The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Highlight

the spring of 2014, when an article in Advertising Age announced the company’s move into mobile advertising. Verizon’s VP of data marketing argued that such advertising had been limited by “addressability… the growing difficulty of tracking consumers as they move between devices.” As one marketing expert complained, “There isn’t a pervasive identity that tracks users from mobile applications and your mobile browser.” The article explained that Verizon had developed “a cookie alternative for a marketing space vexed by the absence of cookies.” Verizon aimed to solve advertisers’ tracking needs by assigning a hidden and undeletable tracking number, called a PrecisionID, to each Verizon user.