What is targeted advertising and how it invades your privacy?

This Blog was Originally Posted to EonVPN Blog
Targeted advertisements can show you products in which you are interested, but it is not a perfect system. You could get ads for something you looked at once, even long after you’ve bought it. This can feel a little like an invasion of privacy since everything you do online can be tracked and used for ads. Advertisers gather all the information they can about you like age, gender, income, and relationship status, to try and sell you more products. Targeted advertising is one of the most common forms of digital marketing, and this blog post will be about what targeted advertising is and how it intrudes on your privacy.

What is targeted advertising?
Targeted advertising is when your ads are shown to the people who actually need your product based on their internet behavior or searches. It is also called personalized or interest-based advertising because it is tailored to people based on factors such as age, sex, location, and internet history. This approach is intended to display more relevant and more appealing ads to the users in order to maximize the chances of attracting the user’s attention and making them click on the ad to make a purchase.

In targeting advertising, AI uses various parameters to create detailed user profiles by analyzing their browsing history, search queries, social media activity, location data, and demographic details like age, gender, and income level. This approach helps make calculated guesses about the user’s preferences, interests, and purchasing intentions, allowing advertisers to show highly personalized ads.

How does targeted advertising work?
Basically, targeted advertising relies on information obtained from users’ activities and browsing history. First, data is collected with the help of tracking cookies, Web beacons, pixel tags, and fingerprinting when customers visit various websites and other digital platforms. This information is then compiled and processed by advertising networks and data brokers at scale through the use of complex algorithms and machine-learning techniques to categorize and tag users and audiences accordingly. Whenever a user visits a website, then based on that user’s profile, the ad server determines the best available ad and then displays them in real time.

The effectiveness of these ads is then monitored consecutively, and the information gathered is utilized to enhance future ad marketing, enabling the advertisers to measure impressions, click-through rates, potential sales, as well as engagement rates.

How do companies track your location?
Companies can track your location by using different methods, including GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell tower triangulation, IP address, geolocation, Bluetooth beacons, and social media check-ins. If your GPS is switched on, it can provide accurate location data using satellite signals.

The WiFi you are using can be tracked, which helps determine your nearby location. Mobile network providers can also determine your estimated location by analyzing the signal strength from multiple cell towers. When you are connected to the internet, your device is assigned an IP address that is generated using your geographic location based on data maintained by an ISP, which can be compromised. Social media check-ins and location tags also provide data about your check-in locations.

By combining these modes, companies create detailed profiles of your location history and movement patterns, allowing them to deliver highly targeted location-based ads and services.

Is targeted advertising an invasion of privacy?
Targeted ads can be considered a violation of privacy as they involve data collection and tracking. It is based on the process of collecting highly personal data like web history, search histories, location indicators, and social media activity, including without explicit consent from the users. Some of the methods used to track individuals, such as cookies, web beacons, and device fingerprinting, follow consumers’ behavior across websites and devices, which is often invasive.

Additionally, the vast amounts of personal data collected are vulnerable to breaches, posing security risks. Targeted ads can also influence opinions and alter behavior in a way that may not be beneficial for the individual’s autonomy. Moreover, the practice can result in discrimination since people are prevented from viewing certain advertisements depending on their profiles.

Even though targeted advertising offers the best experience by customizing advertisements, the above-raised issues demonstrate that there is a need to strike a balance between advertising personalization and user privacy.

How to enhance your privacy?
Protection of privacy is very critical in today’s age, with targeted marketing reaching new heights and the collection of all information that seems to be available to you. Again, although complete anonymity is next to impossible, there are some tips that might be helpful for improving privacy and minimizing the impact of targeted ads:

1. Use privacy-respecting browsers and browser add-ons: If you feel so inclined, use some privacy-first web browsers like Tor, Brave, or Firefox, and augment them, if need be, with extensions designed to enhance privacy protection like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere.
2. Privacy Settings: Review and modify the privacy settings of your devices, social media accounts, and other online services. If possible, avoid personalized advertisement and data sharing; do not share a huge amount of personal information.
3. Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN): A reliable VPN service would not only protect the internet traffic but also hide the IP addresses of users, hence making it very difficult for ad companies and other entities to trace online activities.
4. Manage Cookies and Other Browsing Data: Use regular cleaning of the browsing history, cookies, and other cached data to reduce the amount of information that could be used for the purpose of tracking and profiling.
5. Care with online accounts and sharing: Be careful not to share too much personal information. Be very wary when creating accounts or sharing data with too many diverse platforms and services.
6. Ad blockers and anti-tracking tools: Use ad-blocking browser extensions/standalone software that will block unwanted ads and prevent tracking scripts from running on devices.
7. Keep yourself updated about all the latest developments in privacy, regulations, and best practices from some reputed sources and organizations that are solely dedicated to online privacy and digital rights.
8. Show your support for companies and initiatives that promote better privacy. Do consider supporting companies and initiatives that have strict consideration toward the privacy of users and campaign for strengthened measures of data protection.

One should, however, note that while all these strategies would significantly help in improving privacy, actual anonymity on the Web is very hard to reach. Moreover, some of the privacy measures would cause problems in using or make some online services less convenient. As previously noted, striking a balance between privacy and usability is an ongoing process of diligence and informed decisions.

Conclusion
Targeted advertisements play an important role for people in this digital world. They offer quite a few advantages while, at the same time, creating a few challenges to privacy. Personalized advertising is useful but often requires vast amounts of data to be collected, which may raise privacy concerns. One can talk about balancing economic necessity with privacy. The paths toward trust lie in transparency, user control, and strong protection of data. At a personal level, VPNs and ad-blockers are already available, which could be developed to bring in better privacy.

If you are scared of targeted ads, start using a VPN to encrypt your online activities. Keep updating yourself on the legal aspects of data privacy and support companies that care about the privacy of their users. Make conscious choices to enjoy digital convenience without giving up on privacy.

FAQs
Can small businesses benefit from personalized advertising while maintaining user trust?
It represents the thin line between personification of advertising and user trust in privacy that small businesses have to strike in digital marketing. While personalization does generally raise engagement and sales, it will only do so if businesses are very open with users about their data usage and obtain consent in the process. This goes for clear privacy policies, secure data handling, and options that give users control over their data. First-party data and contextual ad methods can be used to better care for privacy and customer relationships. It also helps if the ad platform is both reputable and privacy-first. Constant practice updating and keeping pace with changes in privacy regulations is vital. Therefore, prioritizing ethical practices will enable small businesses to leverage and sustain personalized ads effectively without losing customer trust.

What are the ethical concerns with targeted advertising?
Targeted advertisements have numerous benefits but also have serious ethical concerns in place, raising issues of privacy infringement, manipulation, discrimination, and psychological effects. It is often associated with extensive data collection without consent from users, thus reinforcing biases, which in turn affect mental health. But majorly, problems lie in the lack of control over personal data and the huge power imbalance between the users and major advertising companies. Another important point of concern may be the environmental impact of data processing. To address these concerns, we’ll require better data protection, ethical guidelines, and more transparency within the sector.