The Big-Tech Backlash Is Coming for Digital Advertising in Travel
Skift Take
If — or when — a backlash comes, it would upend the business models of a wide swath of travel industry companies. It would also put many businesses specializing in surveillance of consumers at risk.
Momentum is building for what could become one of the biggest disruptions to the way that the travel industry — and other businesses across the corporate spectrum — market and advertise their products and services.
That is to say that what some call the surveillance economy, or surveillance capitalism, meaning the penchant for corporations to track internet users across the Web, in their homes, and on their commutes in order to retarget them and monetize the data with unrelenting advertising, could be taken down a peg.
The rumblings are everywhere, although the endgame is far from assured.
Consider that in the last few days, Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners, former mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, appeared on CNN and called for overturning the practices and business models of companies as far ranging as Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube and Snap, among others.
Likening these companies to chemical corporations that were forced to pay for the cleanup of the environmental catastrophes they created, McNamee argued that the big platform companies need to pay for the damages they do to users from disseminating political misinformation to trampling on privacy rights.
Elevation Partners Co-founder Roger McNamee Is Speaking at Skift Tech Forum.
