You've Been Targeted

If you've ever used Google to search for something, odds are that you've been targeted. Web sites and services feed advertising to you based on your searches - and in some cases, based on the content of your email or social media messages. This sounds intrusive, but it could actually be a win-win situation. From your perspective, if you are searching for a romantic Parisian hotel for your second honeymoon, advertisements for holiday deals in the French capital might be interesting to you - as a consumer, you win! From another perspective, you are more likely to click on "Romantic hotels in Paris" than you would on "$200 diesel lawnmowers" - advertisers win!

Shall we sit around the browser, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya? Not quite. This cozy consumer/advertiser arrangement does have a few flaws. For starters, targeted advertising is based on search history. Most often, the advertised products and services are those I have already considered. What I really want are purchasing options similar to what I have already searched. So if I searched for "Dell Latitude" laptops, serving up more advertising for "Dell Latitude" might not be particularly helpful. But if the advertising was for "HP Elitebook", or "Lenovo 410", and the advertising mentioned that they are similar models to the one I've been searching for, I might be more inclined to click through.

So much advertising - targeted or not - forces its way onto my websites that I no longer see it. The ubiquitous nature of the advertising has made them invisible to me.

Another problem with this advertising model is that quite often, targeted advertising is completely off the mark. For instance, there was a time when I was doing a lot of uploading to my site, hosted by Bluehost. A lot of my Internet browser history had URLs ending with bluehost.com. Before I knew it, advertising for Bluehost displayed on almost every web site I visited. I already have a Bluehost account. I already know about the services they offer. I certainly don't need to see the special prices they are offering first-time members.

Then there's the big one: privacy. For targeted advertising to work, your online habits need to be analyzed so that meaningful advertising can be pushed to you. The fact that a third-party has this kind of information can be disconcerting. However, the data is completely anonymized. As explained in the following video, the advertisers are not concerned with what your name is, or where you live. Rather, they are solely interested in what interests you. Once they know that, they can advertise those things to you.


You can't outrun advertising. Most companies offer you the option to opt-out from targeted advertising, but that won't stop them from collecting data about you. Opting out just stops them from using your data to advertise to you. You'll still get ads, just not advertisements that are even of the slightest interest to you whatsoever.

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