[mindslight]

IMO it's easier to just call them "surveillance companies" and be done with it. Regardless of whether they're collecting, storing, or processing surveillance data, they're all in the same business as Equifax, Google, Lexis-Nexis, and NSA.

[morelisp]

I don't think it's useful for analysis or activism to group Equifax, Google, the NSA, the New York Times, Humble Bundle, Twitter, Airbnb, Walgreens, etc. under a single term. The flattening of this mess down into "adtech" is how most of them have avoided scrutiny, and relabeling that "surveillance" doesn't make the relationships between them any clearer.

[mindslight]

Like all paradigms, it makes some things clearer and other things less clear. This one helps me keep my head straight about easy to ignore aspects of my relationship with the ones that would otherwise appear as being tamer, especially for instance Google.

The ones that seem out of place on your list are because their main business is something other than surveillance. Saying that Walgreens "patronizes the surveillance industry" does make more sense than labeling the whole company as doing that one thing. Although labeling the marketing group requesting all the trackers be added to their website as the "surveillance department" makes sense.

I think "surveillance" is a much better term than "ad" because the latter seems like just some harmless annoyance in line with American business values, whereas the former more accurately captures that the systems these companies are building are offenses against freedom and humanity.