A new bill would stop ads around this story from knowing you too well.
The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced Tuesday by Democratic Reps. Anna G. Eshoo of California and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, along with Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, would limit online advertisers to targeting audiences by approximate location, while allowing contextual ads keyed to the bulk of a page.
A brief summary of the bill slams targeted advertising for its “unseemly data collection and tracking” that fuels “disinformation, discrimination, and privacy abuses.”
The bill would ban any attempt by advertisers and ad platforms to “target the dissemination of an advertisement,” defined as using “data inferred or derived about the individual or connected device” from such data as “contents of communications,” “browsing history and online activity,” and customer lists.
The bill would allow some geographic targeting–an advertiser could focus on a local jurisdiction such as a “city, town, township, village, borough, or similar,” as well as a Congressional district, but not a ZIP code or subsection of one of those places.
The text and a section-by-section outline reveal no exclusion for political advertising and include both nonprofits and telecommunications “common carriers”—read: internet providers and wireless carriers–in the targeting ban.
Contextual ads placed to match the rest of the page—in the print world, also called just “advertising”—would still be fine. The outline says that would preserve the business viability of ads, citing a 2019 study that found targeting ads only increased publisher income by 4%.
This sweeping ban on targeting would, however, nuke most of the advertising business of Facebook and Google. And it might upend that of many other companies that rely on online ads (PCMag included).
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington-based think tank funded by corporations and foundations, decried the bill for that reason in a statement from Vice President Daniel Castro.
“Banning targeted ads would make online advertising much less effective, so advertisers will pay less for them and those who display ads—including app developers, media companies, and content creators—will earn significantly less revenue,” Castro said. “Faced with a budget shortfall, many online services will have few options other than to either reduce the quality of their services or charge their users fees.”
Given the consistent inability of Congress to advance tech-policy legislation, however, the most likely outcome for this bill is that of other recent proposals: nothing.
Meanwhile, you remain free to take your own action to jam ad targeting by using a privacy-optimized browser—such as Microsoft Edge, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox—that blocks advertisers from tracking you across the web.
