So if you are part of the group who sees this as a good thing, I'm genuinely interested to understand why you see this as a good thing and whether you view the mass surveillance of the general public by advertising companies as bad?
Previously, only large brands and national/multi-national corporations could afford to advertise at scale and reach customers through TV/Radio/Newspapers (that too with a high minimum spend).
Now your local mom and pop bakery could have a spend as low as $100 a month to reach their customers and help drive their business.
The world is not black and white, and neither is the morality of advertising.
I hope this perspective was useful to you.
I don't see any indication that advertising online is an industry digging its own grave. On the contrary, the increase in quality of ads over the past 10+ years (especially in terms of unobtrusiveness and relevance) would suggest to me that online advertising is digging its way _out_ of the grave it dug itself with flashy, irrelevant ads throughout the 90s and early 00s.
Then, I started needing analytics for my own business. Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business. Granted, the anti-consumerist in me thinks maybe as a society we shouldn't be so concerned with our efficiency to sell. But, we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
The way I see it now, I'm less concerned about tracking than I am about how big some businesses are -- especially in this space.
At every start up I know, they use analytics, and no one is doing anything spooky. But, I'm sure there's plenty of spooky stuff going on at the FAANGAMUs.
Where do you draw the line? This is parallel to the discussion around government surveillance. Just be cause they / you can, doesn't mean they / you should.
If Internet tracking had no potential use to governments then they'd be regulating the shit out of it. The problem is that governments want their own noses in the same trough, and so all these privacy-invasive technologies continue to be developed. The fact that it's not illegal means that anyone with the ability to implement it can, as long as they can sleep at night.
As to solutions that could help with "selling efficiency", maybe some kind of agreed tiers of analytics from benign to spooky that users can opt-in / opt-out of when visiting a website or using an app. Which GDPR is a bit of a kludgy solution for. The problem is that it only takes one bad advertiser to break agreed rules and the trust is gone again for all advertisers.
One bad apple.
Analytics are unquestionably useful. Collecting the data without user consent is what potentially should be regulated.
The general retort I hear is what do you have to hide? Like the only thing that people want to hide are the bad and evil stuff.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, AirBnb, Microsoft, Uber
?
Edit: M for Microsoft, derp
Uber had that secret API access granted directly from Apple so it could see which apps you had open at all times (in case you opened Lyft) so it could charge you different rates.
AirBNB is similarly large, so I thought they were worth mentioning.
I had this idea of an evil group of people getting together everyday and looking at this data and somehow using it to puppet my entire online-life.
Sure, this group of people exists at every decent sized online company, and sure they're trying to get you to spend more time and money on their site/app/whatever, and sure this tracking data helps them.
Sure, SOME of these websites are peddling fake news or selling scams or preying on the poor/unfortunate/uneducated/etc. But I think that's the exception, not the norm.
Most successful companies make a product people genuinely like. There are millions of people that would buy and enjoy this product if they knew about it. Most companies are just trying to use this tracking data to get their product in front of as many of those people as they can, and as few people that don't want their product. They're trying to fine-tune their messaging to make sure it appeals to the people that actually like their product. They're trying to use it to figure out how to BETTER make a product people actually want!
Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it wants.
Like everyone says, Capitalism is the worst economic system, except all the others we've tried.
Unfortunately, I've seen too many product decisions catering to the manipulative aspects of adtech. UX often suffers, not improves with ads. Online platforms all seem to follow the same game ad monetization plan these days which results in messes like Frankensteinish apps--see official Twitter app.
As for actual hands on manufactured products or services, I'd like to know how ads improved the UX.
I guess your summary is about right.
> we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
We were living in a capitalist world two decades ago, and we didn't have a significant amount of tracking back then. If you are concerned about your competition using tracking, then just try to make a better product.
Analytics can give you a decent glimpse of revealed preferences, which may or may not be what you're after.
Whether or not this is a good thing, depends on a lot of subjectivity, sure. But suppose you run a porn site - if you asked most users what they wanted in porn (before they had seen any), they would probably say one thing. If you examine what kinds of videos people look at, you'll see another. (This theme, with actual data from pornhub, is explored at length in the book "Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.)
Both routes (asking and instrumenting) have their uses.
I'm kidding of course, but the idea is that analytics tell you a part off the user story, but doesn't answer the deeper "why" questions. It certainly has a place in tech, but it's less than what it's currently afforded.
There's a flawed belief that it's necessary. UX on the other hand suggests otherwise. AdTech is not concerned with UX though and tries to wrap targeting in some kind of pseudo user benefit—spin.
Good products and services sell even without tracking. Advertising is an economic powerhouse though and will always push for anti-UX trends because it fundamentally runs polar opposite to the user experience.
Advertisers study how to sell a product, and the most important product they have to sell is advertising.
However, it's not hard to reason why people whose livelihoods depend on being able to track users and increase the value of their ad inventory would be happy about this.
People are unusually good at separating their personal interests from consumer interests. I've observed this emotion arise in many entrepreneurs first hand, be they in the brick retail, or conventional energy or obsolete auto parts, it's common for people to be happy about events that benefit their livelihood even when it has a negative impact on humanity or that ecosystem.
Those people can go hungry or find another line of work. I have zero compassion for that behavior. Justify it how you want, but most people abhor it.