Re: Devil's advocate
I get your point, but I don't really want the required data to be known by the advertisers. By extension, I am willing to accept that the ads will primarily be pointless to me. Since I haven't had many useful ads show up, that's not super new.
For example, I am willing to accept amazon's suggestions. I mostly ignore them, but I'm willing for that targeting to happen because:
a. The data is data I knowingly gave them. It's based on things I bought from them and nothing else. If I wanted, I could not buy some things from them to mess up the data, or even just buy them from a local establishment. I chose amazon, so they have the right in my mind to remember what I bought from them and suggest things to me. Equally, I have the right to ignore them, which I do most of the time. The same is true of your local grocer--they may remember what you like or what you've talked about, but if they tracked you to your holiday destination, watched you enjoy some fresh fruit, then used that knowledge to tell you about the fruit they had available, you'd find that creepy even if you did want to buy that fruit.
b. They don't track me around. Even if I'm signed in to my amazon account, they don't have sneaky little code pieces running all over the place to see what I'm doing outside their system (as far as I know). I'm relatively confident that, by signing out and clearing data, that anything sneaky they do is going to fail. I'm also trusting them not to be buying information on me that other companies stole.
c. The advertisements aren't intrusive; they're on amazon and nowhere else. If I go to a different page, they don't follow me (ads from other things will follow me from my amazon page, but that's because google/facebook ad networks tracked me there, not because of amazon).
d. To the best of my knowledge, they aren't packaging up that data and selling it to other people. I assume they aren't doing this because it seems to me that that might hurt their business (if I'm buying from someone else, I'm not buying from amazon).
I'm sure amazon does lots of evil things, and I limit their entrance as much as I can. However, none of those points apply to other sites. Google and facebook do significantly more creepy things to get my data, like attempting to track my browsing, buying information on me as I don't have an account for facebook, and copying information others who know me can provide. I have little control on what they do, any control I do have requires me to change things I do often (for example, not using google search), and I have no clue how much info they have, nor what info that is, nor what they are doing with it.
I hope this is helpful in understanding how I think about this.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
