world. An Internet without discrimination helps makes the world more free, and provides a model that we can draw on as we shape the rest of our nation and our world. 

Matthew W. Callahan is a Technology & Civil Liberties Fellow with the ACLU of Northern California.