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The biggest lie that the corporate arm of the mass surveillance system has ever convinced consumers of is that targeted advertisement is done for the consumer’s benefit. The common refrain is “You’ll see advertisements, anyway, isn’t it better to see ones that are relevant to you?”. At a simple level, this seems to be pretty logical. Advertisements are, unfortunately, here to stay as a business model. It fails to consider two very important points about the state of current advertising, however. The first being that it does not consider the trade-off. Sure, you gain advertisements that are relevant to you, but at what cost? As covered in the other sections, the cost is you. It’s your privacy and your personal data that you forfeit to get ads about mildly interesting things you won’t ever buy instead of random things you won’t ever buy. This data ends up in the hands of the US Government which fuels mass surveillance. The second major issue is that it fails to consider the state of modern advertisement. This is a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry with a need to make advertisements as effective as possible. Their tool of the trade for accomplishing this is recommendation algorithms. In the simplest terms, a recommendation algorithm is a piece of code that sees what items you are browsing and recommends ones it determines you are likely to buy. The implementation varies between ad agencies and corporations, but they all share a common issue: bias. Algorithmic bias means that certain datasets reinforce themselves, which make the algorithms less accurate. This can have major ethical concerns that reach far, far beyond the scope of advertisement. From racial injustice in facial recognition AI to gender discrimination in predictive algorithms, the impact of algorithimic bias can have real world impact on marginalized groups. In the scope of advertising, it means that you aren’t truly getting more relevant ads, you’re just getting reinforced ads for whatever recent trend you’ve been searching. This means that ads are neither relevant nor worth their cost. |