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