Haha, no. You're falling for the trick, or maybe you're just 10 years behind.

Publishers (and retailers, and anyone with a dataset) seek out adtech partner companies, to justify high CPMs and to sell their audience data. Adtech companies are market-makers, it's been years since the data they can get independently of supply-side partners was worth shit.

The publisher is the one with the cookie warning and consent forms! The publisher is the one who wants you to log in with a stable ID! The publisher is the one with a model of you regardless of your ad or tracker blocker settings! The adtech companies will sell you downstream for sure, but the publishers are the ones deploying as many tricks as possible to gather data.

And yeah, adtech companies will advise them about how to effectively gather data. That's a lot less about "tricks" and more about how to build salable taxonomies instead of data lakes full of garbage. To the extent it's about tricks, it's more often the adtech companies having to patiently but firmly explain, no, you can't just hardcode a single consent state for all visitors and send that to us in lieu of a real CMP. (A purely theoretical example, of course...)

You're being very generous to adtech's role in this. Any undisclosed bias?

Adtech is very much instrumental in the race to extract as much value from attention as possible.

Adtech built a market for advertisers to target users based on interest (which may or may not be a scam[1]). Advertisers exploit this and other tools at their disposal (astroturfing, embedded marketing, etc.), but they're certainly not as vicious or out of control as what adtech can produce.

The publisher has my information if I give it to them or if they buy it somewhere. Adtech has it regardless of what I do. Why would a publisher even want a model of me when what they want is for their product to reach me on as many sites as possible, not just their own? An adtech company having as much information on everyone can serve many publishers, so it's no wonder the system is so centralized.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27531714

> Publishers (and retailers, and anyone with a dataset) seek out adtech partner companies, to justify high CPMs and to sell their audience data. Adtech companies are market-makers, it's been years since the data they can get independently of supply-side partners was worth shit.

You're correct, for large publishers ... I guess we could almost say they are adtech companies now.

IMO it's easier to just call them "surveillance companies" and be done with it. Regardless of whether they're collecting, storing, or processing surveillance data, they're all in the same business as Equifax, Google, Lexis-Nexis, and NSA.

I don't think it's useful for analysis or activism to group Equifax, Google, the NSA, the New York Times, Humble Bundle, Twitter, Airbnb, Walgreens, etc. under a single term. The flattening of this mess down into "adtech" is how most of them have avoided scrutiny, and relabeling that "surveillance" doesn't make the relationships between them any clearer.

Like all paradigms, it makes some things clearer and other things less clear. This one helps me keep my head straight about easy to ignore aspects of my relationship with the ones that would otherwise appear as being tamer, especially for instance Google.

The ones that seem out of place on your list are because their main business is something other than surveillance. Saying that Walgreens "patronizes the surveillance industry" does make more sense than labeling the whole company as doing that one thing. Although labeling the marketing group requesting all the trackers be added to their website as the "surveillance department" makes sense.

I think "surveillance" is a much better term than "ad" because the latter seems like just some harmless annoyance in line with American business values, whereas the former more accurately captures that the systems these companies are building are offenses against freedom and humanity.