The Banner That Watches Back

The fieldworker who arrives in the digital settlements of the early twenty-first century soon notices a curious practice. The inhabitants spend much of their waking lives looking at small rectangular images that offer them shoes, mortgages, and holidays they have already taken. Nobody admits to wanting these images, and nobody reports buying anything because of them. Yet the images multiply, an industry of considerable size exists to place them, and the tribe treats their presence as the natural price of reading the news. An outsider would conclude that the rectangles are not there to be looked at. He would suspect they are there to look.

The findings of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto confirm this suspicion more literally than the anthropologist would have liked. According to the researchers, Discover-Tech, an Israeli firm, has been serving online advertisements that can open the way for “zero-click” spyware. Such spyware asks nothing of the target. It needs no tap, no download, and no foolish moment of curiosity. An advertisement loads in the ordinary course of a page, and the device in the reader’s pocket stops belonging only to the reader. The firm’s capabilities are contested, as the capabilities of such firms always are, and the dispute deserves to be recorded. The structure the researchers describe deserves the closer study, because the structure does not depend on how the dispute ends.

Consider the ceremony of the advertisement as its practitioners describe it. It is a commercial courtship. The merchant addresses the consumer, the consumer weighs the offer, and the click is a small act of assent, like the bow that opens a formal dance. All of the industry’s literature rests on this account: relevance, engagement, the matching of willing buyer to willing seller. On this account the click is the productive act, and the elaborate apparatus of targeting and auctioning that comes before it is merely preparation.

Read the apparatus without accepting its self-description and the order reverses. Before any advertisement appears, the reader has been examined. Location, device, habits, and past wanderings are reported to an auction, and bidders who will never be named decide whether this particular person is worth reaching. The examination happens whether or not anyone clicks. The ceremonial element turns out to be the advertisement, the shoe or the mortgage, while the productive element is the census taken in order to show it. The click was always the dance and never the marriage.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. The defender of ordinary advertising will say that commercial profiling and covert hacking differ in kind, not degree. One sorts people into aggregate categories for selling. The other breaks into a specific person’s device for watching. One is regulated commerce, the other is something the law has words for, and to conflate them is to slander an honest trade.

The objection fails on its own premises. The researchers’ account describes no new pipe. It describes the existing pipe with a different customer at the end of it. The same machinery that decides a reader is a likely buyer of running shoes can decide that the reader is the particular journalist, dissident, or rival official someone has paid to find. Once that identification is possible, sending a payload instead of a banner is a matter of what the buyer ordered. The difference between commerce and espionage therefore lies in neither the technology nor the method. It lies in the licence of the purchaser, which the reader cannot inspect. Zero-click delivery only completes the logic. It removes the click, the last vestigial gesture of consent, which had already become the most ornamental part of the ritual.

The incentive map needs no conspirators. Advertising networks are paid per placement and have little reason to ask who is buying. Publishers are paid per impression and have less. Firms that can turn targeting into access find a ready market among governments, which buy discreetly and reliably. Israel’s well-known path from military signals work into private technology companies is not alleged here to run through this firm in particular. It does, however, ensure a steady national supply of people for whom the boundary between audience measurement and intelligence collection was never an obvious one. Each participant behaves rationally, and the result is a surveillance instrument that nobody had to design.

One also notes, with professional interest, who performed the audit. It was not the advertising industry, whose self-regulatory bodies produce codes of conduct in impressive quantity. It was a university laboratory in Toronto, whose work is examining what others would prefer to leave unexamined.

The field note, then. An observer unfamiliar with this civilisation would watch a woman on an evening train scroll past a banner for a sofa she will never buy, and would record that the sofa was the only part of the exchange meant for her.