Ha! According to Google, I’m a male between 25-34 who wants to see ads for movies. This underscores my longtime suspicion about demographic research (on or offline) — no matter how many cookies they install, or how they try to track our behavior, they have no idea who we really are.
I almost clicked the opt-out button, but I think I’ll just leave it on and enjoy knowing that I have a small hand in skewing their statistics.
(By the way — if you click the “x” to get rid of a Facebook ad, when they ask you, “Why don’t you like these adverts?” if you select “Other,” you get a text field in which you can write ANYTHING YOU WANT. ANYTHING!)
Google allows us to edit our advertising categories to make sure we’re being targeted correctly. Facebook wants me to fill in a survey “to help us show you better adverts.” Everyone wants to figure out the best way to monetize every pair of eyes by gearing the ads as precisely as possible. My question is this: How many people really care? Frankly, I’m not concerned about whether I’m getting the “right” ads or not. In all the material about marketing techniques that I’ve seen, the common assumption on the part of the marketers seems to be that we take this game as seriously as they do.
The “right” ads? Please. The “right” ads are the ones that don’t make noise, get in the way of what I’m trying to read, or suck up all the bandwidth with silly Flash animation.
I’m OK with the opt-out policy. By “OK,” I mean “resigned to the fact that marketers will just try to find more ways to get more information regardless.” Yes, they should let us know what they’re doing and why — no one likes to be spied on. Then again, many people already suspect that they’re being watched most of the time anyway.
In a sense, though, “privacy” may have to be redefined. We enjoy many benefits of living in the information age, and we can’t assume that we’re somehow above becoming part of the information stream simply because we see ourselves as unique, deep-thinking individuals. Not that we aren’t individuals (most of us, anyway), but we’re also cogs in the machine.
We can be both. We can also click from a bodybuilding site to an online astrophysics document repository to a Vimeo collection of raw sewage videos to beedogs.com and let the demographic specialists sort THAT out.