Data-driven Ads: Good, Bad, or Ugly?

You’re shopping for something on Amazon until you realize that you’ve been staring at your phone when you should be doing your homework. Naturally, you open your laptop, open Chrome, and browse to Chegg in order to finish your homework assignment. On the sidebar sits the exact same product that you were just browsing for on your phone 2 minutes earlier.

We’ve all been in this place and felt the weirdness of being immersed in virtual connectivity. A lot of people are scared that their shopping habits and preferences are being exploited as a result of companies that have access to their data either using it themselves to market particular goods/services or selling it to a third party who would do the same. While it’s a bit strange, I want to pose the question of whether companies using your past data to run their business is them being proactive or them being invasive of your privacy.

In Mateo Turelli and Luciano Floridi’s The Ethics of Information Transparency, the idea of information being neutral is largely dwelled upon. The example of medical records being objectively neutral but having the ability to be used to either advance medicine or expose a patient to fraud. In this scenario, the information itself is neutral, but the applications adopt either a positive or a negative impact.

To relate this idea to a concept with which many of us might relate, I would like to address the above video.

On the one hand, I don’t think that anyone should have their privacy invaded by sites that want to capture data. If someone wants their information to be private, they should have every right to prohibit sites from collecting their personal information.

On the other hand, I think that data is an incredibly strong driver in economic efficiency. For example, Adidas wants to provide the best experience for their customers that they possibly can. When their customers are watching a soccer match, they would like to be able to provide advertisements for the customer’s preferred team and player in order to create an individualized, relevant experience. I, for one, do not mind this, and in fact, think that it brings efficiency to the market. If you notice that a particular group of people is using a product, why would you not try to advertise that same product to other individuals of similar demographics? I think that a market economy naturally finds its way towards equilibrium at one point or another, and data simply allows for this equilibrium to be reached much faster.

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