The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline
Finding suckers is the one thing ad-targeting is good at.
Monday (October 2), I’ll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. October 7–8, I’m in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.
Being watched sucks. Of all the parenting mistakes I’ve made, none haunt me more than the times my daughter caught me watching her while she was learning to do something, discovered she was being observed in a vulnerable moment, and abandoned her attempt:
It’s hard to be your authentic self while you’re under surveillance. For that reason alone, the rise and rise of the surveillance industry — an unholy public-private partnership between cops, spooks, and ad-tech scum — is a plague on humanity and a scourge on the Earth:
But beyond the psychic damage surveillance metes out, there are immediate, concrete ways in which surveillance brings us to harm. Ad-tech follows us into abortion clinics and then sells the info to the cops back home in the forced birth states run by Handmaid’s Tale LARPers:
