Ad Tech Says It’s Not In The Surveillance Business. Now Is The Time To Prove It

I’ve been thinking a lot about the RFI issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late January. ICE asked data providers and tech vendors to share information on how their tools and services could be used to “directly support investigations.”

The RFI spelled it out: “The Government is seeking to understand the current state of Ad Tech … and location data services available to federal investigative and operational entities, considering regulatory constraints and privacy expectations.”

According to ICE, the RFI at this stage was solely for “market research, planning and information gathering purposes” and wasn’t a solicitation for services, at least not yet.

Is this a slippery slope from commercial ad tech to government surveillance? Should vendors have even responded? Where are the ethical red lines?

These important questions linger because the industry reaction – or lack thereof – was deafening.

There were a handful of news stories and a brief flash of outrage on LinkedIn when the RFI dropped, at least based on what I saw in my feed. And then it got rather quiet. The cycle, it seems, moved on.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Cycles turn fast in ad tech, and once the hot takes had been aired, there appeared to be little appetite for any kind of deeper reckoning.

What was most striking to me, however, is that my inbox is usually flooded with pitches about, well, everything. Outlook yells at me on a daily basis that my inbox is about to hit capacity.

I’m mercilessly pitched on CTV ad innovations, supply-path optimization, the need for better transparency, incrementality testing, retail media networks, outcomes-based measurement, AdCP experiments, linear TV’s slow decline, commerce media, political ad targeting, out-of-home, audio advertising, gaming, chatbot ads, contextual targeting, synthetic audiences, identity, signal loss, the changing nature of search and AI, AI, AI.

Meanwhile, whenever news breaks, my inbox explodes with offers to share commentary and analysis. If this industry has anything, it’s opinions.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for more email for the sake of more email. But the silence in my inbox about this RFI was conspicuous. I’ve had not a single offer to share commentary, no execs eager to go on record for deeper analysis or to stake out a clear position.

Sure, LinkedIn lit up briefly with reactions, but that’s social media venting, not the sort of sustained, on-the-record discourse that compels an industry to declare its red lines and stand behind them.

Outrage costs nothing online.

Who knows, though. Maybe I didn’t hear from anyone because the companies that usually pitch me on everything under the sun are quietly participating behind the scenes.

And it’s a live wire, I get it. But silence isn’t neutrality; it’s a choice.

We’ve heard from some sources off the record that their companies planned to respond to the RFI. But even if no one submitted, the optics alone should cause alarm bells to go off. An industry often criticized for commercial surveillance is now inching toward something more literal.

Ad tech has spent years pushing back against terms like “surveillance advertising” and “surveillance capitalism,” labels coined by privacy advocates and popularized by lawmakers and civil society groups (although, to be fair, the current FTC rejects the characterization).

The defense against those terms has often come straight from industry leadership. During his keynote address at the 2023 Annual Leadership Meeting, IAB CEO David Cohen dismissed the “surveillance advertising” narrative outright: “It’s time to call out this dystopian nonsense for what it is: insane.”

But if the ad tech industry insists it’s not in the surveillance business, this is the moment to prove it – not with LinkedIn posts, but with lines it refuses to cross.

Because the lines we fail to draw in the daylight have a way of haunting us in the dark.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. This column is part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger’s editorial team.

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