Of all the things to fear on social media — outraged mobs targeting your work, neo-Nazis harassing you, creeps finding photos of your family, deranged exes stalking you — it seems to me that the thing we should worry the least This is the kind of practice that Cambridge Analytica has found itself in hot water over the past few days.
The (very) short version of this scandal: the British data analysis company legally acquired a cache of data of up to 50 million people from a third-party Facebook developer, data which it used to targeting voters in the 2016 election – first for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, then for Donald Trump. Facebook got very upset when the news was about to break, banned the company from using the site and said they would look into their safeguards and blah, blah, blah.
There is, as Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out for National Review, a certain hypocrisy in all this twisting. Cambridge Analytica was simply doing the sort of thing Barack Obama’s campaign committed to during the 2012 campaign, using social media to microtarget potential voters and collect a database of supporters. These efforts were hailed as brilliant, innovative and exciting when used to elect Obama, but when used to elect Trump they suddenly turned sinister and scary and the last excuse for Hillary Clinton was a singularly unattractive figure who ran a singularly uninteresting campaign.
The simple fact of the matter, as Andy Levy pointed out on HLN’s “SE Cupp Unfiltered,” is that Facebook’s (and social media basically) entire business model is based on this sort of thing.
“Facebook itself is the problem,” Levy said. “Facebook knew that the profile information of 50 million of its users had been collected in this way and chose to keep it quiet, probably to avoid bad public relations – and also because it exposes the fact that this is the purpose of Facebook. Facebook exists to give away your data As others have said: for Facebook, its users are the product. advertisers to pay Facebook huge amounts of money to advertise there.”
Levy says he deleted his profile years ago because of this, and if that sort of thing bothers you, you should probably do it too.
Me? I love it.
Or at least, I don’t blame myself. Most people shouldn’t, given their adamant refusal to pay for service subscriptions: seeing a few ads here and there based on your online behavior seems like a small price to pay for instant, free access to a product that people use massively, every day without fail.
And I actually appreciate the fact that when I go to Facebook or see a panel of ads on the Google Network, I usually see ads for things that I might possibly be interested in buying. The most annoying thing about advertising, in my opinion, is that for most of my life I’ve been inundated with advertisements for products I wasn’t interested in: perfumes, cars luxury and the latest pharmaceutical advancements that will alleviate some minor annoyances with the possible side effect of immediate horrible death.
Frankly, more companies should do more micro-targeting in hopes of bringing more of us more of the things we actually want. As Richard Rushfield noted in his Hollywood business newsletter, The Ankler, movie studios continue to spend tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising in order to create an outlet. mass consciousness, rather than thinking intelligently about how to reach the ever-diminishing number. of people who really want to go to the cinema.
“Ask yourself: do you know how the one time you googled that plaid shirt and the ad that came with it followed you around the internet for a year? Has an ad for a movie ever followed you? Maybe you’ve seen 20 Tom Cruise movies Do Tom Cruise make unnatural appearances before his next movies on your Facebook page, like that pair of pink boat shoes you thought you’d buy at two percent he six months ago, right?
As Rushfield notes, I Can Only Imagine – a $7 million movie about a Christian rock band that stunned the world by topping the $100 million Disney extravaganza A Wrinkle In Time in its second weekend. — made box office boffo by spending smartly rather than extravagantly.
“There’s a natural potential audience for almost every movie, but you have to go find it. On a hit like I Can Only Imagine, made with limited staff and budget, the process of connecting with that audience started a long time ago. has six months, below the radar, in digital campaigns, going where people are, online, on their apps, whatever: not four weeks before release by releasing the campaign to everyone and assuming that your demo will find out because everyone includes them,” Rushfield wrote while, I guess, sporting that sleek pair of pink boat shoes.
If you’re really worried about companies knowing your general level of anxiety, stop taking quizzes on Facebook to find out what kind of Muppet you are and increase your privacy settings. Or completely deactivate your account. But you’re probably going to miss some great deals and great movies. You only hurt yourself.
© The Washington Post 2018
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