If you feel like Internet ads are more pervasive and invasive than ever before, you’re not alone. Author Tim Wu tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the Web has gotten worse over the years, not better — and unrelenting ads are to blame.

“I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems,” Wu says. “It’s amazing that we’ve got this great scientific invention, the Web and the Internet, and then it has come to the point where using it reminds me of swatting mosquitoes.”

As a professor at Columbia Law School, Wu became known as an open Internet advocate who is credited with coining the term “net neutrality.” His new book, The Attention Merchants, examines how advertising has changed the Internet — and how those changes affect us.

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Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. His previous books include The Master Switch and Network Neutrality. Mikiko Hayashi/ Deckle Edge hide caption

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Mikiko Hayashi/ Deckle Edge

He says the book was inspired by his own experience of sitting down to look something up on the computer and finding, four hours later, that he had slid into a world of digital distraction. “It’s what I call the casino effect,” Wu says. “It’s this effort of the environment to make you lose control of your sense of time and your attention kind of gets dragged away.”

Wu points out that much of the “free” content on the Internet comes at a price to users, who are subjected to ads that are targeted specifically at them and which are increasingly difficult to ignore or close. “Google, Facebook, Twitter — the whole set of companies essentially knows all your weaknesses and essentially how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do,” he says.

Wu says that although the Internet is full of “clickbait that brings ads along like a bad cold,” it doesn’t have to be that way. “We can have a better Web,” he says. “Whether it’s a combination of subscription models or nonprofit models, I would like to have a Web that we feel proud of, that lives up to its promise.”

Interview Highlights

On the quest for clicks

It’s inherent to the business model. It’s very driven with the need to grow, to get more clicks and clicks and clicks. And some of this book is about the history, and we often say that ratings kind of ruined television in the 1950s, well, the quest for ratings looks dignified in comparison to the quest for clicks.

So much engineering talent and ability has gone into trying to make people click on things that I think we’ve almost lost the last five years of development. It’s been very disappointing.

On how we are used to content being free

It’s a bargain with some historical precedent. I think back starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads. …

This attention-merchant model has spread to so many areas of our life, where we’re completely used to everything being free. But then the payoff, or the exchange, is that then we also agree to stuff that is compromised, because it is always trying to get us to click on ads at the same time. So we have this bargain that we made — and you can call it Faustian, you can call it whatever you want — that we have decided that we have to have everything for free, and I think we’re starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.

On the price of “free” Internet content

If you really want change in this area, and you want to act, you probably have to pay for stuff, pay for content. Some people are like, “Oh my God I have to pay?” But people do pay. They pay for Netflix, they pay for HBO, they pay for other types — they subscribe to newspapers sometimes.

Generally speaking, when you pay for stuff it has more of your interests at heart. … In other words, a lot of the websites are always serving two masters, they’re both trying to get you entertained enough to stay there, or to click on things, but to also then make it a good platform for advertising. So I have sort of a plea to people who want to change these sort of things is, like, maybe just suck it up and start paying for more stuff.

On the pervasiveness of Internet advertising

In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries, we had spaces that ads didn’t leave, they stayed where they were on the page, they didn’t float around over the text, and we’re sort of lost on the Internet.

We don’t have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent, and so advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It doesn’t have any natural limit, and we haven’t found a place for the limit.

On Google’s approach to advertising

I think Google is the most profitable attention merchant in the history of the world. … They started a very idealistic beautiful company in many ways, but they didn’t have a business model.

The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising and in fact, they wrote this paper in the ’90s, saying in its appendix that any advertising-based search engine would always be corrupted and unable to serve its highest purposes, because advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid to be there.

Google is this conflicted company. I think they thought they could do this deal and keep advertising at bay, but I think year in, year out Google is starting to get worse instead of better. … You can see it with Google Maps, you can see it with Google Directions where somehow Uber is always one of the options, and it’s becoming exactly what they said was what they never wanted, which is a pay-for service where the highest bidder gets the best results. So it’s kind of a cautionary tale.

I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.

On how advertisers can use technology to target individual “moments”

I think this is going to become more intense in the coming decade as we start to carry more and more technology with us. We already have our phones, but other wearables and those technologies are going to want to know when you’re deciding things and then offer some kind of input, subtle or less so, on that moment.

So you know, discovering the moment: Let’s say you’re someone’s phone and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is, which happens to have paid whoever makes your phone, at the right moment. … We are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don’t have that already.

On how Facebook “likes” help advertisers

Every time you click on a “like” button on another site, you’ve told Facebook that you’re doing that, and so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is. When you decide to “like” something you may feel you’re innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you’re delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that you essentially like to be advertised to by this company.

It’s so funny that the Internet has become a series of traps where you do innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference — “I like this thing” — and therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences. That’s what you’re doing, you’re signaling who you are as a consumer.

On what can happen when Internet companies know intimate details about individuals

I’m concerned with our autonomy. … I particularly don’t like it when it’s used to exploit your weaknesses or make you lose control in some ways — so it’s like advertising casinos to people who have gambling problems, or just things that are too sensitive — if you have a disease and suddenly you started getting ads for cures for that disease, it’s an embarrassing disease. All that kind of stuff, it just gets into that zone of autonomy or privacy where you feel a sense of freedom to be who you want to be, and I’m afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring, because you’re afraid to express yourself.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Law enforcement is increasingly worried about losing access to powerful tools for searching social media because of changing attitudes at the social media companies that allow the searches.

Earlier this week, Facebook and Twitter restricted the bulk data access to users’ information for a company called Geofeedia, after the ACLU of Northern California published a report revealing that Geofeedia had suggested to police departments that they could use the service to track protests.

Social media monitoring services such as Geofeedia rely on bulk data access to be able to search far larger volumes of social media posts, and more efficiently, than the average user. It’s the kind of large-scale social media analysis that’s mainly used by commercial clients, such as marketers, but which has also been sold to law enforcement agencies.

The social media posts being scanned are public, but the ACLU’s Nicole Ozer says the practice is still an invasion of privacy, because of the sheer scale.

“Many of these police departments are actually surveilling entire communities,” Ozer says. That’s a reference to the services’ ability to pinpoint social media posts by location — although most people don’t enable location tagging on their social media, and wouldn’t be subject to this kind of “geo-fencing.”

Still, services such as Geofeedia can comb through and analyze vast numbers of public social media posts, which can sometimes allow police to track someone down, even if that person isn’t visible online.

Recently, police in Texas used social media to locate a teenage girl who had run away after stealing her father’s handgun and car, says Nick Selby, a police detective there.

“What we had to do is look for her in the traffic of other people talking with her or about her,” Selby says.

Signs of restricting access

It’s easier to cast a wide net like that with a social media monitoring service such as Geofeedia. But in recent months, these tools have become less available to police.

Twitter, in particular, appears to be getting more restrictive. Not only did it cut off Geofeedia’s access to bulk data following the ACLU report, earlier this year it quietly cut off data to another company, Dataminr, because it provided deep searches of public Twitter feeds to U.S. intelligence agencies.

The same thing may now be happening to companies that provide searches to law enforcement. Selby, the detective in Texas, says the change has affected the social media search abilities at his disposal.

“I have had to re-work tools to emulate the [bulk data stream] from Twitter, and scrape the public Twitter feeds of people of interest because we can no longer buy this from a lot of the vendors who used to have it,” he says.

A spokesman for Twitter would not say whether the company has changed its policy toward searches by law enforcement; in an email, a spokesman pointed NPR to the company’s guidelines for developers (that is, companies such as Geofeedia that use Twitter data). The guidelines bar search companies from allowing law enforcement agencies to use the data to “investigate, track or surveil Twitter’s users (…) in a manner that would require a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process or that would otherwise have the potential to be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.”

But that policy is very much open to interpretation, because police don’t usually need legal orders to search public social media, and it’s arguable whether such searches violate users’ “expectation of privacy.”

The ACLU’s Ozer believes it does, and that privacy laws need to catch up.

“There’s a difference between posting something online, and thinking that that information is going to end up in a huge database that the police are going to be able to search through at any time for any reason,” Ozer says.

Tide turns amid fears of surveillance

If Twitter has decided to cut off law enforcement, it would represent a dramatic change. In recent years, several data analytics companies have openly marketed Twitter-based search tools to law enforcement, with no complaints from the social media company itself — at least, not in public.

Now some people inside policing believe the climate has turned against them. A few departments have tried to address fears of surveillance by establishing internal rules to make sure officers don’t search social media “at any time for any reason,” as Ozer put it.

The police department in Dunwoody, Ga., for instance, requires officers to get their social media searches approved ahead of time by a supervisor.

“So you can’t target particular groups, or classes of people, or different ideologies,” says Chief Billy Grogan.

But rules like this have been slow to catch on. Most police departments don’t restrict social media searches, in part because it doesn’t occur to police that they shouldn’t be searching public data the same way a marketing company does.

That freedom may now be at risk, as companies such as Twitter feel pressure from activist groups such as the ACLU to turn off the data tap.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)