A deep dive into the political roots of advertising on the internet

The contemporary internet’s de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy, Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising.

The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet’s rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called “surveillance advertising.” He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance.

The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices—not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

Matthew Crain is assistant professor of media and communication at Miami University.

"A surveillance-oriented internet was not inevitable. As Matthew Crain brilliantly documents, the data-obsessed web was manifested to appease and uphold the advertising beast. By untangling the historic strings of policy, politics, and financial interests, Profit over Privacy invites the reader to question why we've come to accept the panoptic internet we know today."—danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

"In this exceptionally insightful and important book, Matthew Crain presents a definitive history of the evisceration of internet privacy. Rooted in a deep understanding of the history of advertising markets and the political economy of finance, Profit over Privacy focuses readers' attention on the fundamental forces demanding ever more data about our lives. Although it tells a dark story, its accessible and lively prose makes it a pleasure to read—and provides the historical knowledge necessary to help future regulators avoid the many mistakes of the past."—Frank Pasquale, author of New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
 

"The book provides a fascinating look at the way that commercial and private interests and the companies and lobbyists representing them wonout over other interests, such as public ownership and public interests,in anumber of debates and processes largely in the United States that created the global internet  infrastructure  we  have  now... Anyone interested in online and digital spaces, surveillance practices, the history of internet companies,and discussions of public policy in the internet age should want to read Profit Over Privacy."—Surveillance Society

"Revealing the emergence of a market logic that has placed individual surveillance at its core, this is a forceful and engaging book."—LSE Review of Books

"His writing skills, including his ability to make the sociopolitical complexities of political economy accessible and engaging for a broad audience, from undergraduates to business executives, are most impressive."—International Journal of Communication

"Brilliantly researched and thoroughly documented, the book argues that surveillance capitalism could not have existed outside of politics."—Technical Communication

"In documenting the historical development of surveillance advertising, Crain makes a forceful argument against the status quo in favor of strong privacy laws."—College Research Libraries