This confronted me in the waiting room.

Bob Sullivan

It’s almost like they want you to be sick…

I went for a relatively routine cardiovascular screening the other day, and I’ve never hated social media more. Before I even walked into the exam room, I was pounded by ads telling me the test I was taking wasn’t good enough (But there is this other test…); the drugs I might be taking wouldn’t work (But here’s a rare supplement pill …); and the things I was doing woudn’t make me healthier (you know what will? Droping all social media).

The ad cluster above is a tiny fraction of the digital attack I suffered in the days around my doctor visit.  I didn’t capture them all, I was busy, trying to get healthy. My smartphone did not help. The digital surveillance I was subjected to just made me furious, and I know my case is tame.  There are endless stories about cruel baby ads that follow around women after a miscarriage, for example.

The thing is, I’m a technology reporter who specializes in privacy.  I’m a visiting scholar at Duke University where I work on research around privacy.  I use social media for work; I believe I have to.  And I’ve tried my best to defend my accounts against just this kind of attack without completely locking them down (at which point, they are no longer social media).  I just checked — I have unchecked “share my information with our partners” and every other such option wherever it can be found.  I’ve even banned weight loss ads from my feed, which is a fascinating stand-alone option. So is Meta’s tsk tsking of my prudish choices – “No, don’t make my ads more relevant…your ads will use less of your information and be more likely to apply to other people.”

Sounds like a dream.

Here’s why I am so repulsed by this. Meta/Facebook/Instagram knew exactly where I was and what I was doing.  But it didn’t just show me relevant ads.  It knew I’d be vulnerable. It knew I might get bad news. And then it targeted me with crazy, untested products that would probably make me sicker. It’s vile and it needs to stop.  This isn’t capitalism and it isn’t free speech. It’s using technology to attack people when they are nearly defenseless.

How did Instagram know what I was doing? Well, in theory, it could have just made an educated guess based on my age.  More likely it had noted some Internet searches I’d made recently, perhaps had access to some kind of “de-identigied” information in my email or my calendar tool, and perhaps it made some deductions from my smartphone’s location information.  I don’t know. What I do know is that I spent a good long while in the waiting room clicking through menus trying to get those ads to disappear. And I failed.

Yes, I didn’t have to look at Instagram while in the waiting room, but I would have been the only one in the waiting room not staring at a Smartphone. What else do you do when waiting for a health test? Those rooms are already crammed with anxious energy unlike anything humans ever experience elsewhere — souls of all ages facing everything from routine tests to a final exam which quite literally might mean life or death to them.  It is no place to practice surveillance capitalism.

Targeted health advertising is dangerous, social media companies. Turning it off should be easy.  Congress, hurry up and make them do that with a federal privacy law.