A review, recommended by the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry of 2019, was followed up with green papers in October 2020 and October 2021. And in February this year, proposals for reforms to the Privacy Act were finally released by the Attorney General’s Department.
Australia is not alone in taking decisive action. Numerous legislators and regulators worldwide have been pushing ahead on digital privacy reforms, in ways that complement the proposed Australian approach—especially when it comes to targeted advertising. Or more specifically, the use of people’s personal data to drive targeted advertising.
The last four years has seen a groundswell of international moves designed to rein in the practice, and Australia may be about to join them. Yet, a powerful campaign from the digital advertising industry (AdTech), social media companies, and their various commercially incentivised allies are fighting back.
Privacy & targeted advertising
Targeted advertising is often presented as if it is just another mild annoyance we need to put up with in the digital age, but the reality is a bit more concerning. Our privacy is deeply harmed by targeted advertising, which fuels persistent and relentless data harvesting from each and every Australian.
It fuels panoptic-like digital surveillance, which in her 2019 magnum opus Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff characterised as an inherently privacy-violating world. Harvesting is so taken for granted that Mark Zuckerberg famously once declared that people no longer hold an expectation of privacy.
Every time you go online, you are datafied and monitored. This isn’t simply a list of websites you’ve visited, or the content of your holiday posts on social media. It’s far more insidious; data about where you are, where you’re going, who you’re speaking to, how long you hover over content on social media, your phones unique ID number, which music you listen to correlated with online spending patterns, what
