Surveillance and Distrust — Data, Privacy, and Stealth Marketing

Last time, we watched search engines and platforms swap out the leading players of advertising. Advertising became able to choose, with unprecedented precision, whom to reach, when, and in what mood. An ad that reaches the intended person at the intended moment. To advertisers, and to us who were supposed to be spared a flood of irrelevant messages, it looked like a convenient kind of progress.

Yet behind that precision lay another face. Advertising can target us accurately only because the vast records we leave behind each day — which pages we viewed, what we bought, where we were — are being gathered, bundled, and read by someone. The source of the convenience was the fact of being watched. In this chapter, we trace, within what has been reported, the era when advertising began to be called ‘surveillance,’ the distrust society turned toward it, and the regulation that came as a reaction.

Advertising that follows behavior

When we walk through the web, we leave something like footprints. Browsing history, search terms, clicks, time spent. Using these records as clues, advertisers infer a person’s interests and attributes and serve what seems to be the most fitting ad. This, roughly, is the idea behind what is called behavioral targeting.

Technically, small pieces of data saved in the browser (cookies) and the like have supported this tracking. A product you looked at on one site follows you as an ad on another site — many people will recognize that experience. From the advertiser’s side, it is an efficient mechanism that reaches only the interested. From the user’s side, however, came the unease that one’s own behavior was being recorded without one’s knowledge and treated like a commodity.

The records that are gathered are not necessarily used only to serve ads. Data is analyzed, combined, and sometimes passed to third parties. The very fact that this flow is hard to see became a breeding ground for distrust.

The shock of Cambridge Analytica

There was an event that turned a vague unease about data into a concrete fear. It was the affair involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, widely reported in 2018.

According to the reporting, a personality-quiz app created by a researcher was set up so that it could obtain data not only on the users themselves but even on their friends. Under the specifications of the time, the acquisition is said to have reached information connected to the social ties of those who used the app, and in the end the data of a great many users was reportedly gathered without their sufficient awareness. As for the scale, early reports put it at around 87 million people, while the company involved expressed a view denying that figure — the numbers vary by account.

After this affair, the company involved suspended its operations, and the platform companies reviewed how they handled data. Yet the distrust, once born, did not vanish easily. The question ‘how safe, really, is data gathered for advertising’ remained with society.

Unseen fraud — ad fraud and stealth marketing

Apart from the unease over surveillance, problems that erode trust from within were also growing in the world of advertising. One is the fraud known as ad fraud.

Ad fraud is the general term for acts that use programs that are not human (bots) and the like to inflate ad impressions and clicks and skim off advertising money. Advertisers are made to pay for ads that in fact reached no one. As digital advertising became automated and bought and sold through complex trading networks, such fraud is pointed out to have become easier to slip in. Although the scale of the damage is hard to measure precisely, surveys at home and abroad present estimates that run into enormous annual sums, and it is recognized as a serious problem.

The other is the criticism of stealth marketing — so-called stealth marketing. This refers to the act of promoting something while hiding that it is advertising, even though it is. As social media and review sites spread and the boundary between corporate promotion and users’ candid impressions grew hard to see, the problem surfaced. Words received as the pure assessment of a third party were in fact a paid promotion — the sense of betrayal on learning this deepened distrust of advertising itself.

Regulation as a reaction

Against such distrust, society tried to respond through institutions. The leading example is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), whose application began in the EU in 2018.

GDPR is described as a regulation that broadly sets out, regarding the handling of personal data, the consent of the person, the clear statement of the purpose for which data is collected, the rights of users, and more. It was understood that any company handling the data of people within the EU bears broad obligations regardless of where it is located, and it affected businesses around the world. The flood of consent-seeking banners across the web is one expression of this current. While regulation is expected to have the effect of protecting users, there are also points raised that it imposes procedural burdens and may, on the contrary, work to the advantage of large platforms — the assessment is not simple.

In Japan too, from October 2023, stealth marketing was added to the scope of regulation as a misleading representation under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations. It is the idea of treating as a problem any display that consumers cannot tell is advertising. To present advertising honestly, as advertising — the fact that this principle, which might seem obvious, was reaffirmed as an institution reflects the mood of the times.

Advertising, having gained precision, took into itself with the same hand the unease of surveillance, the fraud from within, and the consumer’s distrust. How is the trust nearly lost in exchange for convenience to be regained? Or how is the very way trust is placed to be redrawn? Carrying its distrust, advertising heads into the next era. In the final chapter, surveying the relationship of advertising and society to come — the cookieless future, influencers, retail media, and even advertising generated by AI — we will quietly close this long story.