Only 17% of consumers believe personalized ads are ethical, survey says (2019)

I don't think it is a good sign.

I think it shows that, even if your personal information is quietly being abused, individual businesses will still prioritise spamming you.

So, even if you willingly give up your personal information in exchange for personalised ads, you will never see the claimed benefit to you.

One side of the contract is broken.

How effective is spam? From the perspective of the spammer, it's effective enough.

In both cases, these forms of "business" are certainly effective in annoying a large number of people, a tradeoff the operators apparently deem worthy of making.

Does it really though? I would expect a successfully manipulative algorithm to be much more subtle than this; just because we don't notice it, doesn't mean it's not there.

Assuming you're correct about the technical points of efficacy, we can still turn this around as a social problem and hypothesize that the willingness to use unproven, annoying targeted ads directly correlates to the willingness to use intrusive mass surveillance.

You bought a vacuum here are more vacuums might directly translate to you attended a protest so you're a permanent malcontent. Worse yet, the "metrics" of social monitoring aren't as black-and-white as future purchases, so badly-used surveillance might falsely think itself useful simply through confirmation biases.

Basically, applied sociology.

They can't get that directly with the current state of the Internet, so they have to rely on hacks.

Or ... perhaps they do this selectively to quiet the informed few :)

Sadly this sounds like it's perfectly WAI.

> I also once got ads from Jordan Pertsons thing... WOW HOW WRONG CAN IT GET

I mean, what's wrong with that from a marketing perspective? He has a fair few female fans so the targeting can't be that wrong.

a) they've got a model that has learned that people who buy X tend to buy X again, and

b) they don't have a model that can properly distinguish between classes of X for which this is true and classes of X for which it isn't. They are aware of the problem and have made several attempts to fix it over the years but the results have never been sufficiently compelling to incorporate into the actual recommendation model in prod

The problem is, it's hard to distinguish for an algorithm. Vacuums no, but tools or kitchen gadgets, maybe

I'm an avid consumer but I believe my interests are best served by a pull model where I research the things I want to get best in class. Then anything that spends an excessive amount of effort on advertising is wasting their budget which could go toward a better product and lower prices! So that helps me avoid advertising driven products, as well as advertising. #winning :D

If I bought a vaccum maybe I want vacuum accessories, or vacuum bags (if it's not a reusable), or maybe I want more appliances for the house, and so on.

Also, how much of that 1.5T is because of AWS?

Now I don't think Amazon is stupid so there must be a reason for this experience.

I also think they know something we don't.

Once in a while, I have to use a browser that doesn't have uBlock origin, on a network I don't have PiHole running on.

And then I must scream.

when i look through the newspaper or a skate mag, not only is the user experience considerably better but my eyeballs-to-purchase rate is much higher with completely non targeted advertisements that don't flash, pop out or scream at me. this is the most frustrating thing too, advertising does not have to suck. ime pretty much any enthusiast sports publication is about 60+ percent advertising, maybe more depending on if you consider any kind of feature about a team or a brand to be advertising in of itself as well e.g. >https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-...

RSA bought this survey. They're an internet security company. They didn't "research" this for any reason other than the fact that this press release is good for their bottom line.

Conclusion: they don't dislike it to the point of actually closing the account. Possible factor: everyone they know uses Facebook, so they're hostages of their social network - the so called network effect.

Corollary: they don't really know what Facebook is doing, nor do they have time/energy to care, but if they did, they wouldn't be able to act on it - see point about network effects.

How do you separate the two? How can the ads be personally targetted without that data collection and sharing?

I have no objection to adverts relevant to what I'm doing right now. Adverts for DB related books, cloud services, other techie things, etc... while looking at a database related article? Fine. Following me around other bits of my life, not fine.

I don't mind a waiter trying to upsell me a bottle of wine while I'm ordering a meal in a restaurant. I would object if the waiter followed me home, via the supermarket to watch what I was buying there, and knocked on the door to suggest I buy a drink from him while I was cooking dinner.

Tracking, targetting, data collection. Mass scale cyberstalking.

> Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection

From the article -

"A massive majority of consumers believe that using their data to personalize ads is unethical."

The article appears to be all about the data collection.

To me, the biggest issue with targeted ads is opinion or political manipulation, which is much more effective with a targeted user profile.

All social media enables/encourages this to a certain degree and I think the personal touch and reach that individuals give to the products they promote is potentially far more subtle and harmful than the banner ads we typically think of as problematic.

You might not be able to change an individual's choices by very much, but all these tiny nudges in aggregate push society more and more towards unsustainable levels of consumption, without improving happiness.

My problem is not that I want to see ads that are more "relevant", it's that I don't want to see ads. I don't care what you're selling. If my problem that you're trying to solve is really that important, I'd be actively searching for a solution, not waiting to be enlightened by a targeted advert.

Adtech evangelists seem to think that my biggest problem is a burning surplus of cash that I'm just desperate to get rid of. If only I could find more products to buy so I could be liberated from the pain of having money in the bank! Er, no thanks. I'll put my spare cash towards saving for a house and retirement and the occasional luxury; save your bullshit for the people who don't know how to install Adblock.

(The other way I use my spare cash on is to pay directly for content, because almost everything that's wrong with the Internet and modern media is the fault of the current ad-driven paradigm, and only future I want to live in is one where ads are dead.)

The whole point of advertising is getting conversions: convincing people who previously weren't going to buy your product that they should buy your product.

Some of the people that are converted just didn't know about your product, some had forgotten about it, some thought a competitors product was better, etc. So there is a sense in which the vast majority of people you convert aren't people who specifically "don't want" your product. And you're definitely right that this isn't Inception-tier infiltration of the mind. But at the same time, the conversions you are trying to get are the people who don't want your product yet, but just need a tiny push to want it.

But it's quite likely that the majority, or at least plurality, of ad spending goes to the changing minds kind of campaign. This is especially visible in the massive popularity of lifestyle marketing campaigns, that seek to create a particular image making a product (or even type of product) more desirable. Think of the Coca Cola Christmas, "green" cars, hyper-technologized "smart" fridges/washing machines, fashion brands, Apple's success a few years ago in convincing people to change their phone each year etc.

You also shouldn't forget the disgusting world of children's advertising, where often the goal is to convince children to nag their parents or friends about an item - often by explicitly showing this type of behavior, which works wonders with small children especially.

Yes and no.

The problem with digital advertising is that the only part that's easy to measure is what's happening at the bottom of the funnel. Which means that a disproportionate amount of effort and attention gets spent on those campaigns.

There's a whole layer of awareness advertising which, while it's not about influencing behaviour, is certainly about building consumer awareness of a brand or product to later build purchase intent.

Oh please.

Targeted ads are like following people around, tracking everything they do, then interrupting them as they go about their business to interject your commercial "message" about something you think you can sell them for a profit, regardless of genuine need.

They are absolutely nothing like interaction between friends.

The Mad Man series are about an advertisement company in the fifties.

That's a "motte and bailey" defense of advertising, though. If the stated main objective of connecting (existing) buyers and sellers were true, almost all ads would be restricted to opt-in forms like trade shows and catalogs (be it paper or digital). After all, it makes sense to let a buyer self-identify before spending money and effort on informing them about your wares.

The actual primary objective of most advertising, as demonstrated in the real world[0], is to create new buyers, and recapture those you buy from your competition.

> The problems with digital ads is that they are deceptive, clickbait, annoying, (...) ugly (...).

That's started way before digital. Check out pictures of some old newspapers or billboards from a century ago - that was "clickbait" 100 years ago too. It does read strange (all that presumptuous and grandiose language), but it's only because we've became culturally immune to that kind of wording. More recently, I'd argue TV ads were and are the worst - the current form was refined into pure and unadulterated brainwashing. On-line at least mostly spares us that.

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[0] - "The purpose of a system is what it does". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...