Wisse Vandermeer is Chief Data Ecosystems Correspondent based in Zürich, where he covers the intersection of surveillance capitalism, programmatic advertising, and what he diplomatically calls "post-consent monetization frameworks." Before joining The Bidders Digest, Vandermeer spent six years embedded with ad-tech firms across Europe, documenting the industry's evolution from "we track cookies" to "we track everything, including the cookies you thought about baking but didn't." His investigative series "The Auction Inside Your Brain" won the 2023 Digital Privacy Watchdog Award, which was sponsored by three data brokers who appreciated the free publicity. Vandermeer holds a degree in Economics from the University of Amsterdam and a graduate certificate in Behavioral Data Science from ETH Zürich, though he notes both institutions have since asked him to stop mentioning this. He has an unusual talent for getting C-suite executives to explain, in remarkable detail, exactly how their companies have commodified human attention while destroying the remnants of online privacy. He lives in Zürich with his partner and maintains what he calls "a hilariously insufficient VPN setup." His personal data has been sold approximately 47,000 times, by his own estimate, which he tracks in a spreadsheet that is itself being tracked by fourteen different analytics platforms.
