As personalization becomes ubiquitous, the segmented profiles that advertisers, publishers and even presidential candidates use to define us may become more pervasive and significant than the identities we use to define ourselves.
Our consumer profiles are beginning to define us in all of our online interactions, and a result may be that we get different prices at the mall — or different news articles and campaign ads on our mobile devices — based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control. The travel site Orbitz, after learning that Mac users spend 30 percent more on hotel rooms than P.C. users, has started to send Mac users ads for hotels that are 11 percent more expensive than the ones that P.C. users are seeing, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said that mobile devices would soon “do things we haven’t begun to think of,” like storing details of our preferences and tastes and offering location-based suggestions that anticipate our desires and our questions before we’ve even asked them. Advertisers compete in an auction for the opportunity to send ads to individual consumers. Each time a company buys access to us, it can bombard us with an ad that will follow us no matter where we show up on the Web.
Since 1994, when Lou Montulli, an employee at Netscape, created the cookie as a way of distinguishing online shoppers, it has been possible to track the activities of individual users on particular Web pages. It wasn’t until the following decade, however, that real-time bidding first used cookies to tag individual Web browsers so that their users could be sent display ads at various Web sites. This makes it possible to build comprehensive profiles of users and then conduct an auction among advertisers to show a display ad to targeted users across tens of thousands of Web sites.
The stories we see on the Web, on TV and on our mobile devices could be pegged to the market segments in which advertisers have placed us.As our experiences become customized, there is more at stake than just discount coupons and deals. There’s also the future of our common culture. As personalization shapes not only the ads we see and the news we read but also the potential dates we encounter and the Google search results we receive, the possibility of not only shared values but also a shared reality becomes more and more elusive. In his book “The Filter Bubble,” Eli Pariser describes the social consequences of a personalized culture, which is the core strategy for Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube — which hope to present us with information that’s so directly relevant to our lives that they can sell more ads to which we’re likely to respond.
As Pariser puts it, “Personalization can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next — a Web history you’re doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of yourself — an endless you-loop.”
Source: The New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2012
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