“Nobody's looking at you dear...” Governmentality Behind The Cookie Wall, Web Personalization as a Mechanism of Control.

Abstract

This paper explores the phenomenon of the usage of behavioral data, in the feld of digital marketing, this phenomenon is called personalization. It is argued that digital information and communication technologies provide marketeers with new tools to manage online traffc trough data informed persuasion techniques. Online personalization is conceived as an effect of management techniques, that are typical for the dominant paradigm of thinking about problematics of government, or management today, a paradigm Foucault called governmentality. This thesis investigates to what extent the use of behavioral data, in order to create what Kitchin & Martin call the capta shadow, in digital marketing can be seen as a form of control over individuals. Web personalization is fnally identifed as customer journey optimization, and reveals that individuals are in the frst place conceived of as instruments to manage conversions and capital. This complicates debates about the usage of behavioral data and privacy and shows the importance of raising user awareness when these techniques become more and more invisible when marketeers are going from using retargeting techniques for serving personalized banner to using them for generating dynamic websites.