I had no idea - but now I know

Have we sacrificed our privacy on the altar of convenience and personalized experiences?

I’ve had this nagging, curious worry about ads, tracking, and their impact on my life. You might know by now that the silent monitoring of everything you do is managed through AI software, but have we fully considered the cost?

What is really happening with all this personalization of ads, with tracking technologies like cookies, pixels, and AI programs running 24/7, doing behavioral and predictive analytics? How important is it for me—or for any of us, really—to allow AI to predict the products or services we might be interested in, so advertisers can deliver ads tailored to our whims and clicks? Is this personalization a convenience, or is it simply a soft invasion?

What got me thinking about this was the overwhelming flood of political texts and emails as the election looms. For the sake of my own sanity, I sent a STOP message or an unsubscribe email to every text and email list I had been added to—whether by my doing or from some unknown source. I also took the time to turn off most of the notifications on my phone, including all the Substack newsletters. I did the same for the news sources I subscribe to. Honestly, I should have done it sooner. The sense of relief and peace that followed was immediate.

So I decided to run a little experiment to understand how I was being tracked. I turned on the Bitdefender VPN that I normally use when I travel, but this time, I left it on. Why not, I thought, let’s see what happens. Over the course of October, I’ve kept it running about 90% of the time.

Even during the time it’s taken me to write this article the numbers have increased (for the month of October).

The result? Watching the cumulative number of trackers and ads blocked—into the tens of thousands—made me wonder: why do these companies need to track so much? The answer, as always, is marketing, but the scale of it feels unsettling. It’s one thing to suspect you’re being watched; it’s another to see the numbers climb like a dashboard gauge ticking towards the red.

Many of us in the U.S. fail to grasp that all this AI—these algorithms—are working tirelessly in the background with one main purpose: to sell us stuff. We’re handing over every minuscule piece of data about ourselves, 24/7: our location, our browsing habits, the apps we use on our devices. Unless you’re a shopaholic, there’s little benefit to you in this deal. So, my bottom line? Use a VPN.

What about AI control of social media websites?

AI algorithms are everywhere, filtering and controlling what you see, especially on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, and Netflix and all the rest. They collect mountains of data on user behavior—what’s called “signal”—to predict and prioritize the content we’re most likely to engage with. This “signal” data isn’t just about your preferences; it’s about your patterns. How many times have you listened to that one band? Rated that one movie?

In part two of this mini-series, I’ll dive deeper into how these companies use algorithms to filter and control. But for now, let’s ask a bigger question: Why do they do this? The answer is money. The top earners are Google and Facebook. Unless you own stock in these giants, what are you gaining in return for giving up your personal data—day in, day out?

A way out of the matrix

A quick history lesson might help frame this. Back in the early 2000s, a technology emerged that allowed people to get exactly the content they wanted, and only that. It was point-to-point, no filler, no extras. This was called RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndications: a standardized system for the distribution of content from an online publisher. It’s free.

I’ll explain more in the next article, but here’s the point: RSS wasn’t conducive to delivering ads. It was too good at avoiding them. Websites slowly moved away from it because it didn’t drive clicks back to them. Ad-driven revenue models couldn’t thrive in a world where people controlled what they consumed. Doesn’t this tell you something?

The good news is you can still use RSS feeds to monitor your Facebook page and most other social media sites. I started using an RSS reader customized with the RSS feeds from Substack and other key news sources I like to monitor. I find it less stressful and I am more engaged with the content. There are no ads.

I’m not against businesses running ads and making money. I understand the need. But as I watch the invisible mechanisms at work behind the scenes, I can’t help but feel that somewhere along the way, we’ve all been hoodwinked. Hoodwinked into believing this is all for our convenience, when it’s more about control.

Yes, the convenience is undeniable, but the question lingers: when did we become the product, more valuable for our data than for our conscious choices? It’s time to unsubscribe and unplug where possible, if only to remember what it’s like to choose without being chosen for.

Suggestion

Start using a VPN on your desktop, laptop and phone. At least run a test with a free trial. Watch and learn. VPNs are not perfect, they sometime hang up. I am not affiliated with Bitdefender; it’s just what I use for now. I’m considering moving to ProtonVPN. Find one, turn it on, look for the panel that shows you the number of Ads and Trackers blocked and be amazed as you move from one website to the next and from any social media website to the next. The numbers will astound you.

Tom