> I suspect we as a society need new legislation to deal with these sort of issues.
Why not ban targeted advertising altogether?
Why not ban targeted advertising altogether?
Targeted advertising is like the difference between spam and spear phising. The person being advertised to rarely (if ever) benefits.
Of course the abuses are also plentiful and dangerous. We probably do need a lot of regulation. But in general targeted advertisement is a useful thing to have.
This, like TV, doesn't require tracking of individual people who haven't consented to such.
That's a stretch. How do you think they determine any information about the "known" audience? Obviously, they do all sorts of research to determine more about the audiences watching certain shows and channels, likely by sifting through social media, show reviews (IMDB, etc), and elsewhere to determine who's watching what shows, then looking into their profiles to determine their interests. Aggregate that data, find what they all have mostly in common, and cater to those interests. It's just a more generalized and difficult process of the same thing, and eventually it's going to become more narrowed and specific to individual targets.
I can also have a discussion with my friends about My Little Pony and how amazing the last episode was without an algorithm picking that up, unless I publish it to the world or explicitly send it to the advertiser.
Instagram has gotten so good at targeting me that I probably click on at least 1/2 the ads because I find them interesting. I've purchased things because of those clicks too, and have enjoyed the purchases. Things I would have never known about were it not for the ads.
And so targeting didn't work!
Yes, "targeting" can put stuff in front of your eyeballs that may occasionally have marginal utility, but for sales? Nu uh.
In the baby/bathwater metaphor, you saw some ads for strollers. Still no baby.
Ads targeted to an individual without that individual's consent should probably be banned. In addition, the law should make it clear that when a company does hold data about individuals, the individual should have some rights to that data including the ability to block the sharing or transfer of that data.
So, when Google buys FitBit, every user of FitBit should have to explicitly opt-in to their data being transferred to Google.
If you want to inform me, just give me a website I can visit where I can enter my needs and provide perhaps some context information, and which deletes/forgets this information when I leave. There is no need AT ALL to figure this info out behind my back.