Anonymously targeting neighboorhoods is OK, no one's name is involved in that, just a list of addresses.
This is different than surveilling people's private and intimate communications, building a profile from those, then targeting against those built profiles.
How do you feel about grocery stores inflating prices and then offering discounts across the board when using their loyalty programs for which you have to give up your information? This is then used to mail you targeted flyers for products they think you will want to buy based on your purchase history.
I think this is a very different scenario. In this case you have the option to not give up your personal information and walk away. If one particular grocery store is gaming you, you can go to a different store, or use an online store. If all of them are inflating prices unfairly, there are checks in place to make sure that doesn't happen.
In the case of internet and Google, we are being stripped of that basic choice. Google's browser, browser extensions, cdn, site analytics, dns, their prepackaged apps that are hard to uninstall on Android, all these are making it virtually impossible to walk away from that "loyalty program".
There may be people who like personalised advertising and I think they should have the choice to let Google and other internet companies scrape all the personal data they can from them in exchange for targeted ads. I'm not one of them. I want to surf the internet on my terms. I want to pay for the services I like to use like I do now for those that are available and uninstall apps from my devices without breaking warranty from my mobile manufacturer. I want that choice. After all, that's what life is about. If anyone says that we can't find that middle ground where people like me can browse the internet without personalised ads, then fuck personalised ads.
Is it? If it was really that easy to track and identify customers without using loyalty cards, why would they bother with the faff and expense of loyalty cards?
I half-wonder whether there's a more pernicious plan which actively wants customers to know they're being tracked, on the assumption that if they see their purchases as contributing to a persistent profile with unknown distribution, they'll try to curate that profile to make themselves "look good" the same way they do on Facebook etc. Don't want everyone to think I'm a cheapskate, better buy that more expensive brand even though I can't taste the difference...
1. What could I buy at a grocery store that would make me look bad? If I'm rich enough to be around people who will look down on me for what I buy at the grocery store I'm also rich enough to simply not care. Are there really rich or well-to-do people that actually care what cackling Karens think of them while shopping? This is a social issue not a surveillance-advertising issue.
2. Grocery stores are retail. They spend money on bulk product, mark it up, then sell it. Why would a grocery store simply not stock things it doesn't want people to buy?
3. If there is some master plan behind the scenes, who's paying the grocery store to keep product it's trying to shame people into not buying with loyalty cards?
It's more of an idle speculation than a serious hypothesis, but...
To your 1, I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised. "Value" own-brand ranges are typically packaged to look cheaper and cruder than fancier lines. The cardboard costs the same either way.
To your 2 and 3, it's about capturing consumer surplus, not stopping value sales altogether. The customer who can only afford the cheapest lines will still buy the cheapest lines. The one who could afford something a bit more upscale, but wouldn't normally care enough, might be nudged.
And looking further into the dystopian future: what if it becomes more than just status anxiety? What if buying the "wrong" things affects your (social?) credit score, or your health insurance premiums?
It's not that no one buys certain products, it's that the stores know who buys what and sends targeted advertising and coupons based on that. If they know you buy dog food, they can send you a coupon for a certain brand that isn't selling well and they're overstocked on. You're manipulated into buying things you otherwise wouldn't have just like advertising on the web.
I do not appriciate those, mail without your address (i.e. you have no relation to the sender). That should be opt in.
I feel the same about targeted advertisement.
Please, no. Advertising is like drugs: There‘s always a demand, and if it‘s not satisfied legally and transparently, it will find a way through other means.
I already can’t trust most influencers or any other "independent" reviewers.
Pushing ad dollars into prohibition will make the problem much worse than it already is.
Maybe I am out of touch with reality but it seems to me that there is mostly a demand, or maybe better a desire, to advertise something while I do not think that there is the same demand or desire to consume those advertisements. But all kind of media will happily take some of those advertising dollars and force the ads onto us, whether online, on paper, on TV, or billboards. And people don't complain because they get stuff cheaper or even for free, or so they think.
That would be an utopia indeed. Advertising suffers from a massive conflict of interest. People would be much better served by independent third parties evaluating products and publishing the results. We just gotta make sure they aren't corrupted.
Here in Germany we have Stiftung Warentest [1] and it is financed by selling their reports as magazines and online. They also receive some government support from the consumer protection ministry. Not sure if there are any competitors, Stiftung Warentest is certainly by far the most well known one.
Yes, I'm aware of Which? -- my parents used to get it when I was growing up.
It was only ever able to cover a tiny part of the market for a few selected things, though. (And of course only a small minority of people would ever see it.)
