Reading 07: Online Advertising
We have all had that moment where we are randomly talking with a friend about getting tickets to an event, or buying a certain brand of clothing, or watching a show we heard was good, and then all of the sudden an ad pops up on Facebook about it and it seems like Facebook is listening in on all our conversations. While it may seem creepy at the time, giving companies the rights to our information and allowing them to target us with certain ads is how they generate a lot of their revenue, and without it, a lot of the services and applications we use on a daily basis would not exist.
The ethical issues surrounding online advertising are pointed at the tradeoff between privacy and convenience: Should companies be allowed to use the personal information they’ve gathered on us to provide targeted ads, or is this an invasion of our privacy? If it were considered an invasion of privacy, how would companies make up for the lack of revenue that used to be gathered with targeted ads.
Personally, I don’t believe that it is unethical for companies to gather my information in an attempt to sell me products or services. I greatly appreciate getting services that I use everyday for free, such as email, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and I don’t mind letting those companies use my information to generate ads. Honestly, I am very, VERY rarely ever swayed by ads, so it doesn’t really bother me when I company picks specific ones that they think I would click on. On top of that, in the extremely rare case that a targeted ad informs me on a deal for a product that I like or a new product that I’m interested in, then I’m grateful to know about it. As long as these companies are being responsible with their users information, meaning they aren’t illegally recording information to sell to sketchy third parties (credit card or bank information, for example), I’m ok with their use of my information. If they are transparent and honest about what information of mine they are recording, I don’t mind if they use it to generate ads.
However, I agree that privacy will become an unrealistic expectation under this paradigm of pervasive information gathering. The article How Facebook ‘Likes’ Reveal Your Intimate Secrets shows how simple information gathering using a person’s likes can reveal personal details, such as their intelligence level, their sexual orientation, and their political views. All of these things are very personal, and if a person is not ready to share this information with the public, unfortunately companies may already possess this information and use it to generate targeted ads. However, I do not believe that this pervasive information gathering will mean that all of your private information becomes public knowledge. If it is handled responsibly, it will be used for companies to build a profile for you in order to target you with specific ads, without revealing your personal data to the public. But because someone does possess this private information, I do still consider complete privacy unrealistic.
I find online advertising to be very tolerable. As I said earlier, I am rarely influenced by ads, and when I am, it is usually to my benefit. Some believe it can be annoying when websites have a large amount of pop-up ads when you are trying to explore the contents of the site, but this is almost never the case with reputable websites. The smaller ads that before the playing of a video or on the side of a news feed do not bother me in the slightest, and these are the vast majority of ads on websites.
