Online Privacy
2016
Notes to self based upon:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10264625
Not really. I don’t think you can get the ‘ads you want to see’ with programmatic.
The offline analogy is that the NYTimes travel section has adverts for American Express travel services and Samsonite luggage… Scattershot advertising which presumes a median audience. You will see ads showing “something about greece” but maybe just as relevant to your interests as the average soap ad.
Targeting advertising about Greek holidays ‘knows’ also that you are a vegan and have interests in ecology and boulder scrambling and thus will weight those interests when sifting through relevant ads. And thus will find that room for let at a little buddhist monastery on the top of a mountain on an idyllic Greek island…
But most of the time it is not like this. We don’t like it because it knows we are pregnant before we do and gives us the general uncanny sense that it has been reading our mail before we even get it. Its creepy and the tracking it uses dovetails nicely with the surveillance state.
Also and less creepy though annoying, sometimes products are promoted that I do not want. Amazon, Netflix, hulu sends me non optimal choices. I have tried to signal many times that I am not interested in grown men dressing up as their grandmothers… yet Netflix is pretty sure I want to watch the next Tyler Perry movie. Or it wants to convince me to watch it because it is actively promoting it. In any event I have no control over the filter and it is annoying. And I am missing out on that Korean remake of a slasher film that I really would like to see.
I like the ideas of each of us having some control of our online data. It is a utopian idea but I do not think it is realistic because those who already have our data have not reason to give it up. Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath” gives some fairly pessimistic evidence in this area.
I guess I am working up to the question how would the model you present work? In a way it is an inversion of the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, etc.
I want advertisers to know about my interest in ecology and progressive politics but not my pet conspiracy theories, embarassing interest in ‘cheerleader fail” youtubes or that persistent crotch itch…
In short create a filter bubble to present my better self.
But advertising (and surveillance state) wants the id. We acknowledge the truth of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” which in itself becomes an advertising jingle, endlessly looping. “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”