One reason I’m not sure we’ll have rich public discussion about data privacy anytime soon, is because it will be hard to make anyone use normal language to talk about what’s going on. People at the company where I work, where ads are bought and sold, talk about us using words like ‘target’ and ‘influencer.’ The former being a person to sell something to. The later being a person popular enough he or she might convince us to buy it. Does anyone talk like this except an ad buyer? Ney is my thinking. Nobody talks like this. Hence the disinterest in the data privacy discussion, because it’s failed to be humanized.

Conversations about data privacy, which is linked to all this ‘targeting,’ are confusing then, if not boring, if not skip worthy, because the languge doesn’t even sound like human beings are involved. In fact, I already wish I were on Tumblr. Sharing cats. At least I know what a ‘cat’ is. What’s a ‘target’? Here is how ‘targeting’ works, 101: Essentially, ads follow you. With enough information collected about people like you, a ‘target’ or a ‘segment’ is formed. Targets and segments are two names for the same thing: A stereotypical group.

Advertisers try to follow the group. Hence the phrase in the subtitle of this article, Ad Follow. The data privacy discussion is rarely explained in human terms this easy, which may be one reason we haven’t gotten awful riled up yet.

One can paint a dystopian future about all this targeting. It would open on a shot of a woman, mouth pursed, maybe thinking absently while her coffee is made the way she likes it because of the data collected about her, which has perfected her long pull espresso from her connected coffee machine. She’ll be thinking something roughly like, “Sure, it was helpful all that data was used by my car to drive itself to the doctor after that chopping accident last week (why hand-held knives still exist, I just don’t know), but I wonder where all this data goes? ..Cloud? Locker? Underground fortress?”

Here is the dystopian present if the future is a little too far-fetched: Invisible things on webpages collect information about where you click and what you do on the page. The things follow where you send it, and to whom. You don’t know what kind of information. You don’t know where it goes. You don’t know who is collecting it. In what other circumstance would any of us say, “Yep. Sounds good to me. I’m in.” (Said nobody, ever.)

The Influential Geek is a representation here, then, for how disengaged we are with the conversations around data, privacy, ‘targeted’ advertising, and transparency. In short, we don’t care yet about Ad Follow. But what if we began to call ‘targets’ other things? Things like: People, dads, uncles, brothers, neighbors, nurses. These all mean the same thing as ‘target,’ only, we might have a closer connection to these words because they represent objects of care for us. And therefore, we might have a closer connection to what’s being done to the things we care about. The temperature goes up when it’s people, not ‘targets’ in the conversation.

These are the kinds of conversation I’m eager for. A human temperature check is a good start, at the very least.

(Said everybody, ever. Even an ad buyer. Who turns out, surprisingly, to also be a person/dad/uncle/brother we could care about by getting a little more human in our langague about Ad Follow.)