Cookie Wars:How New Data Profiling and Targeting Techniques Threaten Citizens and Consumers in the “Big Data” Era--now published

Our chapter in a new edited volume called European Data Protection: In Good Health? is now published.  It survey's the contemporary digital data tracking and online marketing landscape.  It pulls back the curtain on many digital marketing practices and claims.  Worth a look, as they say, if you have time.  More info here.
 
And a very brief excerpt:  Online advertising companies, such as Google, Facebook,Yahoo, and Microsoft, routinely offer the public and government officials a glossy version of digital reality that purposely evades how their tactics and techniques threaten privacy and have other problematic consequences. They claim that there are only benefits derived from access to the abundance of information readily available online. In their worldview, the ad-supported Internet has now freed consumers and citizens to make more informed choices, immune even from the persuasive lure of marketing messages that may have influenced their behavior in the past. This essay attempts to challenge such storybook claims, relying on my investigatory work to peer behind the Wizard’s curtain and discover what kind of digital “Oz” we may find. For what online marketers say to the public, as we shall discuss, is very different from the discourse they have with each other and their allies. In that conversation, ultimately we believe the more truthful one, the public is at the mercy of advanced technologies designed to move them through a “purchase funnel,” whether on their computers, mobiles, game players, or digital TVs.