Madelyn Sanfilippo is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and book series editor for Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons. She is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.
I often see online advertisements recruiting me to participate in research studies for Sanfilippo Syndrome. Fortunately, I don’t have this rare genetic condition, it’s simply my last name. Just as often, I see ads for college degree programs and toys.
As a professor who studies privacy and technology policy, these ads make sense; systems know things about me, even if imperfectly. I’m not looking to go back to school, but I am a parent who buys lots of toys.
While many of us shrug at personalized ads — maybe even buying one of the many products or services tailored to our wants and needs — the truth is that targeted advertising is unnerving and inappropriate.
It is, after all, the result of surveillance capitalism, or very simply: a system that has every financial incentive to capture, save, and use as much data about us as possible at all times. People are data and data are a commodity. If this is true, we’re not just the users of technology, we’re also the used. Our identities are bought and sold, while we pay for that privilege.
And it’s about to get worse.
As generative artificial intelligence enters this system, we can and should expect to see more —more manipulation, more prediction (which can be both more unnerving and less accurate), and more biased ads.
Imagine ads promoting sales that are targeted to us based on race, or a vague guess what our race or ethnicity is based on stereotypes. Would it be OK for someone to pay more or less for the same items or services based on their race?
Think of the most manipulative ads you’ve ever seen, creating a false sense of urgency or promising incentives, but really including hidden costs. What if every advertisement you ever saw did this? We cannot simply accept this.
Broadly, practices of targeting and prediction around advertising are not new, but the recent evolution of generative AI and its rapid incorporation into advertising — in the past weeks, Google and Meta have rolled out products toward this end — pose new and real challenges.
Generative AI advertisements have the potential to scale even further, target more directly, and to adapt in real-time to increase clicks or purchases based on our behavior, context, and attributes.
Of course, many will see this as an exciting opportunity or the natural extension of the modern digital economy. However, this speaks to profits at the expense of the average person and is a major issue for consumer protection, or, as perhaps we ought to see it, protection of people.
We cannot wait to see the harm unfold and act in a panicked response to the inevitable discriminatory ads or dark patterns that will emerge, as they have from less sophisticated attempts to capture our attention and wallets.
As individuals, we can monitor our ad preferences on many platforms. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, all offer some user control or transparency — but this is not enough.
As a society, we need oversight to address these issues at scale. We need legislation like the bipartisan Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, introduced by U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Existing consumer protection infrastructure is overcommitted and scant on the necessary technical expertise to evaluate concerns and new uses of AI, like advertising. This proposal will create a new federal agency, bringing together experts who can address privacy concerns, deceptive pricing, and bias due to AI and data brokers in advertising — without putting the burden on us to protect ourselves.
People are not merely users. People are not merely consumers. We are citizens. We are parents and children and sisters and brothers. We are friends. By reducing us to users and consumers, we are less real. If we are data in this discussion, dehumanized and abstracted, it almost becomes a problem of math, which tends to both make people less interested and more accepting of the objectivity of the practices.
When privacy comes up in popular culture, it often focuses on social media alone or perhaps a tradeoff with security in discussion of government surveillance. It’s rarely about advertising, but it needs to be.




















U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One on August 14, 2026 at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Trump is traveling to Long Island to tour law enforcement facilities in Nassau County and rally support for local Republican candidates ahead of the upcoming midterm elections
Travel Far Enough, You Meet Yourself
Is it possible that our President has simply not traveled enough?
Born and raised in Queens and attending Fordham University in the Bronx, Donald Trump has no record of traveling outside New York until he was over 20, when he transferred to a college in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania. Were his formative years amiss, then, in his learning about other places and other people?
Is his view akin to the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg, an illustration of the United States with New York City as the epicenter of the country and the Hudson River the border of the known world? We can now at least add Washington, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago to the map of “the realm.”
Our President has now traveled some, but what we recommend is another kind of travel. Not a state-sponsored trip or a venture to scout locations for future Trump Towers. This would be a genuine travel experience, enriching and eye-opening, showcasing other cultures and ways of living.
It will extend far beyond viewing military parades, hobnobbing with such “understanding” world leaders as Kim Jong Un, or taking tea with the King.
WHERE, then, should the President go? As Elon Musk’s Starship spacecraft is not yet ready to take passengers to Mars, perhaps he could explore our own vast country?
Maybe he could travel to “flyover country,” the farming states, where his ying-yanging tariffs and trade restrictions have played havoc with rural economies. Or possibly to California, number one in homeless U. S. citizens, and while there, regale homeless veterans (approximately 32,500 nationwide) with tales of his brave exploits invading and bombing foreign countries.
Or he might tour the Great Lakes, and rename the other four?
WHEN should he go? This will be tough, as he is very busy building his ballroom and renaming bodies of water.
How about a trip in early November, around the midterm elections? Despite the long-discredited accusation of widespread voter fraud, it would be reassuring to know he might be so caught up divvying out ladles of soup in a soup kitchen somewhere that he wouldn’t remember to deploy the military for “election security.”
HOW will he travel? He should definitely not take his Qatari-donated, newly renovated 747, especially after last time, when he had to be smuggled off clandestinely in a catering truck. It’s unlikely any traveling companions, like the Secretary of State or of the Treasury, are going to fall for the ruse a second time. Besides, we may need those people. No more decoys!
Perhaps the President could fly commercially, although this likely would expose him to undue suffering. Without gold bathroom fixtures and maple wood floors, the trip will be no “Luxury Experience.” If only he still had his “Trump Shuttle,” bought with a massive loan he later defaulted on, saying then, “I’m smart. I got out at a good time.”
Considering the potential pitfalls, maybe it’s best the President travel incognito, disguised perhaps as an elderly woman wearing a lot of bronzer.
Wherever, whenever, however: our President needs a vacation.
Moreover, we need a vacation from him.
If the President refuses our travel suggestions, here’s another idea:
Let’s get him a pet! He has never owned a pet. As we know with our children, pets teach essential life lessons: compassion and empathy; they instill a sense of responsibility. There is a well-established connection between those who can care for a pet and those who can care for people.
So, which pet should we choose? A puppy? A kitten? A boa constrictor?
Imagine, the President may even decide he likes having a pet. After all, what is more obedient than a well-trained dog, besides possibly the Cabinet? And what is more docile than a sweet kitten, other than plausibly the Supreme Court?
The President may even become more mellow with a pet afoot and less likely to slap tariffs on our allies, or attempt to annex our neighbors, or bully our Congress. (Realizing, of course, a bully requires active participation from the bullied to maintain his status.)
Maybe we should do both: get the President a pet and devise a travel plan for him. (Do you think we could possibly convince him to leave his phone at home?)
Let’s go for it! After all:
Travel far enough, you meet yourself. (David Mitchell)
And for our President, that would likely be the most profound discovery of all.
Amy Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."