One of the problems with microtargeted ads, and a way I’ve been thinking about them recently, is they resemble the tranched subprime mortgages that brought about the financial crash.

Others have talked about this in the context of the digital ad market as a whole. The allure of digital ads was that you would finally be able to assess impact. The reality is complexity, fraud, and snake oil hand-waving have made the impact of advertising more opaque than ever.

In the political realm, it’s even worse. We talk about whether the ads in there are on the whole beneficial or not beneficial, lies or truth, but the debate itself presumes that even an entity like Facebook has any real idea what’s in there. And they don’t. They can’t. And so as microtargeting proliferates we’re left with the pre-2008 cognitive dissonance we had around subprime: surely someone must know what’s going on under the hood! We wouldn’t really entrust vital social functions to something this opaque, this prone to fraud, this reliant on faith in untested equations, right?

There’s the question of what public policy should be for Facebook, and there can be disagreement on that. But table stakes for that discussion is that public policy be possible, and it’s just not clear to me that it can be the way the system is currently designed.