The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users
This article is from The New York Times.
This articles discusses the online advertising phenomena known as behavioral targeting. What this means is that your internet service provider (ISP) (Verizon, Comcast, etc.) track everything a computer does online and then creates a profile for your IP address (every computer has a unique IP address). This differs from cookies since cookies were tracked by tech companies were only able to track web sites one visited.
The implications of this data is that ISPs are able to gain a great understanding about what type of consumer is using any individual computer. This information can then be turned into profitable information for advertisers who want to reach a particular target market. For example, if your online history indicates that you are a 35 year old married woman with kids, because you visited iVillage, Gerber.com, and Oprah's web site, when you visit the New York Mets web site to find a gift for your husband, advertisements targeted to middle aged women will show and not baseball related ads.
This is a big deal because today advertisements are based on the web sites content. As in the NY Mets example you can see how baseball ads shown to the 35 year old mom would not be effective. There are two big controversies concerning behavioral targeting.
- Most people do not know that this is the future and is happening in select markets
- Lots of people find this to be intrusive and a violation of their privacy
3 comments:
I can see where the controversy comes up about the whole violation of privacy thing. I think that's creepy for people to be watching what websites I'm at or what information I am looking up. That's just weird. After reading how this tracking works, I think it is kind of cool though. I never realized that was how ads were selected for websites, I figured it was just random. I feel like it is kind of like TIVO. Once you start recording a lot of shows, your machine will begin to record similar shows for you. I personally, however, do not really pay attention to advertisements on websites. It is kind of instilled in my mind to just ignore them, so it wouldn't really make a difference for me.
I understand how this would not be effective to have ads for middle aged women on a baseball page. From personal experience, I pay no attention to ads on web pages. I focus on the main content on the page. The technology behind the idea of IP address is awesome, and shows our improvement in technology. However, the question still remains... how effective is the advertising?
This is quite an interesting topic to bring up! I've taken notice of this trend recently, but hadn't heard the technicalities of what was happening. I believe some of the social networking sites like facebook and myspace are tracking personal information on their users now too. Have you heard anything about this?
It does feel like a violation of privacy!.. and allows marketers to fuel stereotypes, like that of a middle aged woman. Who's to say she's not a big baseball fan?!
Anyway, it seems intrusive to me, but it also seems that there is little the public can do to stop it. If we want to utilize the internet technologies available to us, it seems we have to play by their 'rules.'
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