Privacy advocates fear AOL's ad technologies will allow Verizon to better track users across devices
Brendan Sasso / National Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This warning lands five months after Verizon's mobile 'supercookies' were flagged as a privacy threat, when the carrier was already inserting undeletable tracking identifiers into its wireless customers' traffic. Privacy advocates now argue the bigger risk is what happens when those identifiers meet an actual ad business: AOL's ad technologies could let Verizon follow users across devices, not just across pages on its own network.
The concern proved directional rather than hypothetical. Within months Verizon moved to fuse the two systems outright, and Tim Armstrong was shopping a plan for Verizon to buy Yahoo and build an ad empire aimed squarely at Google and Facebook.
First-order effects
- Verizon's wireless subscribers become trackable across devices through AOL's ad stack, combining carrier-level network data with ad-network profiling — exactly the combination privacy advocates are flagging.
Second-order effects
- The logic pushes Verizon toward consolidation: the later merger of its supercookies with AOL's ad network and the Armstrong-led plan to acquire Yahoo both follow from turning a telecom's customer data into an ad-targeting asset.
Third-order effects
- If carriers can monetize network-level data through owned ad platforms faster than regulators constrain it — the pattern The Verge later described as an 'impotent FCC' in its ad-tracking-giant analysis — telecoms become structural competitors to Google and Facebook, with consumer consent as the open regulatory question.
The trend: Wireless carriers are converting proprietary network data into programmatic-advertising assets, putting them on a collision course with the Google-Facebook duopoly and with privacy regulators.