The insidious rise of 'surveillance advertising' : New coalition to end online advertising to children

When I moved into my current home, I found a poster at the bottom of the stairs featuring Kafka and his famous quote “I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things”.

Marketers have always found ways to fill available spaces with adverts, but in Kafka’s 1920s I suspect it was still just about possible to ignore them.

I’m not sure it is any more. Global Action Plan’s interviews with teens revealed that on Instagram alone they see 420 adverts an hour. And that’s just one app – the true number of online ads kids seen during the course of a day will be many times higher.

Online advertising is a completely unregulated world, unrecognisable from the era of TV ads capped at 7 minutes per hour. But as worrying as the quantity of these ads is, it’s the nature of them that is more problematic. 

We now live in a world of ‘surveillance advertising’. Our every move is tracked, generating data that informs the ads we’re served. Almost every ad we see has been tailored based on this treasure trove of data. And what a treasure trove – it’s estimated that by the time a child turns 13, adtech companies hold 72 million data points on them. Our new report, released today, conservatively estimates that 820 million profiles of UK children are being broadcast via online advertising marketplaces every single day.

It’s an invasive and insidious practice, and it enables marketers to target us not just on hard data – our gender, age, location etc. – but also ‘inferred’ data, i.e. what we’re likely to be interested in. 

If that sounds harmless or even vaguely useful, consider what it means for 13-17 year olds to be served ads for weight loss pills, gambling sites, or dating apps based on their ‘likes’. These are all real examples.

Marketing has forever been the art of manufacturing desire – selling us things we never knew we wanted. But surveillance advertising turns it up to 11. Ads for things we searched for. Ads for things people the same age as us like. Ads for things people who have listened to the similar music on Spotify tend to like. Ads for people who use Macs and live in affluent postcodes. Rampant consumerism has never so efficiently injected into our neural pathway. 

Of course, this is all terrible for the planet. We can’t get anywhere near a Paris-consistent trajectory if we don’t face head on the fact that ours is an economy in which consumerism is actively encouraged. Eyeballs roll at just the mere mention of the word, but it remains mind-bendingly-bonkers that an economic and political system that compels citizens to produce, use and discard fast-moving consumer goods is accepted as The Way Things Are, to hell with the consequences.

It’s a dreadful system for any fans of an inhabitable earth. But it’s just as dreadful for people’s wellbeing. Day after day we are all told material products are the route to fulfilment and day after day we suffer the crushing realisation that they aren’t. We are permanently disappointed, having been set up to aspire to visions of ‘perfect’ lifestyles that are literally unattainable.

It’s the polar opposite of what humans actually need, summed up decades ago by the New Economics Foundation as the five ways to wellbeing. And it’s the very last thing that children and young people need, as they develop and explore the world around them.

Being pummelled with marketing content telling them to aspire to what GAP calls ‘junk values’ has been proven to increase materialism, which in turn is known to make people less happy, less socially minded, and less likely to protect and enhance the natural environment. 

Surveillance advertising isn’t the only reason we’re headed in the wrong direction re soaring consumption and plummeting wellbeing, but it’s a huge factor. 

That’s why GAP launched the Stop Targeted Advertising to Kids coalition, demanding that websites & apps popular with kids turn off surveillance advertising to under 18s.

The coalition is backed by powerful advocates: Amnesty International, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, Foxglove Legal, Friends of the Earth, the New Weather Institute, the New Economics Foundation, Open Rights Group, Privacy International, 5Rights Foundation and more.

And we’re not alone.

In recent months – particularly since the Capital riots of 6 January – more and more organisations have identified surveillance advertising as the thread weaving through a vast range of on- and offline harms.

Bipartisan support for banning surveillance advertising has sprung up among US lawmakers. High profile cases against YouTube and TikTok’s data practices regarding children could be just the tip of the iceberg.

But such is the wealth of Google, Facebook and other actors in the surveillance advertising economy, that even the biggest fines will likely be considered little more than the costs of doing business. 

That’s why it’s high time Governments stepped in. 

So today we’re publishing new research that demonstrates that the best way to protect children and teens from surveillance advertising is to get rid of it altogether, for everyone.

The UK Government’s draft ‘Online Safety Bill’ should be amended to do just that, we argue, or else it risks missing the single biggest opportunity to transform internet safety for children and simultaneously stem the flow of Paris-busting consumerism.

Oliver Hayes is policy and campaigns lead at Global Action Plan.