The troubling thing about advertising is that for the companies that pay to advertise their products to the consumer (you), it is in their interest to know as much as they can about you and your buying habits. This allows them to carefully pick and choose which products they show to you in order to increase the likelihood of you purchasing one of their products. As far as business strategy goes, this one makes a lot of sense. You wouldn’t advertise literature on classical music to a teenager who has a propensity to buy comic books, cause odds are that teenager would just ignore it and the money paid to advertise to that individual would have been ineffective. Logically, companies would want to store a certain amount of information on their customers in order to better market their products and improve sales. The problem is what is too much information.
In the article here, we see an example of how the retail chain Target was able to,”figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know.” In this article, we see an example of how Facebook was able to piece together an individual was gay before they had even come to that conclusion, let alone come out to anyone. Here is another example of Facebook users that were outed as gay to advertisers, whether they were publicly out about their sexuality or not.
The troubling part is that these examples show how there is information that can be gathered and extrapolated about us without our knowledge or consent, and used to market to us. This monitoring and aggregation of data is done for the sake of our convenience in some scenarios, but if it didn’t help to improve the sales and profitability of a company, would they still do it? Odds are no, they wouldn’t. Recall the meme that states “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” This is especially true these days with all the free services like Amazon, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and more that we use on a daily basis. These companies all collect our information and are able to sell it for profit, and so that the buyer can use that information as they wish. This seems like a very indiscriminate system that cuts the user (who is effectively the commodity being sold) out of the process completely. They have no representation or protection in this system, nor can they effectively limit what information can be used or gathered without completely abstaining from the use of most many products and websites. It has become harder to use the internet without giving away most of your information than ever before, so much so that the only way to win in this scenario is to not play the game and just remain offline. Unfortunately, that is almost out of the question in this day and age where technology rule our daily lives.
Personally, I have an incredibly low tolerance for advertising on the internet, and I am a prolific user of Adblock and other tools. I do it for my own convenience (fuck Youtube and their impossible to skip ads) as well as because I do not wish to reward the use of my own information to manipulate me into purchasing things I don’t need. For this reason, I also do my best to block or limit the usage of cookies or storage of information by websites and third parties on my computer as much as possible. I believe that the use of these tools is ethical, as I should be able to choose what I see on a given website. I don’t go on reddit or Facebook or Youtube to see ads, and I don’t approve of the method in which they are marketed to me with my own information. Hopefully, this practice sends a message that will one day reach the ears of someone with enough influence over the process to promote some sort of meaningful change.
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