- By creative department AdIndia Advertising Kochi
Consider having a chat with your friend about a certain product. Suddenly you receive an ad from a website about the product you were discussing. These situations plant many doubts in our minds. Where we are being forced to ask how our data is being monitored, mined, and sold for company profits.
Being invaded into a person's private life is not a fact that everyone could accept. Even though man is a social being he always likes to have a personal space. He has the right to enjoy his freedom and privacy.
With rapid digitization and the advent of social media, our privacy is intruded upon in numerous ways.
One of the major factors that have become a threat to our privacy is the introduction of “targeted ads”.
Targeted ads are those ads dispatched to distinct groups of people by collecting details on their behavioral trends and patterns. What they do is collect information about the consumer from their web histories. Which they use to study the interests of the consumer and then approach them in the way they wish to engage.
These ads use tools like cookies to track the information about the user. The tool helps to identify the user by monitoring their actions on their websites. Cookies are sent to the browsers of the user by an application known as AdSense. If these cookies are accepted by the user it gets saved in the browser.
The target ads were created by Google to target the advertising business of the 90s. These ads were further promoted to other social media in the future. These ads have a high return on investment and are also more personalized.
Social media targeting is a type of targeting ad in which the information is collected based on the data that have been uploaded on social media by the users. Their accounts will be looked into and then advertisements related to their areas of interest will be sent. One of the ways by which they do this tracking on social media is by monitoring the posts they have liked.
This incursion on privacy varies with the time, according to how the consumer is tracked.
The longer a person is tracked the more specific the ads become. This invasion creates a perilous feeling in people's minds since they are gathering information and sharing it without the consent of the user. Certain surveys conducted by different nations concluded that targeted ads are intrusive and unethical.
There are certain ways by which target ads can be removed. Options to block the cookies that track the information are also available. Use alternative browsers such as Brave and Tor, which ensure that you don't have such cookies tagging your internet activity.
Learn how much of your personal data google tracks by clicking the link below.
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