Tackling the Internet’s Central Villain: The Advertising Business - The New York Times

Referenced in the article: Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet (New America)

"Ads are the lifeblood of the internet, the source of funding for just about everything you read, watch and hear online. The digital ad business is in many ways a miracle machine — it corrals and transforms latent attention into real money that pays for many truly useful inventions, from search to instant translation to video hosting to global mapping.

But the online ad machine is also a vast, opaque and dizzyingly complex contraption with underappreciated capacity for misuse — one that collects and constantly profiles data about our behavior, creates incentives to monetize our most private desires, and frequently unleashes loopholes that the shadiest of people are only too happy to exploit."

From the final paragraph:

"Socially, politically and culturally, the online ad business is far more dangerous than I appreciated. Mr. Cook was right, and we should have listened to him."

Tackling the Internet’s Central Villain: The Advertising Business - The New York Times