[Commlist] New book: Profit over Privacy

We would like to announce a new publication from the University of 
Minnesota Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Profit over Privacy*

How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet

*Matthew Crain***

https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517905057/profit-over-privacy/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517905057/profit-over-privacy/>

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*CSLF2021*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30^th June 2022. Discount only applies to the 
CAP website.


*A deep dive into the political roots of advertising on the internet*

The contemporary internet’s de facto business model is one of 
surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets 
us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and 
analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In /Profit over 
Privacy/, Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin 
story by chronicling the development of its most important historical 
catalyst: web advertising.

The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, 
/Profit over Privacy /uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the 
massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet 
today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political 
economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences 
of the internet’s rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how 
advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the 
internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous 
business model called “surveillance advertising.” He draws on a range of 
primary resources from government, industry, and the press and 
highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the 
necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial 
surveillance.

The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is 
the result of political choices—not the inevitable march of technology. 
Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy 
law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google 
and Facebook, /Profit over Privacy/ argues that the internet did not 
have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

*Matthew Crain*is assistant professor of media and communication at 
Miami University.

*University of Minnesota Press | September 2021 | 216pp | 9781517905057 
| PB | £18.99**

*Price subject to change.

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