Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, made headlines last week for another controversial interview, this time on the Armcahir Expert podcast. Harry spoke about his wild days in Vegas, life as a soldier and even about his relationship with father Charles. But it was his brief summation of the ad tech ecosystem and the development of targeted ads that has really got people talking (at least in B&T‘s opinion!). You can read his full – albeit brief – spiel here.
“Advertising has been going on for hundreds of years, but done really responsibly. The difference here is targeted ads. If ads have always worked for companies – you can put it on the TV and walk away and come back – your involvement is switching on, switching off or changing the channel,” he said.
“Whereas now with algorithms, it’s there, it’s feeding your habits and it’s also reading through your emails and everything else.
“It gets to know you and the decisions you make before you make them and then it creates this echo chamber of no pushback, no context, no nothing.
“It’s just perpetuating and feeding the bias that you already have inside of you, which is terrible.”
“At the moment, they [tech giants] get to wash their hands of responsibility, because [they say] ‘it’s not human error, it’s a computer’… but who wrote the algorithms? You guys did. Probably all male and all white.”
