Unlike I believe most people feel, I don’t really have any problem with online advertising. Yes, they do collect data and try to determine our personal information so that they can target us with specific ads, but that’s what advertising has been trying to do for years. It’s only now talked about more because it can be done so much more accurately with all of the information out there. But first, a digression to describe the advertisements we are talking about. Online advertising can be implemented in several ways. The specific type that we seem to be talking about here though is the pedigree that you would find on Facebook. On Facebook, as well as on some other major sites, you are not just getting the same advertisements that everyone else is getting. You are getting ads that are specifically tailored to you. They do this by looking at the types of things that you like on Facebook. For example, if you like a piece of tech-related news, you are more likely to see tech-related advertisements on Facebook.
Now back on point, online advertisements are often under fire for the level that they are able to identify what is going on in someone’s personal life even though that person has not disclosed it to them. Adrianne LaFrance of The Atlantic mentioned that there was once a survey taken where people described this type of data mining. He says, “many of those surveyed said data tracking made them uneasy—the words ‘creepy,’ ‘Big Brother,’ and ‘stalking’ came up often.” It is exactly this image that America has wrong. We feel weird when we hear about the wild, but correct inferences that can be made about us from our digital footprint, but should we be? The companies that target us consumers are not personally looking into our lives and following our lives. Rather, it is a very impersonal, statistical analysis that Target performs.
Here is a summary of Target’s data analysis from Charles Duhigg’s New York Times Magazine article, “Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.” The person being followed is just an ID code in the target system. Yes, they can figure out personal details, but it isn’t like they’re trying to write a biography of your life with the data they have. It’s just for marketing purposes.
The level of data protection that a company which analyzes data like this provides should vary according to what the company does. I see no harm in Target selling the information on what I purchase, but places such as medical facilities obviously would have to have much greater data security. The reason that I think that the company has the right to the data, is because they are collecting it through their own efforts. The data that Target gets from your surveys and what you purchase was not recorded by you (though you may have helped them if you took a survey), so you shouldn’t have any say in what they do with it. You freely purchased your items or took their survey, and I believe that this gives them the right to do what they want with that information. Now some information shouldn’t be spread around freely of course. If they did not, then they would lose the consumer’s trust. For example, when we get advertisements about products for our child on the way, it can be a little unsettling that they know that, similar to the way we feel when a new person we meet already knows our name. In the case where Target sent the girl an advertisement for newborn baby products and revealed to her father she was pregnant, perhaps they jumped the gun and send that out too early. On the other hand, if it were a happy couple who was eager to start raising their first child, this advertisement would have been really nice. It is not exactly black and white. The company has the responsibility of determining whether the information should be used or distributed.
For example, companies assigning loans and hiring new employees should be using their collected or bought data is used. As it was said by Kate Kochetkova in Kaspersky Daily, “Such programs are advertised as free of human biases; but humans set them up. Humans, who are quite prejudiced and can make mistakes. There had already been a case with the same program when it rejected every good applicant for a job because of the wrong instruction.”
Online advertising is annoying, but it makes sense to me. Websites that don’t sell a product have few other ways to make money, which is why I understand them. When I have to wait 30 seconds to watch a YouTube video though, it can be a huge buzzkill.As such I use Adblock to get rid of most of that interference, and I do not believe this to be unethical. If Adblock is considered unethical, then so should be skipping the commercials for a recorded TV show. It’s just silly to me that people consider it so wrong sometimes. Yes, it does make web advertising spaces less valuable, but that’s just the way it is. If websites don’t like it, then they should find ways of beating the Adblock, which many sites already have done.
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To end this blog, I would like to make one last point about Josh Halliday’s article in The Guardian, I just didn’t know where to fit it into the questions given. Josh is disgusted with how Facebook can figure out so much about us from only the topics that we like. My message to Josh is this: don’t use Facebook, or else tough luck. Facebook is a site where you voluntarily go online to share your personal thoughts and express your interests via “liking” things publicly. The entire point of a person liking a subject matter is to broadcast to the people that can see their profile, “I like this thing”. As he points out in the statistics he cites, it isn’t a perfect correlation, sometimes it guesses a wrong personality trait. So the things that Facebook is observing are probably not that difficult to infer without the help of a mathematical analysis. Facebook exists to share information about yourself. I understand when people feel uncomfortable that organizations gather data on them, but I think that we can go a little overboard sometimes. In this case, if you are against this type of data mining, be rational and realize that you’re basically giving your enemy the keys to the castle and getting mad when he/she uses them.
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