there are many paradoxes but this one is mine

previously: podcast topics from the Generationship podcast.

I was on the Monopoly Report podcast, and Alan Chapell named a paradox after me.

The first is what I’m going to call the Marti Paradox. And yes, I coined that on the pod. You heard it here first, folks. Don’s observation that the most engaged, most valuable customers are often the same people who’ve taken the most deliberate steps to make themselves less measurable by conventional ad tech, which means that if you’re an advertiser that is optimizing purely for trackability, you may be underweighting your best customers.

This might be a general case of another effect I have observed for a while, which is that information and market habits of future mainstream audiences are closer to the habits of today’s early adopter nerds than they are to the predictions that marketers make based on today’s metrics and research.

• In the early 1990s, marketers predicted “interactive TV” but then we got the web.

• Sanford Wallace predicted that mainstream email users would want email to work more like direct postal mail. Instead, mainstream email norms ended up matching the implied rules coded into early spam filters (which were written by atypical early adopter nerds).

• The “Slashdot effect” on open source sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a small-scale preview of social media’s impact on mainstream web sites later.

I’m still figuring out what to do about the paradox, and have a couple of projects in progress. More on those later. For now, here are some links to some things that came up on the podcast.

What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect? by me, on AdExchanger

Don Marti columns at the Reynolds Journalism Institute

Research report on the value of privacy practices FIXME

Have you filed your compliance taxes? (Big Tech shifts the costs and risks of compliance onto smaller companies)

The First Principle of Honest Advertising Measurement Is Independence from the Media at Central Control

The Attribution Cartel at Central Control

The Hidden Dangers Of Privacy-Preserving Attribution – And A Smarter Solution by me, on AdExchanger

Towards Developing an Understanding of Consumers’ Perceived Privacy Violations in Online Advertising by Kinshuk Jerath, Klaus M. Miller, and D. Daniel Sokol. Importantly, consumer perceptions of privacy violations may not align with technical definitions, suggesting that operational investments in privacy technologies may fail without consumer validation.

FTC PrivacyCon transcript So keeping your data safer on your device seems to help in terms of consumer perceptions, but it doesn’t make any difference whether the firm is targeting the consumer at the individual or group level in the perceived privacy perceptions.

Google “Privacy Sandbox” timelineWhy People Push Boundaries & How to Protect Your Peace (General advice that applies to when your web browser keeps testing boundaries by adding advertising features)

The surveillance economy is more like the commodification economyWinners don’t click search ads (FBI warning on fraud and malware)

IAB Sweden Expels Meta: Warns Advertisers About Fraud, Brand SafetyMicrosoft’s commitment to GDPR, privacy and putting customers in control of their own data by Julie Brill

Antitrust and competition guidance - 2017 version at W3C

Antitrust and competition policy - 2024 version at W3C

Marketers for an Open Web calls on UK Competition and Market Authority to block Google’s ‘Privacy Sandbox’Investigation into Google’s ‘Privacy Sandbox’ browser changes from the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK

Attribution Data Matching Protocol (ADMaP) from IAB Tech Lab

Reducing Friction in the Exercise of Privacy Rights CalPrivacy is exploring whether regulatory changes to reduce friction in the exercise of privacy rights are necessary. The Agency is gathering information and seeking input from stakeholders about this topic.

Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race (So-called “privacy-enhancing” tracking technologies would make it easier for large platforms to avoid this kind of investigation)

Conclusion

And finally, something that I partly agree with Alan on. He says,

From a public policy standpoint, I don’t believe it’s helpful to require a consent for attribution or measurement. And even the EU seems to be considering whether or how to grant exceptions for certain uses of data under the digital omnibus. But if the premise is for the W3C to create a standard which enables big tech and/or browsers to engage in attribution or measurement outside of the regulatory framework of privacy choices, then the W3C needs to be able to justify their rationale for doing so. And the current justifications around, you know, air quotes, improving privacy are vague and should be viewed much more suspiciously given their clear anti-competitive impact of enabling one set of actors to engage in attribution and measurement without friction while effectively denying critical data to the rest of the marketplace.

and he’s clearly right about part of it. Either every company should have to get consent for attribution tracking, or no company should. The situation where the attribution cartel doesn’t need consent, and everyone else does, would plunge us into a grimdark surveillance oligopoly dystopia result in an extremely sub-optimal level of market consolidation.

The place I disagree with Alan is the part about nobody needing consent for attribution or measurement. That might hypothetically be a valid point of view in some alternate timeline, where business norms were notactively in the process of collapse. But we have to consider the problem starting from the Internet as it is, not the Internet as we would want it.Consumers lost $2.1B to social media scams in 2025, according to the FTC. The search ads are too dangerous to click,according to the FBI. People will assume that any attribution system deployed today is going to be feeding in to the same deceptive business practices that the companies involved are already doing. (Even Google says thatnot showing personalized advertising is a form of “protection”.) It’s a shitstorm out there.

Perhaps in the future there will be some cleanup of business practices that might make a consent-free attribution tracking system feasible. That level of shift back toward a higher-trust society would create all kinds of opportunities. Another good reason why state legislators should draft bills by starting from privacy harms and working back from there, not justcopy California.

Bonus links

California Privacy Protection Agency Releases Letter Opposing the SECURE Data Act “A strong federal privacy law is worth pursuing, but it should not strip away rights that tens of millions of people already depend on,” said Tom Kemp, Executive Director of CalPrivacy. “The SECURE Act would set privacy rights back and make it much harder for consumers to exercise them in this AI-driven world where personal data is being collected at unprecedented scale.”

The Four Parts of Accountability & How To Give A Genuine Apology by Mia Mingus. As you read this, I encourage you to think about who you need to apologize to, rather than who needs to apologize to you because we all have people we need to apologize and make amends to.