The advantage and disadvantage of the of the technology
I was shocked when I first saw the article, I feel like I would be watched every minute in my life, even in my home. While, with more research, in the future, if possible I would use the technology to enable the targeting advertising. My reasons are as following.
The advantage of the of the technology is that it can save our time and provide the most suitable choices for us. It is a kind of trade off in nature. with some of their own information to obtain more personalized advertising services. Ideally, accurate advertising should give you the most relevant advertisement, give the advertisement you want most and interested most. It is a service that especially customized for you which benefits can not be underestimated. I think the most important function of advertising, that is saving time. Before you are ready to make shopping decisions, consumers generally are two categories of people: one does not know their needs or certain function of one product, if at this time you just heard or read the advertisement, you don’t need to search online to find the product with certain function. You just realize that it is what you need. The second group people are those who know what they want to buy, let’s say if they want to buy a computer, they can’t decide whether they want to buy apple or Microsoft surface, then you will think the advertisements you have seen or heard and remember that Surface is more suitable for work and apple is kind of fashion. At this point, you would know what you want according to your needs. Throughout the process, if you just go along with all the advertisement and forget to think, it will certainly simplify the shopping process, and save a considerable part of the time. This is the role of advertising, to weaken all the pre-shopping decision-making thinking, simplifying all shopping processes. And accurate advertising is such an advertisement, greatly save your time spending on searching, screening, , verification of information time before shopping, so you have more time to do other stuff.What the verizon do is to draw a three-dimensional portrait for each consumers. The dimensions includes interest, the behavior, purchasing behavior, natural attributes include sex, age, educational background, geographical area, marital status, family status (whether have children or not, children age, etc.), income (personal income, family income), industry, occupation and other information.
The disadvantage of the technology is that in a degree, our privacy can be leaked. While I think the targeting advertising does not violate user privacy, but an application of the the user “privacy” (big data). The ends can justify the means. In the big data area, all of our behaviors are being watched and collected in one way or another. It is almost impossible to stop others from knowing us. In fact, think about it, the user information is already exposed, might as well let others use the information has been exposed to you to provide some services.In the information age, your behavioral data is massive, you can viewed from multiple angels . Your App will leave location information, account ID will leak your identity ID, each search indicates the next act, of course, shopping and consumer data, etc., when the cross-up these information and found that your current period of time behavior is similar to a group of people (already confirmed data) , then others can boldly recommend related ads of a certain type of goods that has been purchased by similar group of people. People should keep an open mind and acknowledge that there is no such thing as privacy in the age of big data. Privacy is a product of specific historical stage, such as, long ago primitive people feel would not feel shy seeing everyone is naked, and now everyone will feel embarrassed if doing so; and in the feudal age, women would not even exposed a arm. So the privacy itself is not that important as we think, of course, we always care about some really private information, but most of the precision advertising will not involved in these information. The collection of the the information is not about obtaining your privacy through mean way but through the mass of not so privacy information (you do not care) it can achieve your information characteristics.
Also as for the autonomy, someone might argue that the technology undermines customers’s autonomy, because in a way, the advertising has influence on our preference. Someone think that the technology enhance customers’ autonomy, for it provide the choices according to our preference. While I think the question here is that whether the choice of purchase is made by me, in the targeting advertisement, it just analyzes what I may want and provide choices to me, in a way it is guessing what I want. While I can’t deny that there is implicit bias that may influence our behavior, and the advertisement could create implicit bias. In the end, if the advertising ca help me to select the product I want, I don’t think it undermines my autonomy.
In conclusion, there are disadvantages in the targeting advertising, while I think the advantage of it out-weight the disadvantage. I believe it would bring benefit to our life. g
