How Adtech Facilitates the Misuse of Consumer Personal Data

Adtech Summary and Ethical Issues

One of the harsh realities of innovations in digital technologies is the fact that it is possible to use them to either benefit or potentially harm consumers depending on how they are used. This is certainly the case with adtech, a technological innovation that facilitates location-specific marketing but also allows law enforcement authorities to monitor the whereabouts of consumers for other purposes, including surveillance and interdiction. Taken together, it is clear that adtech represents yet another dual-edged technological innovation. To determine the facts, the purpose of this paper is to review the literature to provide a description of adtech and why it presents such an ethical gray area. Following this review, the paper presents a summary of the research and significant findings concerning adtech and its implications for the future.

Review and Discussion

Advertising technology or “adtech” is an umbrella term that is used to refer to a wide array of digital tools that are used by software advertisers to reach specifically targeted consumers and to evaluate the effectiveness of digital advertising initiatives. Some of the common tools that are used in adtech applications include demand-side platforms which are used to purchase various types of digital advertisements such as videos and mobile apps (What is adtech and why is it important?, 2022). This description suggests that adtech is a comparatively benign technology that benefits consumers by providing them with location-specific information about where they can find what they are looking for and marketers who also want to sell them something, but there is more involved in the adtech calculus than just advertising. In this regard, Archbold et al. (2021) report that, “The advertising technology industry, known as 'adtech', is a complicated network of organizations and individuals that collect, aggregate and deal with large amounts of personal data” (p. 857).

Even technologically savvy adult consumers may not fully understand or even realize the manner in which marketers seek to leverage adtech tools to increase their sales by using personal data, and children in particular are vulnerable to these marketing tools. For example, Archbold and his colleagues add that, “As children engage with digital networks for many aspects of their lives, they are increasingly exposed to adtech practices” (p. 858). Likewise, unscrupulous marketers can use adtech tools to promote spurious claims commonly known as “fake news” by hoax publishers (Braun & Eklund, 2019).

These unsettling trends indicate that the conventional use of digital consent strategies by adtech is a threat to young consumers in particular, but there are other ethical gray areas concerning its use. Further and notwithstanding the assurances that are provided by online marketers concerning the limited uses of any personal data shared by consumers, the use of consumers’ persona data is routinely expanded beyond its stated usages in ways that diminish trust levels between marketers and consumers. As Shapiro (2020) emphasizes, “Agencies face huge margin challenges to compensate for the heavy adtech tax that cut directly into their profits. In response, they arbitrage across the adtech supply chain without transparency to their clients, creating a host of ethical issues” (para. 3).

Conclusion

Just as a hammer in the wrong hands can wreak mayhem and destruction, the tools in the adtech repertoire are capable of performing in ways that are legitimate and ethical, but they are also capable to misuse by marketers and even law enforcement authorities. These considerations mean that the consent precautions that are typically used by consumers in evaluating the trustworthiness of digital marketing may fail to take into account the full range of unknown and potentially unauthorized uses that adtech provides digital marketers and others.