83% Of Consumers Believe Personalized Ads Are Morally Wrong (forbes.com) 219
An anonymous reader quotes Forbes:
A massive majority of consumers believe that using their data to personalize ads is unethical. And a further 76% believe that personalization to create tailored newsfeeds -- precisely what Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications do every day -- is unethical.
At least, that's what they say on surveys.
RSA surveyed 6,000 adults in Europe and America to evaluate how our attitudes are changing towards data, privacy, and personalization. The results don't look good for surveillance capitalism, or for the free services we rely on every day for social networking, news, and information-finding. "Less than half (48 percent) of consumers believe there are ethical ways companies can use their data," RSA, a fraud prevention and security company, said when releasing the survey results. Oh, and when a compan y gets hacked? Consumers blame the company, not the hacker, the report says.
At least, that's what they say on surveys.
RSA surveyed 6,000 adults in Europe and America to evaluate how our attitudes are changing towards data, privacy, and personalization. The results don't look good for surveillance capitalism, or for the free services we rely on every day for social networking, news, and information-finding. "Less than half (48 percent) of consumers believe there are ethical ways companies can use their data," RSA, a fraud prevention and security company, said when releasing the survey results. Oh, and when a compan y gets hacked? Consumers blame the company, not the hacker, the report says.
kill them all (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: kill them all (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly.
They are so intrusive it's ridiculous. They show up everywhere. Break up content so much you can barely watch or read anything anymore.
They steal personal data on us to personalize these ads. In many instances they show things that can be kind of questionable to show. In some instances they even have truly obnoxious ads that practically scream at people.
More crazy yet, using our personal info, they frequently show us things we either already bought or decided not buy. They don't only do it once
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"Personalized" ads are rarely relevant for me anyway and are just obnoxious, especially if they are for items that I recently purchase.
Ads served have gotten totally out of the hands of the consumer these days and the only remedy is to protect yourself using adblockers.
What I worry is that soon we will see a huge backlash where any actor in an ad have to watch their back when they are out and about. But the way around that would be for the ad companies to rely solely on avatars.
Overall there are way too man
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If "personalized ads" are for items that you've recently purchased, then whomever did the algorithm for "personalizing" those ads was a complete cretin. If you just bought one, then you're (probably) not in the market for one.
On the other hand, knowing you just bought a hoover vacuum, ads for bags for hoover vacs might be useful....
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Yeah, which is exactly why they are using an ad blocker, like duhh.
Ads should only ever by aligned with content but that takes time and costs money. No corporations has any right to private information and should by law be required to disclose all information they hold about people to those people.
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This is why we block them. Duh.
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Coincidentally systems where the developer also made it less convenient to block them than on PC operating systems.
From personal experience, most people can't be assed to do something about it on their own, so they bear it on their mobile devices.
I would assume that a significant part of the population is exposed to their persona
All advertising is morally wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
All adverts are morally wrong.
They either:
1. Prey on your fears
2. Exploit your darkest, deepest desires
3. Promise you an easy-out to your problems
The best things in life speak for themselves and need no pushing. You find them or they find you by word of mouth, or you see it on your own, or.... you just know about it through some inexplicable mechanism.
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It's just that those adverts that do those things gets more attention by design.
Re:All advertising is morally wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, all adverts are fraud. Their purpose is to make you buy something you wouldn't otherwise -- ie, to make you do unoptimal decisions. There's also a second effect of making the good's price increased by whatever was the cost of the advertising campaign, making you actually pay for being lied to. The third effect is wasting your time and attention.
Effects 1 and 3 can be countered with an ad blocker. Setting one up properly might take a bit of time but is strongly beneficial to you in the long run.
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s/all/man
There are very few absolutes in life and this isn't one of them. Some ads are actually just being informative but not most.
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I disagree. Quite often I'll see an ad for a product that solves a particular problem in my current line of work, and occasionally I'll buy the product. If the ad is relevant, non-intrusive, and not pushy, they can be invaluable tools both for the marketer and for the person or business who might need that product (even if he doesn't know it yet). Quite often I've seen an ad in a trade magazine and thought, oh that looks like a very good idea that could really benefit me. So I've bought more than a few t
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Ads in trade magazines are not push. They're mostly pull. Anyone who buys a trade magazine thinking it's clock-a-block with articles is a royal fool.
Scanning ads in trade magazines is a perfectly fine way to pinch a loaf: cooling your jets on the hinged horseshoe, the ads don't randomly impinge on your attention span during maximum cognitive load.
You've also engaged in a classic fall
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Just for the individual reader? It seems to me that this would also be exercising the echo chamber/bobble head effect. But I could be misunderstanding what they're saying.
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So you are so constitutionally weak that you are slaves to it, therefore it is morally wrong to offer you something you might want to buy?
Why is that that so many people think they require protection from the most trivial things?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
All? (Score:2)
I saw an advert promoting recycling; not sure which of those three categories that would fall into...
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I saw an advert promoting recycling; not sure which of those three categories that would fall into...
Easy-out. Planet going to hell in a handbasket? Recycle! At least here in florida it all goes to the landfill anyway. Moot point. I still throw my plastic glass and paper into the green bin, but most ends up in Mount Trashmore anyway.
NOt entirely sure a recycle ad is really an ad, to me it's more of a PSA. Of course, you must ask -- who's benefiting? In my case, it isn't the planet, it's Waste Management (WM). They get paid by the city, and my shit still ends up in Mount Trashmore. Yeah baby. Fake
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That's absurd. I see ads for basic stuff like jackets, because i've been dying to replace my aging overcoat and have searched for alternatives. Nobody ever told me the jacket would make me sexy, the ads have a picture of a jacket and a price.
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So, just curious...
Would the personal computer revolution have occurred if none of the PC makers had been allowed to advertise their products? Same for any particular piece of software? And yes, Linux would have to be included in "any particular piece of software" even assuming Linux could have exist
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Yes, the more novel the offering, the more people have to be told it exists, and be convinced to purchase.
Back in the 70s there was no social media to help spread the word, but many read newspapers and magazines. But these were mainly funded by advertising, and I doubt a PC company could have forgone advertising and relied on editorial to get the word out. The publications would have blackballed them for not buying ads.
Still happens today, but at least media is now more democratic.
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That comment is just dumb especially since not all adverts fall into those three categories, and also because not all three of those categories are morally wrong. "Prey", "Exploit", "Promise". One of those are not like the other, and if said promise is broken a company ends up in a nice legal problem.
You find them or they find you by word of mouth, or you see it on your own, or.... you just know about it through some inexplicable mechanism.
For this mechanism to work the product on service in question needs to widely publicly distributed or easily visible. Congratulations your suggestion just killed 100% of small companies on the internet, and lik
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No, "build it and they'll come" doesn't often work well, though online word-of-mouth is making it work better than it has done before. You can still get steamrolled by competitors who do push their products in people's faces (hello "ambassadors" and "influencers").
Yes, all ads spin. Independent helpers are better. But in a free society ads will always be with us.
The best response is for the worst forms of advertising (door-to-door, consumer telemarketing, mass spam, intrusive ads embedded in media) to
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Speak for yourself. Some of us pay good money to hear those things.
Now tell me more about this easy out...
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This type of advertising is much more insidious. http://www.americantable.org/2 [americantable.org]...
If they can do that with something as simple as breakfast. What else have we been manipulated into?
The two combine.
1. The picture of the dollop of shaving creme on the 90's - 2000's cans of Gilette Foamy show a fist-sized mound of creme. Amount you really need to get proper coverage: 1/4 that. Half a ping-pong ball, not a fist-sized mound.
2. THe long-ass string of toothpaste shown on Aqua Fresh (and i'm sure others too) toothpaste adverts is about 1.5 inches long and curled at both ends. Amount you truly need: 1/2 inch or so. They're encouraging one, subliminally, almost, to use so much more produ
Get a real browser (Score:4, Informative)
Don't use a browser from an ad company that protects its approved ads deep into the computer, browser and OS.
Consider using
Adblockers
No script
U Block and U Block matrix.
Ghostery.
Anything to slow and stop tracking away from the site visited.
Ads will just move to the site and be part of the content generated per user.
Be ready for ads and tracking to become the site content.
Re: Get a real browser (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd be just as outraged by a paywall (Score:4)
Just try putting content on the web behind a paywall, and just imagine the screams of outrage.
One wonders how they expect everything on the web to get paid for...
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Some people want to pay, but they don't want 30 cents per page view to go to the credit card companies. What method of accepting payment without 30 cents per page view going to the credit card companies would you recommend?
Sunk cost of 99 unused page views (Score:2)
Well, you could sell page view tokens in quantities of more than one per transaction for starters.
What good is buying single-site page view tokens in minimum quantities of 100 when a reader plans to view only one article on a site? The sunk cost of the remaining 99 page views produces almost the same filter bubble effect as the sunk cost of the remaining 29.9 days of a monthly subscription.
Porn sites had(have?) the adult verified affiliate network where for one aubacriptio you get access to a bunch of sites.
I'm aware of Adult Check, and I've suggested a similar multi-site subscription model before because adults can pay for nice things. But what appears to have brought down Adult Check was the fact that so many sites on
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The web would be a lot better if you removed all the stuff that has to "get paid for" by advertising.
But would there still be enough "stuff" left to make wide use of home Internet access worth what the ISPs charge?
Much lower CPM for non-interest-based ads (Score:2)
Such old-fashioned ads can be seen on Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io]. But their cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is one-third of what interest-based advertising can produce according to a 2014 study by Beales and Eisenach [politico.com].
So wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I find 'personalized' adverts to be morally wrong, profoundly so.
Aside from violating my dignity as an individual who can make my own choices, the sheer volume of advertising guarantees that I will block them out, either mentally or technologically, which means they are misrepresenting the value of the services to the businesses buying the advertising. So two strikes against them on the question of morality.
But more often than not I am finding them to be factually wrong, in the sense that whatever guess their algorithm is making about me is wildly inaccurate. For example a few Google searches for the price of an object is far more likely to mean that I have made a purchase of one than it is that I will be highly motivated to make new purchases daily for the following six months.
Or their inference is so exact and narrow as to be transparently absurd. E.g. Local women seeking 53-year-old!
And then there's the ones where I try to find a restaurant in a city I'm going to visit and I can't block out adverts for restaurants for the area where I live (you know, the one place I'm guaranteed not to physically be in any time I travel).
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I find 'personalized' adverts to be morally wrong, profoundly so.
Then, with all due respect, you are uninformed, and profoundly so.
Want to know why? Because all advertising has always been targeted. From the dawn of advertising. Don't believe me? Take a look at the types of ads that they run on any TV show. If a show demographically skews to younger women, they show tampon ads. If a show demographically skews to elderly men, they show Viagra ads. I guarantee you if they reversed this, people would scream that the ads aren't targeted enough.
Where the web becomes a
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The sheer volume of advertising exists primarily because the overwhelming majority of advertising is not targeted well enough.
That's logical, but it's the opposite of what we see in reality. Targeting is obviously better than in the past, even if the advertisers are over-estimating the reliability of it, but the volume of advertising has exploded, demonstrating that the strategy is clearly quantity and not quality, and giving the industry their own tragedy of the commons problem, but at a cost to me in time and opportunity.
Advertising is already morally dubious, and no-one has an expectation that an advertisement is unbiased, but
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Actually, I don't think it's a strategy so much as a desperation move. Companies are finding it harder and h
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Please tell me then, o wise one, how Netflix suggesting shows you might like is exploitative. Please explain to me how not showing tampon ads to men is exploitative? And so on.
The problem is not that you don't like personalization of ads. The problem is that you don't like ads. And that's certainly a reasonable opinion, but it has nothing to do with whether the personalization itself is moral or immoral.
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Because advertising has diminishing returns. The more ads you see, the more you ignore them. So the more ads you sell, the less valuable each ad is.
Broadcast and cable TV are basically walking dead anyway. In fifty years, nobody will believe that anybody actually watched content that way. An
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Aside from violating my dignity as an individual who can make my own choices, the sheer volume of advertising guarantees that I will block them out
Wait what? I thought you're not able to make your own choice?
For example a few Google searches for the price of an object is far more likely to mean that I have made a purchase of one than it is that I will be highly motivated to make new purchases daily for the following six months.
That depends on what you are buying and how much effort you're putting in. The algorithm is incredibly dumb but if you're looking up the price of something and buying now it means it fails for you, it doesn't stand to reason that it fails for others. Many such algorithms rely on the fact that:
a) the customer is still researching and didn't buy something on the first moment they searched for the price
b) the customer bought something that is likely
Personalized Ads for the thing I already bought? (Score:4, Informative)
E.g. if I already bought an 80" TV, the chances I need another one are pretty darn small.
That's the kind of "personalized" ads that Zuckerbook keeps showing me. I really don't understand why people are paying for ads on Zuckerbook. And the ads are invisible to me anyway because I don't even look at them. In that case I'm there to see what my friends are posting and nothing else.
One of these days the advertisers are going to catch on.
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>> And the ads are invisible to me anyway because I don't even look at them
It does not work that way, unfortunately:
https://theunboundedspirit.com... [theunboundedspirit.com]
I would argue it's not intrinsic. (Score:2)
Personalized advertisements in and of themselves are completely amoral. If a company kept everything completely compartmentalized so that nobody could ever access your information except a benevolent AI that want to help you then it could be moral because the AI wants to help you complete whatever your task is. However, in this scenario, the AI would also not advertise to you if it were determined you were better off with a competing product or none at all. This is the moral ideal of advertising but as w
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Then putting all the data from other sites back together again.
Selling on that data thats had some powerful math done.
Nothing stays free with free sites and free services
Ban all ads (Score:3)
When is the insanity going to stop?
Normally I don't advocate extreme ideology but after the constant visual pollution of ads (online, billboards, TV, movies) I'm starting to wonder if society just wouldn't be better off with a simple policy:
Ban all ads. Just ban the fuckers outright.
The world has existed for thousands of years without the modern exploitative manipulative propaganda and I'll be the first to say:
And nothing of value was lost.
A person can dream, right?
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Content as ads, ads as content. Each site tracking users for the ads.
No more 3rd party ad site to block.
Advertise only on specialized sites (Score:2)
If you start a new company and have a new product, how are you going to tell people it exists?
Advertise on a website about that class of product, not on the web at large. For example, advertise a video game on a website about video games, and advertise tampons on a site about women's health.
If you're unemployed and want to find a job, how do you know there are job openings?
Look at ads posted on a job board, such as Indeed, Monster, or Stack Overflow Jobs, not on the web at large.
If you're not happy with a product and want to find some alternative, what do you do?
Subscribe to Consumer Reports, a not-for-profit publisher of less-biased product reviews. Or look for reviews on some other website specializing in that class of product.
I donâ(TM)t get it (Score:2)
I wish all ads were personalized. It would be so much better than random crap that has no relevance to me!
Re:I donâ(TM)t get it (Score:4, Interesting)
I see this sentiment widely on Slashdot. And only on Slashdot. I've never once had a face-to-face conversation with anyone and had them say they want more personalized ads. I've been baffled by this Slashdot thinking for a long time.
Re: I donâ(TM)t get it (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)d probably be happy to just tell them what they want to know. They wouldnâ(TM)t have to do anything nefarious.
How was it actually phrased on the questionaire (Score:3)
FWIW, I believe that personalized ads are fine. It's personalized prices that are immoral.
BUT!!!
This requires them to have collected personal information on me, which *isn't* ok. Not unless it's based on things I've bought from them before. And not if they sell it, or leak it, to someone else.
And 100% of Men (Score:3)
And 100% of Men polled did not want to see tampon ads...
In all seriousness, 100% of people do not want to see ads that are not targeting them.
Re:And 100% of Men (Score:4, Funny)
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Exactly. The reality is that you can create any results you want if you word the poll in a way that leads the pollee in the direction you want.
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>> porn ads are legally restricted in most jurisdictions, and thus are unlikely to show up on children's computers.
You must be new on the Internet.
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I'm fine with tampon ads—it's the ugly women in the ads that I object to.
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You never were confronted with ads for diapers for the elderly, did you ?
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You mean this one [youtu.be]?
why are there advertisements ? (Score:4, Insightful)
The main reason that ads exist is that they are for generic products and services. When your product is indistinguishable from all the similar products, one way to sell it is to advertise. There are other ways, such as lowering the price. But generic products tend to be priced near cost anyway. The best way to sell your product is to make it distinctly better than similar products.
Pepsi and Coke sell essentially the same product: sugar water. As a result they must advertise like crazy to get buyer loyalty. Ford and GM have battled the same way for generations over cars that (despite certain crazed fans) aren't really very different.
Every week, many of us receive by post a packet of ads from local retailers, supermarkets, restaurants and nail salons. If you look closely you won't find among them an ad for Walmart or Amazon. Why would the worlds largest retailers need to waste money on those ads? Target will occasionally use that medium, hoping to grab some Walmart customers.
OTOH, Phillips / Norelco actually created two unique products that for a long time lead the field: the first cassette tape recorder and the first rotary electric shaver. They had no real competition and the need for advertising was only to introduce the public to a genuinely new and potentially beneficial product.
For a few years Apple sold its products with big images of great thinkers (Einstein, etc) and two other elements: the words "think different", and a small Apple logo. No product was mentioned. Elsewhere in the world of personal computers there were 20 brands with names like Compaq, Dell, H-P, etc. They were all making 'clones' and fighting furiously to sell these basically identical products. Lots of ads promoting minor distinctions, but mostly low prices. A race to the bottom.
If every vendor of goods and services had a unique product that clearly stood out in its field, the need for advertising would be greatly reduced. Thus most of the ads you see are for items that are essentially uninteresting.
Unfortunately, we benefit from the clones of every industry. The race to the bottom means standardized products and low prices for consumers. We don't have to pay the Apple/Norelco premium price. It's nice that there are innovators, but also good that we have access to affordable traditional products. Thanks to advertising.
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You're incredibly verbose but ultimately so stupidly wrong.
Following your line of reasoning I can ask the question: why do you live? You live the same inane existence of billions of other people. You make no contributions to society and anything you "may" contribute is just irrelevant. Nothing matters. Coke is water with sugar. Ford sells rubber and steel. You breathe in valuable oxygen and expel nasty CO2. Unfortunately, due to whatever reasons, we're stuck with you.
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Walmart started as a general merchandise retailer so they run Sunday to Saturday ad weeks (same for Target and all the big department stores) and they push their print ads in the Sunday newspapers. Both Walmart and Target will do grocery specific ad flyers
I'd like them more if they were smarter (Score:2)
I'd like personalized ads more if they were more intelligently done. With cookies turned on if I buy a video card from Amazon I then see ads for video cards...
What kind of stupid is this?
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It's sales and marketing stupid. If you've never worked with sales and marketing, you wouldn't understand. Sales and marketing is a different world, with different rules. It's the people who need the expense account to take clients to fancy dinners and shows. It's the wheelers and dealers, the schmoozers and show-offs.
It's those hung-over, strung-out assholes who make these stupid decisions at a meeting they wander into 10 minutes before it's over, throw everything decided already onto the floor, vomit a pi
What % pay for apps vs. use "free" ad model? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of those 83% refuse to use any app which provides them such personalized ads and/or collects their data in exchange for a "free" app? People say a lot of things on the surveys, but do otherwise in life. I seriously doubt that 83% of people purchase apps when given the "free" option with targeted advertisements.
While I have no love for advertisements at all... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... if know that I have to see ads, I'd still rather see ads that actually are relevant to my own interests or needs than ones that aren't.
If I can't use software to block ads, then I will use personal control of my attention to block ads.
I don't see why "personally relevant" ads are better than generic ads. In either case, I usually receive information about something that I'm not interested in buying. The only time when I want personally relevant information is when I'm searching for that information, and then I want the information to be unbiased by ad money.
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The world would be a better place if this was true for more people. Unfortunately advertising works for a large percent of the population. I remember a few years back when I was interacting with a handful of teenagers, one kid starts belting out the jingle for a fast-food fish sandwich. Half of them joined in, then they decided it would be hilarious to go get fish sandwiches.
What. The. Fuck.
It blew my mind that that shit actually worked. Then it occurred to me that if it worked on them, it also works on mil
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Personally, I would like to see advertisements become expensive to display, thus increasing the benefit to content producers for displaying the ad, and driving total volume of total ads shown waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down.
In other words, the debiers model. Diamonds are extremely common. The price is kept artificially high through a marketing campaign that reinforces the notion that they are rare, coupled with an aggressive supply side monopoly and warehousing operation.
By ensuring only a select number of
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This. People forget the advertisements in the early days of the internet consisted of mostly girls and penis enlarging drugs.
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Well to be fair, you wouldn't want one without the other.
Visit a web site just once (Score:2)
Devils advocate / rant (Score:5, Insightful)
When we suggest our users to do donations, they refused.
When we suggested premium membership model, they refused.
99% of the users want the content that 4 people maintain, for free, demand it what's more, and we even got blamed that we're extorting users by having a premium membership and ads, not realizing that if the ads were gone tomorrow - the service would be gone too.. and premium membership was a way for us to DISABLE ads. Eventually, we got rid of premium as it was useless.
Don't want personalized or otherwise fucking ads ? Pay for the shit you use, because
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business model on the decline ?
Not easy to get a better one.
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Ads are what keep the internet working.
No ads means no internet. Ads are the "business model" not of a "website" but of the whole fucking thing. Take ads out of equation and you get the "academic" internet again.
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Nope.
Internet and HTTP browsing predated online ads. By far.
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Take ads out of equation and you get the "academic" internet again.
Internet and HTTP browsing predated online ads. By far.
That was what hjf referred to as "the 'academic' Internet". If the Internet were to suddenly contract to "the 'academic' Internet" tomorrow, I doubt that there would be enough demand among home users for "the 'academic' Internet" alone to support the continued availability of home broadband Internet service.
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What about charging all users your best estimate of the average value they get out of your site, with a one-month trial?
Would your membership be decimated because few get much value from it, and could easily move to a competitor?
There are other potential solutions depending on the nature of your service.
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no. there are no solutions. this is how things are.
People DO NOT LIKE TO PAY FOR STUFF. Simple as that.
And i'm not going to "subscribe" to every fucking website I visit *AND GIVE THEM ALL MY PERSONAL DATA SO THEY CAN BILL MY CREDIT CARD* just because some fucking nerd on slashdot doesn't like ads.
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It depends on the value the site provides, and the difficulty of it being cloned. Top newspapers are doing quite well with digital subscriptions, and they don't even give subscribers an ad-free experience. And I'm amazed at the success with which free-to-play games sell cosmetic items — selling to susceptible kids helps here. Then there's the paid exclusive content and free lure model [nytimes.com].
Also, companies like Apple and PayPal allow one to set up regular payments without anyone else getting credit card
Re: Devils advocate / rant (Score:2)
No. It just doesn't work that way. You propose only one person (the first one) can do "something" and the rest are just clones.
Also you're denying of access to information to the 90% of the world's population. The people who simply cannot afford to pay for every website they visit. not to mention all the people who simply don't have credit cards (newsflash: CCs are rare outside the "first world" and the issued cards usually are only local or national. International cards have requirements 90% of the world's
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Everyone not first, but inspired by the first, is by definition a clone in some way. But here we're talking about how the ease with which a service can be both cloned and indirectly funded creates competitive pressure against a paywall.
Poverty means not being able to buy a lot of things. Is information special? Governments can always provide or subsidise important sources of information if they don't want the poor to suffer an advertising ghetto while the rich go ad-free (where ad-blocking is hard or unp
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OK, so since Little Special Snowflake doesn't like ads, governments around the world have to work to pay for content for their citizens to consume.
Nothing can go wrong with such plan.
Nothing.
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If you can't get people to donate because they love what you're doing, what you're doing isn't valuable to them or unique enough to differentiate you from others.
It's a harsh truth. And if you want to do it no matter what, great. That's a nice hobby that makes you happy. But don't complain that your viewers aren't supporting you if you're in this for a hobby.
That said, have you tried Patreon? I keep spending more and more money there on people doing shit I enjoy seeing. Music, comics, videos, educational se
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I don't have premium memberships on any sites, not necessarily because I don't think they're worth it (often the fees are rather modest), but simply because I hate setting up an account, giving them my email address and personal info, risking my credit card data (and not being sure there won't be automatic renewals that are nearly impossible to stop), etc.
One possibility I might consider is buying a membership from a third party like Amazon, something like a gift card, where a code number gives me access
Belief vs opionon? (Score:2)
Why does Forbes use the term "believe is morally wrong", when this is a question about opinion?
It seems to me that they want to hammer their own opinion into the heads of the readers, and belittle those with one that is different from theirs.
Bad form. A new low.
Leading questions (Score:2)
When the question is "If a company loses my personal data/information I feel inclined to blame them above anyone else, even the hacker", the results aren't that surprising.
This survey feels truly meaningless to me. I doubt that many people truly prefer non-targeted ads or generic feeds. Sure, people might dislike ads in general, or hate it when targeting fails, which is what often happens, but that doesn't make targeting unethical.
Not creepy, just oddly useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose I'm in the market for a new camera lens. I google for tech reviews and user critiques. I make a choice, and then jump onto Amazon.
A week after my new lens arrives, every online ad I see is suddenly for the lenses I searched for, including all the ones I didn't buy. What have all these advertisers bought from Google, exactly? While I'm out on the trail shooting with my new lens, they are funneling targeted ads they paid a premium for to a target market that no longer exists.
Internet equivalent of a hawker in your face (Score:2)
It would have been fine if it was for my benefit (Score:2)
If personalized ads was for my benefit I would have been okay with it, but right now it is strictly for the benefit of the advertiser.
Right now we have a situation where financially literate people looking to borrow money see ads from serious lenders with competitive rates,
whereas people who are not financially literate get to see ads from predatory lenders and scams.
These are exactly the people that need help finding the good options, and the advertisers take advantage of them.
stalking (Score:2)
it's called stalking and it's against the law in lots of places.
I feel threatened when I know someone or some company is perpetually watching me and interacting with me in a way I don't want or like.
Call me paranoid ? I'd be paranoid if it was just in my head.
They are mostly doing it to steal money from me.
Re: (Score:2)
The only way you're going to get what you want, is if you stay offline, and cancel your TV service.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Would you do without home Internet? (Score:2)
Would you accept not having Internet access at home? If, as you suggest, there were "no ads. For anything. Ever", there would likely not be enough economies of scale for your cable company to continue to offer affordable Internet access to your residence. Adblock Plus will not protect you from the "You are offline" notice.
Re: It's okay (Score:5, Insightful)
For marketers, the holy grail is getting some idiot to want something that they won't actually ever need or use.
Re: (Score:2)
Yours and the GP's descriptions aren't mutually exclusive. The goal is always to sell *your* product. If that is at the expense of the competition then so be it. Being in the position to actually *want* to buy said product makes the advertising hugely more likely to succeed.
e.g. Marketers can pump information about Tylenol towards me all they won't. It still won't make me want to buy their product. On the flip side Facebook spamming me with suggested posts about "this company just reinvented how to control
Re: (Score:2)
Good advice.
Maybe start lobbying to exempt people working in that industry from laws concerning murder. Make it legal to hunt them for fun and profit.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in the same boat. I just tried to think of some ads I know I saw recently, and I honestly can't really remember. Some sort of drug ad with a lot of side effects, wife was watching a home improvement show, so I think one about paint?
I know there are a lot of vehicle ones, but I can't tell you which was honda and which was toyota. I know chevy is running a pile of "people surprised that it's a chevy" ads, but I couldn't tell you what models they were. And ford is lying about their new aluminum F-150 by ca