Author: Daniel Rosenfeld / Source: The Next Web
When the Cambridge Analytica scandal came out, it did more than just shake up Facebook, it stirred the conversation about privacy and brought it front and center. Privacy is a huge subject especially when it plays on the fear of losing it. In a world where hacking has become mainstream, people’s identities are stolen and online fraud has never been easier, it’s clear to see how this fear can spread easily.
But have we taken it too far?We have become a society that can’t live without our social networks, they are part of our daily lives, we wait for new features, spend a huge chunk of our days on them and we get to use them for free, yet the slightest bug or breach and we turn our backs on them without a second thought. We become judge and executioner without truly understanding the issue, why it occurred, and who is at fault. You might not like or agree with me, but it’s time to put down your pitchforks and take a moment to understand who your true ogres are.
As a digital marketer I have used many tools to target and advertise various products online. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google all offer marketers a vast array of advertising tools and targeting methods, from showing up in a person’s search, to their favorite websites, newsfeeds, and even videos. In fact, it’s hard to find an online placement that doesn’t contain some form of advertising.
Whether you like it or not, the truth is advertising is what fuels the internet. Without it we wouldn’t have a Google, a Facebook, or many other sites most of us use daily, they simply wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves.
Imagine if you had to pay a monthly fee for every site you wanted to use, would you still use as many as you do?I think it’s pretty clear that advertising is a necessity to sustain the freemium online world we have grown accustomed to, but that doesn’t help mitigate the fear we have over our privacy. There are many conspiracies when it comes to user data and how it’s acquired such as companies listening to our phone calls and reading our messages, but not many of us understand how it really works, what our data is used for and how.
The most basic and fundamental understanding is that while companies do want to present their customers with individual messaging and content, they do this at scale, meaning if anyone was “listening” or “reading” your calls and messages it would be a machine not a person.
There’s a persistent idea that somewhere someone is sitting and listening in on your call, but with millions of users that would require a huge staff dedicated only to that. In reality, if such practices are done, they are all machine based. The machine listens or reads keywords, those words would then trigger ads that contain the same or similar words. It’s as simple as…
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