Day 12 - May 12 - How anonymous are you online?
- Elizabeth Rasnick
- May 12, 2023
- 2 min read
The anonymity we experience online is often seen as a double edged sword. In some online spaces we want to interact with a level of privacy. In others we want everyone to be clearly and correctly identified. In our general use of browsers and looking over websites, we expect that no one knows or cares who we are. That is absolutely not the case. Organizations pay big money to find out who is browsing what. A little background is needed here.
My mother spent years in marketing for broadcasting companies. Her clients did not want to market to people who were unlikely to purchase their product or service. They narrowed the field of where to market based on some very crude indicators of buying habits like age, gender, and zip code. As it turns out, in the days before the web, this type of information could be cobbled together from a handful of sources. With this information, diaper companies would run tv advertisements during times when females between the ages of 18 and 40 were watching. Beer ads would run when more males between 18 and 65 were watching. Ah, the olden days.
Now, with the internet and all the data sources available on the web, data analytics tools put this information together automatically and keep it updated almost continuously. And this is where things start getting interesting. Predictive analytics. What my mother and her marketing colleagues were attempting to do, by hand, was historical analytics. Based on previous purchases, it was known that people in demographic group A made X% of the purchases of product Q. With the volume and frequency of data collected these days, data analysts try to predict with a high level of accuracy, not what group of consumers are likely to purchase an item, but precisely which consumers. Sounds implausible and a little creepy? Ever browser for a product and then start having ads for the same product start showing up on your browser?
Research from Harvard has developed a fun and scary tool that will show you just how little information it takes to identify you, not people like you, but you online. All it needs is your gender, zip code, and birthdate and it will identify you. The site does not post the names of people matching the criteria, but instead provides the number of people who match them. That is all it takes to have that “someone is watching me” sensation. I suggest giving it a try. The link is below. I’ve also given the link to the research from which the tool was built.
Link to the tool: https://aboutmyinfo.org/identity
Link to the article explaining it: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/uniquely-me
We’ve hit one of many contradictory conditions. We all want ads that are relevant to us. Unrelated ads are annoying for consumers and a waste of resources for the advertisers. To achieve relevance, marketers use data analytics which require mass volumes of data (Big Data). This high volume of data provides great precision for ad targeting. Sometimes this precision feels too close for comfort.
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