“There’s an anecdote that a glitch with Facebook led to ads no longer being targeted over a period of several weeks. And absolutely nobody noticed because the metrics all looked normal, the engagement and purchasing was just the same.”
Facebook has had her birth date for 15 years and still serves her events for under-30s in a city she doesn’t live in. Google watched her buy a mattress and keeps selling her the same mattress. Clients ask for a six-person audience, balk at £20 a head, then widen it to half a million at 20p. The surveillance is real. The targeting it pays for is a fairy tale.