Direct marketization: Platform surveillance and the contextual integrity of democratic media

This essay uses the theory of privacy as contextual integrity together with critical research on the role of media in democracies to critique platform surveillance and a related process that I call direct marketization. It focuses on the case of advertising attribution, a paradigm of audience and marketing measurement that attempts to determine advertising effectiveness by observing people as both media audiences and marketplace consumers. Advertising platforms have recently promised to implement ‘privacy-preserving’ methods of attribution measurement. The paper argues that these efforts to legitimize attribution make implicit claims about the values and purposes of media systems. It then introduces the concept of direct marketization to explain how these claims relate to shifts in the social and institutional norms of ad-supported media. The analysis exposes direct marketization and advertising attribution, which both fuel and depend on platform surveillance, as contradictory to the contextual integrity of democratic media.