Targeted advertising - evil surveillance or marketing tool?

Have you ever looked after a product on Amazon and later you see an ad for that product on your Facebook? Or searched online after some things and later you see those things again and again in form of advertising everywhere you go? Well that's targeted advertising, at least a form of it.

Targeted advertising comes in many flavors, some subtle, some annoying and some more obtrusive. I wouldn't go into the direction of conspiracy theory, even if this is the easiest way and the internet is full of that, but I would go more on an analytic view or approach.



First of all you are a number, many times you are not even in a database, they don't know who you are. How? Easy, take your sister's or girlfriend's laptop and you will see everywhere only ads for clothing and female stuff, only after few days of using you will start to see those automotive ads and boy stuff, or if you surf intensive on automakers websites you can see instant results. Make another test, go through a fresh browser or anonymizer  - suddenly you won't see those ads, you will see others. See? They don't know who you are in a magic way because then you will be targeted in the same way regardless of the computer you use, country you are in and browser.

I have seen countless articles written by journalists and other bloggers who probably studied social sciences, and still the "if" function is a secret for them, who are saying that this is the devil's weapon, we are under surveillance and we are all gonna die. True and false, ok, it is true since we are all gonna die at one point, false comes with the surveillance. And unfortunately this kind of articles are made for the same reason targeted advertising was made, to sell and sell big.
Actually talking just on a basic use of internet, without accounts or social media .... just browsing for info or entertainment and not being logged on your chrome account and other things, there is no real surveillance of your private person.. You are just a number, maybe not even stored in a database, what you will see as targeted ads will be based on the cookies stored in the browser. You can say now that "oh, and by IP!?!?". Yes, is again true and false. Is true because the IP is used for geolocation, so they know to serve ads in a certain language and is false and irrelevant when your ISP does not provide you with an static IP. You have an internal IP in the network of your ISP but all of the computers from the network are going out with the same static IP of the internet gateway, this means that all customers of that ISP will have the same IP address as seen outside the network, from the internet. So, do you think that having one IP for thousands is relevant or worth to be used? Yes, like I said, only for geolocation and even that can be false. At my job I always have an IP from UK, because there is our gateway and I am not even close to UK. At home I have an IP from a city which is about 600 Km distance.
How can you be paranoid and say that you are known just by IP? Ok, as police searches they can get deeper into the server logs, but not every time successful, to see which internal IP had a request for a certain page at a certain time, and then go back on the chain to see who had assigned that internal IP at that time. I can assure you is not easy to get and to find and no ad company wastes time and money with this shit. They go easy and cheap.

Now comes the cheap part, and is totally your fault to be in a database. Yes, that's right, your own fault. I will not do here another Facebook evil plan theory, this is again forged by some guys who have interests in stopping Facebook, because ALL of them are doing the same: Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Bing ...you name it. And sometime those are just the front names because all of them are working with "third party providers" companies that you never heard of and probably never will that own huge amounts of analytic data and statistics in order to target you.

When you open an account on a social platform, for the respective social platform is easy to target you and fit you into the demographics, you declare your gender, date of birth, interests, religion and you start to interact with their platform and like and share things. You automatically get a code number and you are in a demographic database. They don't care about your name, trust me! You are just a number, and because you receive a free service and you are happy to have it for free you don't think that nothing is free, they have to pay development teams, servers, server space, internet and the entire infrastructure. If your "free" provider has a technical issue you start to shout that they should fix it as soon as possible, like you have invested millions in that company, so they have to pay someone to fix it, how do you think is this possible? Would you work for free? If yes, please give me a message, I have a job for you!

Back to our list, so you are now a number in a database, and comes an advertiser, wants to have some ads but his target group is, lets say, females - 20-30 years old ... if you fit into description here you go, you will have the ads. There are also other techniques and I will cover them in other post. Now you say they spy on you, you feel it ... but you gave them all the information, no one spied on you, you are account number 102654897 and female, awesome. Is not too far from the street targeted advertising where a guy has to give flyers only to males, businessman look or at least a mid range job in a company, between 35 and 50 years old. The guy is not spying you, is just assessing your looks to see if you fit into the profile. You fit, you get the flyer, you don't then he skips you. The online guy who has to give you flyers can't see you so then are used those demographic things mixed with some cookies and some predictive parameters. Not rocket science, is arguable if the online guy or the offline knows more about you. Online guy for sure can know more about your browser than about you, while the offline guy knows how you look. Now imagine you use the same computer with your girlfriend or wife and kids. The online flyer guy will have a very cloudy and contradictory image about you, will have a problem in giving a flyer for kids, for females or for males and probably will pick one and whoever sits at the computer receives it. Now, you are in park with the family, your wife and two kids ... the offline guy knows how you look, if you have a sexy wife, which gender are your kids, which age, how they look, how you look as a family so he can give you the flyer that fits you, and knows everything about you (what can be seen from a first look, and trust me can be seen a lot) and he can flirt with your wife too.

Who knows more about you? Is this targeted advertising just a marketing tool or an evil plan to conquer the world? Actually before internet was telephone, you were in the phone book with name, address and phone number so actually any homeless guy could come at your door and really spy on you. Today you are a number with some attached demographics, can be more personal at the first look but in the same time no one knows where you live just based on demographics, I can't come at your door. You can say that yes the company that has the data base has also your name, even if is not given to the advertising company. True, but the same is with your mobile phone provider, your electricity company and all the other companies you signed a contract with.

Note: I worked for an online market research company, we worked with panel providers, giving us lists with people that registered with them to be respondents (so, free willing) and still I never received names, addresses and other info, just what I asked for: females or males, certain age, certain interests. I didn't know who they were and I didn't cared to know, my job was  done, I was happy, the client was happy, the provider was happy and the respondents could choose to ignore our survey or participate, just like with ads, I can ignore them or I can interact with them.