Neither Facebook nor Google “sells user data”. Why would they? There is value in having sole access to the data. They sell access to you based on the data they collect.
In this case, I would say FB is more in the side of the angels than Google. People knowingly give FB information about them
The last thing I want to do is to start a flame war, but I know a lot about this field and it’s been my observation that it’s both important and kind of opaque.
I would be happy to answer questions (within some fairly broad guidelines of proprietary information) in as much detail as anyone would like.
Everything from the technology to the organizational imperatives to the competitive landscape is actually quite complex and nuanced.
I have no ambition of informing folks’ moral judgements (I have my own), but on average it’s probably better if moral judgements are informed by detailed understanding.
So all the ads in newspapers and on television and in sports venues and public spaces and...don't work? Or did you just mean ads are less cost effective without tracking-based targeting?
Ads are much more valuable and higher click through vs impression if they’re personalized.
Small businesses are willing to give more money per ad campaign if they know they’ll get clickthru on a specific target market. These same small businesses don’t have the money to run long ad campaigns which would result in less clicks.
sell the ads in newspapers? is this the 1950s? j/k
Seriously though, what newspaper(s) would you honestly be willing to spend ad dollars with (and for what products) thinking that this would be a good investment? Geritol? Now, if your suggestion is buying newspaper ads would then get ads in their digital versions as well, then maybe. However, seems to me that most viewers of news sites are from link aggregators more than just readers of a website. Not sure how that would affect ad placement.
TV and podcasts are moving towards surveillance based advertising too. Look at the rise of smart TV's, cable, and streaming services that require identification and location as well as the various ad supported podcast players.
Your are correct if you are using over the air TV or Kodi and if you use FOSS podcast players such as Antennapod or Podverse.
>TV and podcasts are moving towards surveillance based advertising too.
Everything is moving this way. It's only a natural desire for those spending money on advertsing to want to know if the money is being spent effectively, or if they'd be just as well off lighting cigars with $100 bills.
The lure of targeting, tracking (ad effectiveness, not people per se), etc is just too inticing for those non-techies that haven't pulled back the curtain to see that the all powerful wizard isn't wearing any clothes (to mix metaphors). Those of a certain age that depended on Nielsen ratings and what not buying TV/Radio ad time were always very interested in knowing how effective the ad buy really was. Then, the digital ads folks come along telling them they can hit exactly the demo they want to target and then show click through rates, etc. It's like a dream come true with a cherry on top under a rainbow with the leprechaun delivering a pot of gold riding on the unicorn's back. They all bit hard hook,line,and sinker.
Fair enough. But you do notice that newspapers are still the most popular way for CPG goods like P&G to advertise where they don’t have to target or track.
Some people claim, without much proof, that ads without tracking are less effective. We don't care and would prefer to see their business model fail than to maintain the status quo. That is the point here.
Weren't there even studies showing, that context based advertising is on par with personalized (based on tracking your every move) advertising?
I strongly suspect that might be the case. I also believe that social networks could - in theory - create effective advertising possibilities without the need to target user properties.
Take my experience with Instagram. When I am looking at mostly typography related posts, it tends to work well if they show me paid ads for interesting fonts. But when they show these to me, when I am looking at gardening content, I tend to be irritated and ignore them.
I know - I am talking anecdata here - but maybe there could be a way to not target users, but target topics and hit the users that move through these topics (so to speak).
One problem, though, I see with this approach is when you want to create a longing in somebody who never before had the idea that he/she would like to have a cool new font (to stay with my example). Or the next "hot" stuff from some global brand (or what they believe that i should want to feel cool).
But as said - I can't find the studies I seem to remember right now on the effectiveness of context based advertising compared to personalized advertising. So I am not sure if this was just my imagination.
The vast majority of people love ad supported services. They prefer free/low cost to expensive and express this preference regularly. They don't think advertising is evil, and in fact many people voluntarily wear adverts on their own clothes.
Online advertising pays for a massive amount of stuff. If it dies, then the outcome is not "everything stays the same but somehow better". The outcome is that a lot of services we take for granted go away and either don't come back at all, or come back far worse because their market is now much smaller and only rich people pay for it.
To put this in perspective, when I worked at Google they had a prototype internal service that let you "buy" your way out of seeing ads by bidding against yourself in the auction. The idea was to allow people to pay for an ad-free internet, but without making users freeloaders on the services they used (that's ad blocking and exists already). I thought, what a great idea. I'll sign up. Result: to get rid of a just a fraction of all the ads I was seeing online (my guess, ~20% of ads I saw were served by Google) would have costed $200-$300 per month.
After seeing the scale at which advertisers were subsidizing my online experience, I lost interest, as did everyone else. Paying 4x as much as my entire normal internet bill just to see fewer ads, not even get ridding of all of them, just wasn't worth it.
The reality is that the public aren't demanding restrictions on online advertising. They don't care. They like free stuff and they've got nothing against advertisers. This is a war being waged for political and commercial reasons, dressed up as consumer protection, and if/when it actually starts to bite in visible ways, a whole lot of people are going to be mighty shocked at how upset the public will get.
The public would certainly got upset with the idea above. Fortunately that idea has nothing to do with reality - we don’t need to bid ransom to Google to make it stop tracking, same way we don’t have to bid against car thieves to get our cars back.
The most efficient way to solve climate change is to provide every user in the planet the exact amount of goods/services that solves a user's need at the exact time.
This eliminates all the redundant transportation, housing, waste (food, cloths, electronics, equipment)
And the only way to provide is that through tracking (both history and intent).
No, the most efficient way to solve climate change is for people to consume less crap; this reduces far more wasted resources. There is no need to give up your privacy and no need for corrupt middlemen to track you.
I have always been a bit skeptical of off-site data producing serious lift in VCG auction clearing prices for in-feed units, but I’m also pretty out of date.
Selling user data (for ads) IS the problem.
No one would collect and store massive amounts of data if not to make a profit selling it.
They would only collect things that are useful in improving the product.
That kind of tracking IS valuable.