Ads (Reading07-lgrazios)

After this reading there were several things that struck me as very interesting and impressing because I had never thought of them in that way. For example how using ad-block is like stealing and even though it is obvious it is something that people don’t usually think about. Another thing, is the idea of how keeping track of all the user information done by some companies (Google, Facebook), is such a big deal I never thought of it as important because I don’t see why someone would care about my preferences, religion, substance use, IQ and so on. This really caught my eye because some of these thing usually aren’t a secret, so what does it matter if an AI keeps track of it and targets ads for me, when all my friends and people around can probably know this information. Personally I don’t mind, these kinds of attributes that most consider “personal” to me seem very superficial and not at all a secret. I get how it can feel uncomfortable that a machine out there knows this about me, but also if you think about it the because this machine knows this about me, it con probably provide better suggestions online for me. Going of on that if you start getting helpful, or useful ads when online you probably wouldn’t need to use ad-block. For instance, once my cousin told about a time he was looking to buy something online and he looked at several online sites, I don’t exactly remember which sites he looked at or on what order he did so, but since these companies where tracking his online activity he automatically got discounted and price matched for what he was trying to buy. Which if you ask me, is a win, which wouldn’t have happened if his online activity hadn’t been tracked. I guess this relates to Google claim regarding a “personal Google” for everyone, and the tradeoff between privacy and this personalized assistant. Now going back to ad-block I hadn’t thought of its negative effect on most web publishers, and how these sites depend on advertising to survive. In these sites case, and several other types of sites, one should allow ads to be displayed but I also believe that there are some sites that are very excessive when displaying ads, so that is when ad-blocking is “OK”. I say ok in quotes, because in a way it is still stealing but you might also say the site is stealing your time by throwing so many irrelevant ads in you direction. Considering this, and how I have ad-block, I will allow more sites to display ads.