Why are targeted ads a bad thing, they sound fine on paper?
In: Other
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.
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