Targeting ads: knowledge is power.
Advertisements have always been annoying because the point is to make you unsatisfied with the things you do have by showing you the things you don’t. However, they are getting more annoying and creepier than ever.
Suppose you’re buying toilet paper in the middle of a pandemic and you want to Google the brand that lasts the longest. Those ads about toilet paper could potentially follow you around the web even to different platforms like Instagram or Facebook. This is known as target advertising.
“Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that focuses on the specific traits, interests, and preferences of a consumer. Advertisers discover this information by tracking your activity on the Internet.”- GFC Global
When an ad doesn’t apply to a person they simply ignore it. Instead of watching a YouTube ad until the end, you count down the seconds until you can skip it. It’s become a nuisance, something people avoid at all costs. Thus advertisers had to get creative. Advertisers use the websites we visit, the searches we make and any other internet activity we freely give them to generate ads specific to us which will increase the likelihood of us paying attention to them.
Advertisers can monitor our activity using tracking technologies like web cookies which are used to identify you to your web service provider, save information, and possibly use that information to prepare customized web pages.
These targeted ads may seem harmless but they are not. They can affect what kind of information you receive only showing you things that fit into your previous activity. It allows browsers like Google to put you into a box and watch your every digital or physical move because they can also track where you go on google maps and Waze which is owned by Facebook.
Luckily, there are certain apps like DuckDuckGo and Startpage that make their user’s privacy, on and off the internet, a top priority.
These internet search engines create a safe alternative to search engines that compile profiles on you. DuckDuckGo is considered the top alternative with the slogan “Switch to the search engine that doesn’t track you”. Startpage was one of the first search engines offering privacy and protection in 2008. They both are 100% ad-free and clean.
If you would rather not switch search engines another way to maintain some semblance of privacy is by regularly clearing your cookies on each device and utilizing all the Google setting options. Google allows you to see the data they have saved up about you including the history of ads you have loaded and using the My Activity tool you can delete that information as long as you know where to look.
The easiest way for companies like Google and Facebook to take advantage of people is through their ignorance. And since knowledge is the power it’s important to know how your information is being used for someone else’s gain. The best way to do that is to stay informed and involved in the information you allow someone to have.
“The Internet, my fickle friend, my two-faced enemy, what would life be like without you? Where else can I be anonymously anyone and yet, have no anonymity at all?”― Susan Schussler, Between the Raindrops
