section_path: Internet/Advertising
section_name: Advertising
paragraph_text: Advertising
  
  The Internet has become a significant medium for advertising, with digital marketing making up approximately half of the global ad spending in 2019. While websites are still able to sell advertising space without tracking, including via contextual advertising, digital ad brokers such as Facebook and Google have instead encouraged the practice of behavioral advertising, providing code snippets used by website owners to track their users via HTTP cookies. This tracking data is also sold to other third parties as part of the mass surveillance industry. Since the introduction of mobile phones, data brokers have also been planted within apps, resulting in a $350 billion digital industry especially focused on mobile devices.
  
  Digital privacy has become the main source of concern for many mobile users, especially with the rise of privacy scandals such as the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Apple has received some reactions for features that prohibit advertisers from tracking a user's data without their consent. Google attempted to introduce an alternative to cookies named FLoC which it claimed reduced the privacy harms, but it later retracted the proposal due to antitrust probes and analyses that contradicted their claims of privacy.