Week Three

The monetization of surveillance isn’t something I had ever really given a thought to. I knew websites made money off advertisements that were often targeted to myself, but I didn’t know the extent to which targeted advertising affected companies. In the podcast from this week, we find out that Google’s profits increasing over 3500% in a three year period thanks to the introduction and use of targeted advertising. That’s insane. It’s also insane to think about the fact that all that data used to just sit, unused. I think they referred to it as ‘data exhaust.’ It didn’t really occur to me that someone had to think to use this data to a company’s advantage. The fact that Google originally looked down upon online advertising seems a bit off to me, since now whenever you google something, the first few search results are from organizations that have paid loads of money to have their websites pop up first; and that’s not even the targeted advertising being talked about.

The article about Target and the pregnant teen has always been an interesting story to me since the first time I heard about it in high school. To my knowledge, I haven’t ever received a physical catalog or anything from any company I frequent with content catered to me; it always seems to be just a general, whole store catalog. But since I’ve never really thought about it before, I will be interested to see how differently I look at the things I’m sent from now on. I honestly think that it’s very clever of companies to do this targeted advertising. Their goal is to make money, and if they can find ways to do just that, why not do it? People nowadays know that companies are constantly collecting data on them, so we should almost expect things like this to happen. I know that’s not a super popular opinion, but I’m definitely part of that group that says, “Well if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to worry about.”