Somehow advertisements serve a dual purpose. The other side is the "beat your drum so people can find your great product" mind-set, or, depending on your point of view, the fightclubian impetus to "make them buy shit they don't need"; the other side is the profiling of the users.
If someone goes full-on "modern internet experience" without ad blockers, third party script blockers, cookie blocking, canvas fingerprinting blocking, etc. etc. the dataset collectable from the user behavior is rather large. And this allows for a detailed profile of the user to be built over time.
But what for? Why so much detail? Why so pervasive collection of online behavior and real-life interests? To sell more things to people? It seems like advertising would work just fine with a much coarser scale. Is it something more exotic, like building a "digital twin" of every citizen out there to predict what they will do and how they behave?
Or can it just be the mundane ads?
Anyway, I've wondered those questions and namely why the profiling part must be so pervasive and massive in scale. Can it not work in lower resolution?
PS. The TV-series Colony contains one possible "answer" but although it is an entertaining and paranoid thought, the real-life plausibility of that answer is rather low :)
If someone goes full-on "modern internet experience" without ad blockers, third party script blockers, cookie blocking, canvas fingerprinting blocking, etc. etc. the dataset collectable from the user behavior is rather large. And this allows for a detailed profile of the user to be built over time.
But what for? Why so much detail? Why so pervasive collection of online behavior and real-life interests? To sell more things to people? It seems like advertising would work just fine with a much coarser scale. Is it something more exotic, like building a "digital twin" of every citizen out there to predict what they will do and how they behave?
Or can it just be the mundane ads?
Anyway, I've wondered those questions and namely why the profiling part must be so pervasive and massive in scale. Can it not work in lower resolution?
PS. The TV-series Colony contains one possible "answer" but although it is an entertaining and paranoid thought, the real-life plausibility of that answer is rather low :)