Medical ad targeting fails are a problem.

As much as we look at the Cyberpunk genre as a "what could happen", the truth is, we're already in a cyberpunk dystopia right fucking now.

It seems like a lifetime ago, but in reality it has been less than 10 years since I worked in the media and advertising industry directly. That's right: I was a corporate slave, propping up the very machine I hate, just trying to survive in this fucked up corporatocracy.

I worked for multiple media companies that owned a plethora each of properties in television, radio, print and internet all over the US, and my final years were spent in the "interactive" corporate division of one of those media companies.

I myself build ads and websites, and also maintained our ticket (build & deploy) order system codebase so artists got the requests for designs, and the traficking department got the orders for ad deliveries.

This - along with the usual corporate rah-rah meetings sharing what exciting new things we're doing to get advertisers' shitty products in front of people in shitty ways - is how I became familiar with a lot of the methods used in targeted avertising.

There's a lot of scary shit that's old hat now; I remember one piece of tech that I got to dig a bit into that was basically a hidden sensor that advertisers would place throughout their stores. These sensors would talk back and forth with hidden functionality within either our mobile apps, or the advertisers own apps (in both cases on the users' goddamned phone), to track folks as they walk through the store.. And then send them special offers directly related to whatever product they were standing in front of at that fucking time.

The thing is, all this targeting tech doesn't quite fucking work like it should, in practice.

Case in point, and what prompted this rant:

I don't fucking have hemophilia, so stop serving me ads for hemophilia medication.

What's worse is that there have been instances where ads have known serious medical facts about visitors and then delivered targeted ads to said visitor's family..

So, with this sort of pre-cog like behavior, many people may be wondering..

.."Do I have fucking hemophilia?!"

The more we rely on the seemingly-black-box technology, and the more users are told to "trust the tech", the more problems we'll see.

"But Will, how do you know you don't have hemophilia?"

Do you realize how many times I get diagnostically stabbed? How many labs I get drawn? How much I have to be very fucking aware of my own healthcare just to advocate for myself?

Hint: The scale is well beyond what most folks understand.

So, no. I know for a fact that I don't have hemophilia, nor does Jess, and we're the only ones on our network (and yes, I fucking checked).