From the readings and in your experience, what ethical concerns (if any) do you have with online advertising? How is it performed and what methods are utilized to aggregate and analyze information? Considering the Internet meme that If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold: What protections should companies provide over user data? Who owns that data and who controls it? Should companies be able to sell that data to third parties? Should they share the information with the government when requested? Do find online advertising too invasive or tolerable? Do you use things like NoScript or Adblock? Why or why not? Is it ethical to use these tools?
I recently heard We Know What You Did on Reply All, where the inventor of online popup ad discussed its history and apologized for the unpredicted advertising chaos that ensued. Online advertising has accompanied the entire history of the world wide web as a solution to the free service that many websites provided, and by now it’s almost the business plan for every popular internet company: provide free contents and generate revenue through ads. Since we’re enjoying the free service provided by all the internet companies, it’s hard to argue against the point of view, that we should watch ads online.
But I confess: as I’m writing this blog post, I’m currently using uBlock to block unwanted online ads, and Ghostery to block trackers. I have whitelisted a few websites on which ads don’t distract me, but for the most part, I hate online advertising.
I have no problem watching ads, though. I’m fascinated by the advertising industry (and I wanted to work in it for a long while), and I don’t click “skip” on interesting YouTube ads. Ads themselves are not the problem—many people subscribe to magazines like GQ and Vogue, which are packed with hundreds of pages of fashion ads; even more people watch the Super Bowl, many just for the ads.
I’m not against companies learning about me (as long as they’re not personally identifiable) if the ads they push to me are relevant, well-designed, and not distracting. I whitelist websites for this exact reason—some websites accept only high-quality ads that are relevant to their contents, and I’m happy to see them flourish. But when websites shove total garbage in my face, I don’t think they can blame me for using ad and tracker blockers.
The root problem with online ads is that they have no taste whatsoever. Traditional print and TV ads are instruments for educating desire; online ads are tools to make money. They’re an afterthought, a damage control mechanism, an utterly undesigned stew of greed. And to compensate for this lack of design, companies try to collect data about the users and “tailor” the ads to their interest, while in reality, these tailored ads rarely interest me either. It’s only creepy when I added a headphone to my cart on Amazon some day, and the next day an ad about the same headphone popped up on my Facebook timeline. No thought went into the creation of these ads; online ad platforms are developed to maximize exposure, rather than to stimulate interest.
You know what else works this way, by maximizing exposure rather than curating content? Emails from Nigerian princes.
Conundrum 