I was just thinking about how targeted internet marketing is becoming and wondered if targeting could be dangerous. From what I gather, the more I use the internet, the more the internet knows about who I am. Apparently, something called cookies keeps track of where I’ve been, what I’ve looked for, what I might want in the future, and who knows what else. It’s just like I’m building an online identity over time! Creating an identity is probably a fairly harmless activity considering it’s what you and I have done over time since we were born. But can it be a problem if the internet knows who you are too well?
Often times, when I do a search, I can type in a few letters and the search bar will guess the rest of what I’m looking for. The website thinks it knows me. And maybe it does. In real life, my identity consists of what I choose to show others. But the cookies in some mysterious folder on my laptop might know some things about me that I would not even tell my best friends, parents, siblings, or even my dog. The situation reminds me of what I envision would be the relationship I might have with a shrink.
(In theory,) We are supposed to be able to disclose private information to professionals like psychologists, doctors, or lawyers with a certain amount of assurance that those disclosures will be kept confidential. Confidentiality serves an important purpose in such relationships because the information can be crucial to effective servicing. Given the importance of such services to society and the importance of confidentiality to the effectiveness of such services, there are regulations in place to ensure that the privileges of information are not abused.
You may disagree with the analogy, and confidentiality alone is not a complete solution, but I think similar concerns about abuse apply to information collected through our use of the internet. I’m not trying to make any apocalyptic suggestions about the effects of the under-regulated collection of personal information, but I think we ought to consider the responsible use of information collected on the internet more. As the ability to target an audience on the internet gives rise to opportunities for marketing, it would be in the interest of opportunity seekers to prevent abuse lest the internet-users become wary of sharing their information at all.
1 comment:
The post is a little vague so I thought I'd leave a few endnotes here:
Perhaps my imagination is getting the better of me, but an illustrative example of the concerns I had in the post above is the links that show up next to emails in gmail. I just thought about how horrified I might be if I received an email about something tragic like a relative passing away because of an unfortunate motorcycling accident only to find an advertisement trying to sell me the newest Ducati or Harley Davidson. While a human being who is sponsored by Ducati (a friend for example) would be sensitive enough to provide support without trying to sell me a bike, gmail's technology might not be so smart.
Sorry for the morbid example, but I guess the extreme nature of that thought was what drove me to post about it in the first place?
The reason why I think it's relevant to the class is that I think it's in the interest of people who stand to make lots of money through internet marketing to prevent such a problem to make sure people continue to be OK with sharing personal information (even on an anonymous basis) through their internet habits.
It would seem that when information useful to targeting is a main driver of value in internet marketing, one of the largest threats would be an ability and/or desire to become a truly anonymous non-information-sharing internet user.
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