Excellent work. I had not thought about this and appreciate the pressure The Stranger is putting on tech companies to operate with the standards we have put on so many of their competitors. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

great piece, thanks eli. good to have you back on 11th

To do this would likely cost more in overhead than the ad revenue generated. That would force online content to deny all political advertising in Seattle. That might not be a bad idea, but it does raise questions around free speech and the 1st Amendment.

How long will it take our local stations not to exist now that they aren't required federally? Or did that not pass through... Can't find the article about it now. Either way I'm sure these FCC regulations will be disappearing as fast as Ajit Pai can make them. Glad we have at least some state/city laws in place.

@3 I'm assuming you've maybe never coded on a computer, or worked on one before... maintaining these records would not have a large overhead cost, not even remotely. These companies are not skating a line, they mostly have lots of money off-shore. They can afford one guy to set up a database.

Bonkers.

@3:

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. All that's required to comply is to put physical copies of records of recording sessions (if the entity physically produced the spot) or ad buys into a manila file folder (such as those depicted) and stored in a location where members of the public can be given access. Most traditional media outlets simply put them in a file cabinet adjacent to their front reception desk; there is literally no significant "overhead" involved.

@5 and 6, Eli is asking for targeting data that includes markers that determine demographic and geographic location. That would require updating every time you tweek an algorithm and exposing your IP to the broader world. People who really work on these types of complex systems understand the complexity involved, though there may be ways to mitigate\simplify via legislation.

Do Facebook and Google sell ads geo-targeted to "Seattle"? Those can easily be found. But if an advertiser targeted Seattle voters through, say, "lives in the state of WA and liberal donor and pays more than $X in property tax" -- that's going to be interesting.

@7:

Are you suggesting that tracking a small subset of data-points for a comparatively small number of advertisers might somehow be beyond the capabilities of a Google or Facebook? Isn't this literally what they do and why they exist in the first place?

@7 while you seem to have a grasp of what could be involved, you don't seem to have a grasp over how easy it would be to document this (it's already documented in the case of Facebook, at least) and make it available upon request. a simple log of this sort of thing is all that would be needed. we're talking not even 1GB of "overhead."

@10 you're right when it comes to the storage space needed, but documenting APIs to fit government requirements is complex to begin with and that multiplies every time you need to update or optimize you're targeting. With SAAS these days it's not uncommon to validate on the fly and fix bugs after shipping via updates. At $5K per instance that could be costly. Technical requirements for such a system are often pages long and would need to be agreed upon with the city and I'm not sure they even have that expertise. Finally even if this were all free if a third party could access and reverse engineer your targeting algorithms which are billion dollar crown jewels.