A fascinating account of an advertising practice little understood.
Hoffman, an ad agency veteran, details the political and legal dangers posed by tracking-based advertising.
The author observes that the online advertising business is now colossal—approximately $350 billion is spent on it annually, though few businesses understand the “arcane nature of the online advertising ecosystem.” As a result, it is nearly impossible to precisely estimate its benefits or to effectively regulate it, and it is terrifyingly vulnerable to criminals and terrorists looking to exploit it. Hoffman is especially concerned with tracking-based advertising, which employs intrusive surveillance to collect personal data about internet users to either sell or share it. The ramifications of this now ubiquitous corporate spying are unsettling and, according to the author, even pose a threat to democracy itself. The principal political risks are twofold: First, they contribute to the nation’s partisan polarization by promoting misinformation and encouraging rhetorical incivility, as these tactics attract attention—the author asserts that nothing produces clicks on social media like “false, sensational, slanderous, and scurrilous” posts. They also pose a threat to national security insofar as the personal data mined is left completely unprotected, providing a wealth of opportunities not just to criminals, but also state-sponsored hackers. These points of vulnerability are rigorously documented by the author in this concise synopsis of the issue. Hoffman writes that tracking-based advertising isn’t even very effective, a fact well known within the industry but concealed because it is nevertheless very profitable. He concludes that the tracking-based adtech industry is “organized crime at a global scale that has been normalized by involving virtually every major corporation, every pretty-sounding trade organization, and the entire advertising, marketing, and online media industry.” Hoffman’s writing is spirited and can slide into unrestrained hyperbole—it is simply not the case that the “time when intelligent people of good will could disagree in a civilized manner” has completely vanished. However, his account of the way in which advertising data collection works is as meticulous as it is accessible, and his presentation of its dangers is illuminating. For readers in search of a brief study of the issue, this is an eye-opening book.
A fascinating account of an advertising practice little understood.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9780999230749
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Type A Group
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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