Difference between revisions of "Digital Privacy associated with advertisements"

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−	Everyone leaves a data trail behind on the internet. Every time someone creates a new social media account, they provide personal information that can include their name, birthdate, geographic location, and personal interests. In addition, companies collect data on user behaviors: when, where, and how users interact with their platform. All of this data is stored and leveraged by companies to better target advertising to their users. Sometimes, companies share users’ data with third-party entities, often without users’ knowledge or consent. <ref>https://sopa.tulane.edu/blog/key-social-media-privacy-issues-2020</ref>	+	Social Media can get to know a user's private information by data mining. Everyone can be tracked by the trail the leave on the internet. Users provide personal information that can include their name, birthdate, geographic location, and personal interests when they make an account. Additionally, companies collect data on user behaviors about how users interact on the website. Companies sometimes even share users’ data with third-party entities without users’ knowledge or consent. <ref>https://sopa.tulane.edu/blog/key-social-media-privacy-issues-2020</ref>
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Revision as of 03:50, 26 January 2022

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. ^[1] Now entering the technology age, Digital privacy becomes more of a concern since people engage in online activities more and more frequently. Digital privacy is often used in contexts that promote advocacy on behalf of individual and consumer privacy rights in e-services and is typically used in opposition to the business practices of many e-marketers, businesses, and companies to collect and use such information and data. ^[2] Entering Internet Age, digital security and privacy become more closely related to every individual.

Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sponsors of advertising are typically businesses wishing to promote their products or services. ^[3] Advertising changes its form in time. In the Internet Age, business gradually switch their advertisement from traditional media to new media, social media advertising for example. The main internet advertisement companies include Alphabet Inc. (Google, YouTube) and Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook, Instagram).

Internet Advertising is closely associated with Digital Privacy these days. Companies use technologies like cookies to get information of the user and use that information to better sell their advertisements. Ethical issues like should companies make profit of user privacy from advertisement always arise these days. "Targeted adverts are one of the biggest moneymakers for Facebook. By utilising the vast amount of personal data from the 1.71 billion active users, the social media giant can tailor adverts to suit your situation." ^[4]

Digital Privacy And Personal Data Collection

The advertisement distribution algorithm relies heavily on personal information these days. The wide application of recommender system, a machine learning-based content delivery algorithm, recommends new content by using the knowledge of user preference. The data used to predict user preference can be user habit or even sensitive data like address and search history. Some companies even benefit from selling these personal information. The ethical concern of digital privacy is highly related to different advertisement algorithms. The concept of Information transparency ^[5] was introduced to measure how much privacy has the platform exposed or utilized. In most of social media platforms, user information is collected unconsciously by the platform in the form of cookies, registration information, user habit, and etc. For example, most of platforms used to not have the option to turn off cookies; now even they provide the option since the law required them to do so, most people won't care and choose to accept all cookies for their convenience. In the perspective of Information transparency, these big tech companies are definitely not transparent enough when they try to collect user information. Users usually don't know how much of their private information has been exposed to the social media platform. For example, in the Yahoo! data breaches ^[6] , a lot of user's private information has been exposed during this attack.

Data Mining

Social Media can get to know a user's private information by data mining. Everyone can be tracked by the trail the leave on the internet. Users provide personal information that can include their name, birthdate, geographic location, and personal interests when they make an account. Additionally, companies collect data on user behaviors about how users interact on the website. Companies sometimes even share users’ data with third-party entities without users’ knowledge or consent. ^[7]

Advertisement Case studies

Google Ads

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google generates most of its revenues from advertising. This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. ^[8] More than 80% of Alphabet’s revenue comes from Google ads, which generated $147 billion in revenue last year. Google has been the market leader in online advertising for well over a decade and is expected to command nearly a 29% share of digital ad spending globally in 2021. ^[9] So Google nearly makes money entirely from advertisement. All other free services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Map are used to better sell advertisements. The famous saying goes "if you don't pay for the product you are the product". Google use a specific sealed second price auction algorithm to sell their ads. For example, Google determine the ranking of advertisement when a user search with a certain term.

YouTube Ads

Scholar and technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci has claimed that "YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century."^[10] As YouTube algorithms aim maximize the amount of time that viewers spend watching, it inevitably discovered that the best way to do this was to show videos that slowly "up the stakes" of the subject being watched - from jogging to ultramarathons, from vegetarianism to veganism, from Trump speeches to white supremacist rants.^[10] Thus, while the intention of Youtube is to keep viewers watching (and bring in advertisement money), they have unintentionally created a site that shows viewers more and more extreme content - contributing to radicalization. Such activity circles back to and produce filters and echo chambers.

Facebook Ads

By taking a closer look at Facebook's algorithm that serves up ads to its users, gender and racial bias is obviously prominent. Using demographic and racial background as factors, Facebook's decides which ads are served up to its users. A team from Northeastern tested to see the algorithm bias in action and by running identical ads with slight tweaks to budget, images, and headings, the ads reached vastly different audiences. Results such as minorities receiving a higher percentage of low-cost housing ads, and women receiving more ads for secretary and nursing jobs ^[11]. Although the intent of Facebook may be to reach people that these ads are intended for, the companies that are signing up to advertise with Facebook have stated they did not anticipate this type of filtering when paying for their services. Additionally, although Facebook may believe it is win-win for everyone since advertisers will be getting more interactions with certain audiences targeted, and people will be happy to see ads more relatable to them shown, it is incredibly discriminatory to target people based on factors that are uncontrollable. Facebook needs to adjust its targeted advertising practices by removing racial and gender factors in their algorithms in order to prevent perpetuating stereotypes and placing people in certain boxes by race and gender. This type of algorithm goes against many ethical principles and is important that powerful technology companies are not setting poor examples for others.

Instagram Ads

Ethical Concerns

References

1. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
2. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_privacy#:~:text=Digital%20privacy%20is%20often%20used,use%20such%20information%20and%20data.
3. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising
4. ↑ https://www.privacytrust.com/blog/how-facebook-makes-money-from-personal-data.html
5. ↑ Turilli, Matteo, and Luciano Floridi (2009). "The Ethics of Information Transparency." Ethics and Information Technology. 11(2): 105-112. doi:10.1007/s10676-009-9187-9.
6. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches
7. ↑ https://sopa.tulane.edu/blog/key-social-media-privacy-issues-2020
8. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
9. ↑ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-advertising-business-breakdown-.html
10. ↑ ^{10.0 10.1} [1] Tufekci, Zeynep. “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 10 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html.
11. ↑ Hao, Karen. “Facebook's Ad-Serving Algorithm Discriminate by Gender and Race.” MIT Technology Review, 5 Apr. 2019, www.technologyreview.com/.