Why are targeted ads a bad thing, they sound fine on paper?
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Another thing to consider is that, for targeted ads to work, you need to be in a receptive mood to click on the ad.
Looking at social media, if you see a bunch of posts about how poorly the economy is going, you are most likely not going to click on the ad for that $150 steak from Crowd Cow.
To combat this, social media sites manipulate what information you see to keep you scrolling. This includes filtering what posts your friends/contacts post, in addition to showing you “recommended for you” content. Facebook is notorious for this.
The result is that these companies figure out what makes you receptive to purchasing, show you that content, and then put ads in front of you. In real life, this means you might be concerned about the coronavirus. You click on an article your friend posted about it being fake. Facebook knows this, so it starts showing you more articles about covid being fake. Now you keep reading articles and believe that covid isn’t real, all so that Facebook can show you an ad and charge a vendor $3 for your click.
If you play soccer, and so walmart shows you an ad for soccer cleats, it sounds great, right? You see ads for things you might actually want, walmart’s ads are more effective, so everybody wins!
There are a couple of major objections that I know about: First of all, how did they know you like soccer and what else do they know about you? Secondly, there’s kind of an echo chamber effect where you only see ads for things you already do, rather than things you might like.
Most people’s objections are the first – the privacy angle. How did they know you play soccer? Did they send someone to follow you around for a day and this person followed you to your school’s soccer game? Cause that’s creepy AF. Where else did you go that day?
Did they install some tracking cookies on your computer to digitally “follow you” all day and saw that you went to `lincolnhighschool.com/soccerforums`? That’s pretty creepy too. What other websites did you visit?
Did they install a device in your house that constantly listens to everything you say, and they overheard a conversation about your upcoming soccer practice? Alexa is always listening. What else did it hear?
What companies do you trust to have all this data about you? How secure are they against being hacked? How likely are they to sell this truckload of data to some unscrupulous person?
TLDR: It’s not about the ads themselves, it’s about all the data these companies are constantly collecting about you.
If somone knows you and wants you to kill yourself, would it be bad of them to make sure you only got ads about death, and how bad life is, how it’s all your fault, your anti depression meds are actually making you sick, and how there is no hope, therapy is fake and for suckers and how nothing gets any better, and look, try our new pill suicideos, first box is free, click here we already have your address.
That is the current situation, the people posting the ads are doing so at your expense, and without your best interest, and trying to make you do what they want you to do to benefit them.
To be honest I’m mostly fine with them. It’s bad targeted ads that I hate.
A particularly annoying example is trying to sell you the thing you just bought.
Also if they know a little bit about you but not much you get things that are just for your gender and maybe age. You used to be able to swap your gender on Spotify and it would change all your targeted adverts and it was great because some of the women’s ones were soooo annoying (and irrelevant) to me.
Roughly speaking, for targeted ads to work, an entity is recording information on you….things you’re searching for in search engines, browsing on the internet, etc. That recorded information on what you’re looking at may also be sold to other companies. The question is, are you OK with that? A lot of people are not because some people feel it violates their privacy, among other things.
The adverts being targeted aren’t especially bad. The bad part is that, for them to work, a really quite accurate picture about your life and interests needs to be generated and utilised. This leads to situations where, as a particularly alarming example, women might find baby products being advertised to them before they even know that they’re pregnant because of a combination of their age, relationship status and various other things they’ve searched for.
If the entity creating and maintaining this moving picture of your life is one you entirely trust, then there’s nothing to worry about. But do you?
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