The new dot com bubble

I am not the biggest fan of advertising in general, and my appreciation for the art hasn't increased by following how the practices have evolved and into what direction.

I stumbled into this article via adactio's links, and it delves well into online advertising bubble.
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent

We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. And certainly, live-gaming is more likely to appeal to gamers. But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.

This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.

The above quote says it well enough, collecting data is fine if it is required for providing the service.
But at the moment, the practice is to gather everything because it is possible or trendy (Big Data).
Maciej Cegłowski puts it quite nicely in his Haunted by Data -talk:

There's a little bit of a con going on here. On the data side, they tell you to collect all the data you can, because they have magic algorithms to help you make sense of it.

On the algorithms side, where I live, they tell us not to worry too much about our models, because they have magical data. We can train on it without caring how the process works.

The data collectors put their faith in the algorithms, and the programmers put their faith in the data.

At no point in this process is there any understanding, or wisdom. There’s not even domain knowledge. Data science is the universal answer, no matter the question.

Eventhough the state were in with online advertising is strange, the article left me optimistic: bubbles have a tendency to to burst over time. The sooner it will happen, the more private Web we will have left.

Realistically, advertising does something, but only a small something – and at any rate it does far less than most advertisers believe.

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