We all know Facebook stalks you all the time. It knows so much about you: from your basic personal information to your friends groups; from your likes and dislikes to your daily life events… But that’s not the whole story. Last week, Facebook announced a new advising platform: Atlas.
Whenever you are browsing the internet, you can see some ads of products which you probably have searched them through search engines or viewed them on online shopping website before. This is what Google, the current dominance of the online ads space, does all the time, using “cookies” to track your search record and present you the one and only featured ads suggestion. The problem is, while cookies can work well on computers, they might not be able to work effectively and accurately on smartphones and tablets, which are the primary devices people are now using.
All marketers are desperately tracking every consumer. Like we discussed in class, advertisers need to keep control of the latest trend, consumers’ taste, behavior and psychology in every moment in order to make optimized marketing decisions and thus maximize their profits. Since people spend more time and more money in mobile, Atlas, aiming at gathering mobile data base, provides advertisers with the new best advertising intermediate tool.
Think about it: a mobile based advertising platform that interacts with Facebook. I cannot deny this is a powerful tool. Facebook and other marketers claim they want to build a people-based market and I have to admit I agree this is a very effective way for them to make marketing strategies.
But is it really good for us, the ultimate consumers? First of all, we can easily question the privacy problem. Honestly, I feel anxious when strangers know so much about me. And will all our information stay safe with them? But secondly, how will it affect our purchasing habits? If marketers and advisers take such dominant positions in the consumption process, consumers are likely to be oppressed. By tracking and presenting, even compelling us with all these ads, we can easily tell ourselves we need these goods and eventually, we will lose the ability to choose on our own and buy what the marketers want us to buy. I am worried about that.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-extends-reach-withad-platform-1411428726
Excellent post, Amy. It's for these reasons that I make it a policy to isolate Facebook in a separate browser from my internet searches, so they gather less information on me. Even then, I know that my Gmail is collecting info on me, and Google in general. Every day we surrender a little bit more of our privacy, and we no longer really seem to care. Shouldn't we? Isn't this gradually looking more and more like 1984? Or Brave New World?
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