Online advertising was supposed to connect brands with interested customers. Instead, it became a surveillance machine, tracking users across the web, hoarding personal data, and running on metrics that are trivially faked and nearly impossible to audit. Advertisers pay for phantom clicks. Publishers lose revenue to fraud. Users get stalked by ads for products they browsed once, three years ago. The industry's response? More tracking, more fingerprinting, more opaque middlemen. Privacy soluti...

Online advertising was supposed to connect brands with interested customers. Instead, it became a surveillance machine, tracking users across the web, hoarding personal data, and running on metrics that are trivially faked and nearly impossible to audit. Advertisers pay for phantom clicks. Publishers lose revenue to fraud. Users get stalked by ads for products they browsed once, three years ago. The industry's response? More tracking, more fingerprinting, more opaque middlemen. Privacy soluti...