How Advertisers Use the Internet
We have all become users of free Internet sites. Google, Yahoo, and Facebook provide convenient resources, such as email and search tools. Millions of people use these sites every day. How is it possible that online companies benefit by supplying services for free? The answer is that although we assume that we are customers of Google or Facebook, in fact we are not. We are the product that these companies sell to their real customers: advertisers.
Every time we look for information on Google or click on a Facebook link, we are being watched. Every time we send email, the content of our mail is being examined. Information about what we are interested in, what products we like, or what books or Academy Award movies we are interested in is collected by these online companies. Then, they sell this information to advertisers. (1)Advertisers use this information to target advertisements and promote goods and services to individual people rather than to a broad mass of the population.
As technology improves, the opportunity for advertisers to target customers grows. Smartphones have GPS receivers. A person’s location as well as other factors about that person can be known. Online companies sell this information to advertisers. For example, imagine that your hobby is tennis. You have recently done Internet searches on new types of rackets. You’re walking down the street and suddenly you receive a message from a sports store, informing you of a sales campaign for tennis rackets. You look up and see the store right in front of you. (2)Practicing your technique is important if you want to improve in tennis.
Internet companies know more about us than we realize. They know our hobbies and interests. They know our likes and dislikes. They even know about our children. More than a quarter of parents in the United States have posted photos of their children online. These include names and sometimes even addresses. Internet companies can gather all this information and sell it to advertisers. But what right do they have to do this? (3)We can blame them for the spam (junk) email that we receive. We can also blame them for the annoying pop-ups we see on the Internet. (4)The online companies claim that they are just connecting buyers and sellers. They say that they are just helping people to find the right products and services. However, these companies are really just using our personal information for their own profit.