Advertisers and ISPs don’t care about privacy (surprise!)
I hate being advertised to. I can’t watch cable TV (which I already pay for), listen to the radio (even subscription satellite radio has ads now), goof off on the internet, play a video game, drive in my car, read a magazine, buy groceries, or check my e-mail/snail mail/answering machine without being bombarded by coupons, billboards, commercials, in-game ads, Google AdWords, spam, telemarketing, and third class junk mail. The sad fact is, advertising is everywhere.
Opinions and research vary widely on the question of how many advertisements Americans see during a typical day, with estimates ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. (via Google Answers) So, it’s no surprise that the advertisement industry is always trying to come up with new and innovative ways to get you to see or listen to their pitch.
One new approach in the internet arena is behavior tracking – a system in which the advertisers work with your ISP to analyze your online behavior to target ads at you (Read about the debate in Congress here). I understand the need of ISPs to maintain logs for legal reasons, but sharing this type of information with anyone, least of all for the purpose of more ads is extremely distasteful to me.
The security problems surrounding spam (another annoying, ubiquitous form of advertising) are difficult enough to deal with. Now I have to deal with (more) privacy implications of ISPs tracking browsing behavior and sharing this with third parties? I wonder how much more degraded the state of security and privacy on the internet has to get before I have to scale back my activities to the essentials, like e-mail and online banking.
And now, for some Futurama:
Leela: Didn’t you have ads in the 21st century?”
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games… and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky.
But not in dreams, no sirree.
July 15th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
The theory on it is that we don’t need to see more ads, we need fewer better directed ads. Right now the mathematics on advertising work out as something ridiculous, like for every one million impressions you have, you make one sale. If the advertising you receive is more aligned with your interests (related to the TV shows you watch, satellite radio channels you listen to, web sites you go to), then maybe that number goes way down to 1000 impressions:sale.
That said, you and I both know, the advertising industry is unlikely to make fewer, better directed ads. They will probably just have more ads.