Many of the internet sites you use are free. At least in the sense that you do not have to pay anything in order to access then¹. Facebook does not charge you any money for creating or running your account. Twitter does not charge you for sending out short text messages that anyone can view. Google lets you search the entire internet² as often as you’d like, and you don’t pay them any money.

But you do pay with something else: Your personal information. These companies are not charities. They want profit. So someone else has to pay for your usage. And usually it’s advertisers. They pay Google, Facebook, or Twitter for access to their users. And to entice advertisers to spend as much money as possible, these sites allow targeting specific subsets of their users based on certain criteria.

This is in contrast to how advertising targeting used to work. You couldn’t know who exactly would see your ad. All you could do was place it somewhere where you were pretty sure the people you wanted to target would hang out. If you wanted to sell your shiny new muscle car, then placing a TV ad during Sunday morning cartoons makes less sense than buying a slot during a football game³.

But online targeting changes this. Not because the platforms allow for more narrow targeting definitions, but because they just know so much more about you. Instead of just hoping that some of the people watching the football game are also interested in buying a new car, you can now only show the ad to people who are affluent enough to afford it (but not too affluent — for them, your car might not be fancy enough), maybe live in a place where owning a car makes sense, and are male and between the ages of 30 to 40, because you know that’s the kind of person that would be interested in buying your car.

But in order to allow this kind of targeting, Google, Facebook, etc. need to know all of this and much more. How? Sometimes you just outright tell them. Adding your school, university, and places of work to your profile isn’t just so it can find your classmates & co-workers, it also allows Facebook et al. to make a pretty good guess at how much money you’re earning. By tracking your every move on the internet, they also know what your hobbies are, how many friends you have (and probably also who they are, because again, you just tell them), what kind of stuff you like to buy, etc. In some cases, they don’t even need to track you all that much: Spotify can target ads basically based on what kind of music you listen to.

It’s also why shopping sucks now. Because everyone has become so transparent, companies can create an endless variety of products you might want. And so instead of having a choice between maybe 3 to 5 products, you now get to choose between hundreds of thousands of them, without a real way to distinguish between them.

It’s not that ads per se are bad. And not every website needs to be paid. But the current model of online advertising has become a surveillance machine of gigantic size, that no one notices because it’s just not visible when you’re using the internet⁴. Instead, companies should not be allowed to target you so specifically that all your personal information needs to be harvested. Instead, they need to figure out to do the online equivalent of buying an ad slot during a football game.

You might not care about this right now5. You might be annoyed by all the cookie consent popups that GDPR has forced on you, and just tap “OK” so it goes away6. But if you don’t want to participate in this rampant online data collection, there are some things you can do. [Ditch Google for DuckDuckGo](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-google-alternative-search-privacy “I ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here’s why you should too

WIRED UK”). Use a browser made by a company that does not run the biggest ad service in the world. Install a good ad blocker plugin. And whenever you see a cookie consent form, look for the “reject all” option. It’s usually hidden. I wonder why?

Speaking of evil companies, Slate made a list, checked it twice, and then published it: Which tech companies are doing the most harm?

🤔😔

Expressing emotions and tone through words isn’t easy. Even less so when you’re not writing a novel, but are chatting. Which is why emojis are so ubiquitous nowadays. They allow you to quickly express emotion or stuff like irony without having to resort to lengthy explanations or or relying on context. But Unicode, who are responsible for adding new emojis, aren’t really adding any exciting ones: New Emoji Are So Boring — but They Don’t Have to Be.

Brain GPS

Surgeons have to navigate inside your body without hitting or injuring anything else. Nicking an artery while operating is bad. Even more so for neurosurgeons: They don’t just have to worry about nicking blood vessels, but pretty much any damage in the brain can have lasting consequences. So how do neurosurgeons navigate inside the brain? (YouTube)

Sizing Up

It’s difficult for humans to imagine relative sizes for anything we’re not used to in our normal lives. Going from a mouse to an elephant is an easy comparison to make, because we’ve seen both of them, and know their relative size to us. But other things are harder. A blood cell is so small you cannot see it without an aid, which makes it difficult to really get a feel for how tiny it is. And atoms are even worse: They’re so tiny, pictures in the normal sense aren’t really possible, because we’re getting into the territory of light’s frequency. To make it easier to get a feel, watch this VFX artist reveal the true scale of atoms (YouTube, via kottke.org)

📖 Weekly Longread 📚

“The enigmatic leader of the U.A.E. may soon emerge as the region’s most powerful figure. What does he really want?” Mohammed bin Zayed’s Dark Vision of the Middle East’s Future

🦄 Unicorn Chaser 🦄

2019 Ocean Photography Art Contest Winners (via kottke.org)