This has become a standard part of the debate and we insist that it’s wrong. In the discussion over online advertising, online money making, there is often the claim that peoples’ data is being sold. This isn’t what happens.
A study by the New Economics Foundation think tank and the charity Global Action Plan estimates that British children's data is being sold to advertisers around 820 million times a day as they browse the web.
The findings have prompted the organisations to call for a ban on default ad tracking online to protect children from having their private information harvested and potentially misused on an industrial scale.
The report – called I-Spy – looked at how children are being tracked across the internet using web cookies that funnel information about them and what they are looking at to agencies, which then sell it to advertisers.
It is not true that Facebook (or Amazon, Google, whichever) works out that Harry, of 4 Privet Drive, seems uninterested in Action Man but might go for a wand and then sells that information to an advertiser. That’s simply not what does happen.
Think about how magazines and newspapers work. They have some idea of who their readership are. Ask any of them, they’ll gladly show you their ABC circulation data. Our readership is mostly C and D socioeconomic groups, there’s a hole in the circulation where Liverpool should be and so on - at, say, The Sun. The Mail will talk about, well, why not let Yes Prime Minister take the strain here. If you wish to advertise something then you’ll select from the outlets which reach your target market. The Mail for that cancer curing coffee that raises house prices, The Telegraph for cavalry twill trousers (for decades just one such ad ran next to the crossword) and The Guardian for something or other, possibly a course in the latest self-righteousness.
At no point has anyone sold you the data of the readers or consumers. Rather, you’ve been sold the ability to reach certain targeted groups of them. Sliced and diced to as narrow a fit with your perceived interests as is possible given the information available. Push up wonder bras might not do so well on the sports pages, men’s hair weaves perhaps not so well on the women’s page (for decades, the front page of the Evening Standard was considered the perfect place for that).
Again, at no point was the data about the readership sold to anyone at all. Rather, the ability to advertise to select slices of it was.
The online advertisers are simply doing this at a greater level of granularity. It may well be possible to slice and dice the audience to find boys, in Surrey, who seem to have no interest in war toys but have havered over a page about magic. But that information is not then sold to an advertiser. Instead, the opportunity to advertise to them is then rented to the advertiser. In exactly the way that a magazine salesman might agree that Tribune isn’t quite the place to advertise a privatisation stock while The Spectator might well be.
Data is not sold in this online advertising business. It simply isn’t.
But then the study quoted comes from the New Economic Foundation which always has had that tenuous connection with reality.