You search Google for “sunglasses.” You browse for a while. You look at a few on Amazon, a few on Ray-Ban’s website and ultimately decide to leave the purchase for another day. But now every website with Google AdSense, like the sidebar on Facebook, offers you sunglasses. It’s called targeted advertising, and even if you might think it’s annoying, computers seem to know us better than we know ourselves. I’m okay with big data as long as it’s good data.
The targeted advertising you see on Facebook is collected from your browsing history when you view a retail website. Your browser, Chrome, Firefox or whatever you may be using, submits information about what you’re looking at to third-party advertising networks, like doubleclick.net. To make a long story short, you are tracked all over the internet via cookies, small bits of information tied to your digital identity, which let advertisers know what you’re looking at, when you’re looking at it and if you allow location services, where you’re looking at it from.
Using all that data to sell you things isn’t necessarily a bad thing in my book. Think of it like this: Web browsing is annoying enough as it is. Even with all our desperate, millennial-minded tactics of using AdBlock and related extensions to remove ads from our web experience, some websites require you to disable it to use them. Think of sites like bibme.org that a lot of us use to compile and format APA citations. Advertising can be disruptive and often annoying, but plenty of journalism websites, like those of The New York Times and The Washington Post, heck even The Independent Florida Alligator, use ads to make money.
Do you really want your browsing experience to be full of ads for things that have no relevance to you?
I want to support The Times and The Post, but I don’t want to be bombarded with annoying ads for a new car, especially when I’m not in the market for one. I’d much rather my browser and internet service provider sell my data to advertisers so I can get a glimpse of sunglasses instead. Advertising, despite our best attempts to quash it, will never perish from the earth. We can only make a best effort at keeping it from being rage inducing.
It’s easy to be scared of technology. The long-running meme is that there is an FBI agent constantly watching over you through the camera in your phone or your laptop. There are valid privacy concerns as well. But provided we do a good job of regulating it, I think the “creepy” ads that pop up to follow you on Facebook aren’t creepy at all. They are the future of a more pleasant internet.
Stephan Chamberlin is a UF political science junior. His column comes out Tuesday and Thursday.
