How can advertisers knowing my information and tracking me to better serve me ads cause me personal harm or injury?
In: Technology
If you think that advertisement networks is just simply showing certain advertisements to anyone who have visited web pages containing the name of the product you are sorely mistaken. It was discovered many years ago that you could find certain behavioral patterns among people if you had enough data about them. You can essentially group people together based on their current state of mind. But more importantly you can study how people change their mind and look at what they were doing to make them change their minds. It can be simple words that you read or it might be more complex imagery which will predictably take you from one thought to the next. This can be done not only through advertisement but also using dynamic content in news sites and social media sites which make it harder to detect. And although it can be hard to prove if this is being done it should also be possible to use these techniques to automatically generate a script for people to perform that will reliably change the mind of the people in the target audience into whatever you want. However this will likely be an awkward script as most of these triggers are simple words or phrases without much relevance to each other so you would still require a good writer to string the words together in a sensible way unless you want someone to just stand on a stage repeating seamingly random rambling words over and over again with a few mumbled half harted attempts at bridging the words together.
So now the advertisers are not just trying to offer you products but are actively manipulating your mind in a very clinical and determined way. Sure they can manipulate you into buying their products. However it can be much more intrusive then you might think. For example it could be possible to manipulate people into having kids so they would end up consuming more products. And they could make people vote for candidates that is against your self interest. Or maybe get you to do activities that would require you to buy medication later in life.
Latest Answers