“Nobody is using that anymore anyway,” said my 15-year-old son. His reaction is logical but naive. The social network may be losing users, but Mark Zuckerberg’s business empire under the name Facebook Inc. continues to grow at a thunderous pace. Despite the fact that Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are free. So where is that growth and money coming from?

After a quick search using Google, another giant known for huge growth figures based on “free” products, I came across a graph that leaves nothing to the imagination. A whopping 98.5 (!) percent of all Facebook income comes from advertisements. This accounts for $55 billion per year, meaning that each user contributes $35 to Facebook.

A whopping 98.5 (!) percent of all Facebook income comes from advertisements.

Smart approach from Zuckerberg, right!? Maybe, but remember Facebook and Google have mainly pushed other advertising companies out of the market. More than half of the revenue generated from digital advertising worldwide goes to Google ($103 billion) and Facebook ($67 billion). Meanwhile weeklies, newspapers and news sites are sidelined.

How could Facebook and Google have grown so rapidly in the advertising market? The answer is somewhat unnerving: by collecting as much personal data on us as possible. They seduce advertisers with the idea that they can offer advertisements in a targeted way, because they know a lot, if not everything about us as users: age, place of residence, gender, friends, favorite band, favorite color, favorite dish, etcetera. This is called ‘micro-targeting’. An example of a connection that could be made: men aged 20, who live in the woodlands of Bastogne and like Gordon Ramsey, will probably be interested in carving knives. The more personal the advertisement is, the more people pay attention to it. That is the idea behind ​​micro-targeting.

But Google and Facebook go further. Even all these personal characteristics collected via their own sites still provides too little information to their tastes. This has led to the creation of “behavioral” advertisements. Via so-called tracking cookies, you are followed almost everywhere on the internet. Everything is stored: every search query, every website, the duration of your visit and the places you look at on the site. All of this is done with the aim of offering you advertisements that you must like and that will therefore shake as much money out of your pockets as possible.

It can be reasoned that personalised ads are more effective than more general ads.

It can be reasoned that personalised ads are more effective than more general ads. That is exactly the story advertisers have fallen for. And yet this concept is debatable.

First, the price for personalised ads that users of the Internet, like you and me, are constantly tracked, and everything that could ever be known about us is collected. It is a worrying idea that commercial giants are constantly looking at us as users of the internet. Moreover, it is not certain what purposes our data will be used for (or perhaps against us) in the future.

Second, despite the sales pitch to advertisers, personal ads regularly miss their target. Sometimes they are strikingly rude rather than on point. The 20-year-old man who is offered carving knives turns out to be a vegetarian. Or the 30-year-old woman who receives advertisements for baby clothes has a desire to have children but can’t. Economists call this accidental damage. But there are plenty of examples where personal ads do damage only. An example would be children who are being targeted by junk food companies, politicians who try to influence elections by micro-targetting, the spread of racist and anti-semetic hate speech trough personalised ads, the use of detailled ads by people with terrorist motives. In short; personal ads are not that smart and have more disadvantages than advantages.

Behavioral researchers and privacy advocates point to yet another major drawback. Children and other vulnerable groups cannot handle personal ads well, but there are also harmful consequences for all adults. The internet looks like a virtual Times Square where all day flashing neon lights are trying to draw our attention using personal information. Privacy advocates call that a breach of our “digital dignity” (in analogy with human dignity). A dignified digital life can never mean that you are a permanent target of dubious commercial parties.

If I add up all the drawbacks, I can only argue against the personal ads. But then what would the alternative be?

But what would the alternative be?

The privacy advocates have taken matters into their own hands. With digital no tracking requests, ad blockers and other plugins to disable tracking software, they protect themselves. But digital dignity should not only exist for ingenious experts, but be the standard for every user. And that alternative? It already exists.

In early 2020, the Dutch Public Broadcasting (NPO) made a drastic choice. With the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation, people who visited the NPO sites were asked if they agreed to personal advertisement. Almost no one did. That is why De Ster, the organization that sells advertisements for the NPO, decided to only use contextual advertisements. Are you looking at “Floortje naar het einde van de wereld” (a Dutch show about traveling)? There is a good chance that you will receive an advertisement from airline KLM. At the beginning of June, De Ster was able to show initial results and to their great satisfaction, there appeared to be no difference in the number of advertisements they sold nor their effectiveness. In fact, in many cases the contextual ads achieved better results.

They are not the only ones. Large ad companies in America have previously decided to move away from ‘targeted’ ads, because targeting ad revenues hardly differ from neutral ads, while the costs are much higher. Researchers from the University of Minnesota and California also found that the financial benefits of personal ads compared to neutral ads have been greatly exaggerated.

So there is no need for personal ads, not for the advertisers themselves and not for the consumer. Only Facebook and Google might shed a tear. It’s time to pull the plug on personalised ads!

On Thursday June 19th, the European Parliament agreed with a large majority on my proposal to ban personalised ads. That was a nice first step, but we are not there yet. Facebook and Google have an army of lobbyists at the ready to stop legislation. That is why we need to do much more. We must call on our representatives, governments, business leaders and world leaders to ban personal ads: Personalised Ads Zuck.

We must call on our representatives, governments, business leaders and world leaders to ban personal ads: Personalised Ads Zuck.

Make some noise!

• Sign the petition on AdsZuck.com and share it with your network.
• Call on your representative, boss, neighbour or anyone in your netwerk, who is in the position to help abolishing personalised ads, to support our battle.

Finally: one s/o to all of the privacy advocates who defend digital rights day after day. It’s their success.