Thank you, University of Chicago Press, for providing this book for a voluntary review via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

In The Problem With Personalization Joseph Turow provides a comprehensive history of targeted advertising and how it has evolved since Roman times to today. He convincingly shows that the end goal of ads is to sell something, oftentimes to the detriment of the consumer in ways that erode privacy, social structures, and democracy. Turow starts with the period prior to the rise of industrial marketing in the nineteenth century and ends with today's increasingly sophisticated targeting and personalization techniques based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Turow covers the development of department stores and chain stores, the rise of radio and television and the techniques used to track the corresponding audience (e.g., Nielsen ratings), the emergence of mailing lists, coupons and direct marketing, the use of internet cookies and barcodes, how mobile phones, starting with Apple's iPhone and HTC's Dream, enabled a whole new level of personalization, the details of how Google and Meta use their platforms to track user's preferences, habits, and activities, and the impact artificial intelligence and machine learning (via supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning) is already having on targeted advertising.

Turow closes with a discussion on how governments have (and haven't) addressed privacy issues for their citizens and provides a list of recommendations to enable consumers to retain their privacy. He justly raises concerns about how extreme personalization impacts the reality each individual sees, which can prevent society to come to a shared understanding to learn what is necessary to keep the society going. Ultimately, our democracy suffers, which is why the topic of personalization and where it is headed is of utmost importance to our collective good.

I highly recommend The Problem with Personalization to all as a wake-up call since in today's internet-connected world essentially no one is immune to personalized advertising and its negative impact on society. Thank you, Joseph Turow, for the educational and eye-opening read.