Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
Physical storefronts have over time learned how to optimise their presentation to achieve higher conversion. Initially it was experimentation with layouts, with time they added cameras which helped understand customer behaviours.<p>This expertise is commonly outsourced to physical marketing companies who dispatch &quot;merchandisers&quot; to your store to help optimise your layout to fall in line with the layouts they have designed based on the experience they have doing this for many different stores.<p>Some companies would actively seek out target customers, give them cash to conduct surveys for market research.<p>The barrier to retail taking this to an extreme is physical obstruction and money. It takes time to experiment with layouts, you have to pay people for their insight. It isn&#x27;t practical to have a Moogle which has cameras analyzing most physical storefronts around the world.<p>It&#x27;s a really complex issue as online retailers do make money from online advertising companies and it often matters to them, but the proliferation of the chosen advertising providers few means that everywhere you go they have a presence listening for your user actions.<p>With that said, these companies don&#x27;t really want to know you, they just want to ensure they are able to serve relevant ads to someone like you. Collecting personal data is a consequence of there being no other way to group data into uniquely identifying profiles and get those insights on the interests of those profiles.<p>More often, these companies explicitly don&#x27;t want to know you. Personal information is a massive liability.<p>Attempts to anonymise the data are difficult as you will need some kind of unique primary identifier, but you can infer a lot about an identity from seemingly unimportant things like browser resolution.