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Ads, ads and more ads. Ads are everywhere you look- on billboards as you drive down the highway, in the newspaper, spoken about on your favorite radio station, and even on television in between shows. They never seem to go away, and can cause distractions while driving or trying to read an article in the paper.
Being both annoying and bothersome, ads also seem to find a way to sneak into our privacy bubble. For example, companies that rely on real estate market’s for business heard about a house that needs to be sold. All of a sudden, there are multiple spam emails and phone calls about movers and real estate agents who advertise about selling homes, which escalated from your search history on the internet.
In addition, when searching something online like a pair of shoes from a popular brand and then exiting out and searching something totally different, it has come to the realization that those same pair of shoes pop up as an ad after browsing them on the internet. Facebook, for example, could be the root cause of why someone’s previous search history will pop up as an ad on other websites that have been searched about in the past.
I gathered information from an article by Thorin Klosowski called, “How Facebook Uses Your Data To Target Ads, Even Offline” on lifehacker.com, which talked about how Facebook is able to use your data to create ads specific to your interests and recent search history. How this works, is Facebook collects information about your personal status and interests, and creates something called a “targeted ad.” Targeted ads are the advertisements that take the data you provided to the network and offer ads that are in relation to your interests. These ads will get more and more precise, and eventually start grabbing information from other sources. With this in mind, each ad that is clicked engages the viewer’s curiosity, and will soon evolve into more ads that correspond to the one clicked on previously.
The article also explained how Facebook will use someone’s basic demographic information, such as getting engaged or married. For example, if they updated their status saying they were getting married, they'll receive all types of ads about wedding plans and the best places to purchase a wedding dress.
People should not be entitled to post everything about themselves and what their interests are on the internet. If you wanted to know more about someone or something, go see for yourself! Not everything that happens in your life has to be uploaded on the internet. I think it’s unfortunate that whatever people post either online or offline has to be turned into an advertisement for other people to see, which results in violation of their privacy.
Therefore, the more information you upload on the internet, the less privacy you’ll obtain from it. That’s because your interests derive from the types of ads you’ll come across, which is why we should keep our private information to ourselves and from the internet.
Image Courtesy of Revinate