Watching Eyes, Part Three: Your Online Life
Our entire lives are recorded onIine. But is it really an invasion of privacy if we invited it?
Yesterday I was running some errands and stopped at Walmart for a couple of items. I had been listening to Spotify on my headset, connected to my phone by Bluetooth. Walking from my car to the store I had not yet paused it, and suddenly I was served an audio commercial for Walmart, literally as I was within 50 feet of the door. This was not a coincidence.
Known as location based targeting or proximity targeting, my phone was being detected within a certain radius of the store and I, along with everyone’s phone within that radius, was being targeted, especially if I meet other consumer demographic characteristics desired by Walmart.
You’ve been served
The word “served” gets used a lot in the online advertising world. When a digital ad of any type shows up on your phone, laptop or tablet, it is said to be “served” to you. Your personal characteristics are stored on computer “servers” and that data is sold to users who want to “serve” you with ads. Whether you feel like you’re being truly served is another matter, since marketing now is so personally invasive.
I’ve worked in media for 32+ years, all of it in radio, or what is now referred to as “legacy media” because it is old school broadcasting. But in the last fifteen years I’ve added to my training and knowledge the disciplines of the “new media” of online content and marketing. It is truly a revolution in how to reach consumers with precisely targeted advertising. But it has come at the cost of the consumer’s privacy.
Broadcast radio and television have for generations used audience ratings data through providers such as Nielsen. In radio, Nielsen continually surveys listenership, market by market, by having volunteers of all ages carry electronic devices that detect and record their radio listening habits. Each month the data is tabulated and distributed to the stations who purchase it for use in selling advertising.
Nielsen numbers are estimates of how many people listen. The number of people using survey detection devices, called the sample size, may be less than 2,000 people in a market (metro area) of one million people, but Nielsen projects audience data for each station based on the representative sample it gets from those devices.
Digital advertising is revolutionary because it is exact and exceedingly detailed. Digital consumer data is based on exactly what websites a person visits, information they fill out in online forms, topics they search through Google, Bing and other browsers and much, much more.
There is no estimating with digital. Every website has data on exactly how many visitors it receives each day, what their IP address is (Internet Provider), how long they stayed on the website, how many pages they looked at and whether they took action such as signing up for a newsletter or ordering product.
To grasp how measuring consumer use of media has changed, think of this analogy: you and I walk into an auditorium just before a concert. The seats are nearly all filled, but not quite. You visually survey the crowd, plus you know the auditorium holds 2,000 people, so you estimate there are 1,700 attendees. I, on the other hand, have accessed the data on exactly how many tickets were electronically scanned as the crowed filed into the auditorium. I know there are exactly 1,622 people.
That is the difference between legacy media’s ratings estimates and digital media’s exact traffic measurements.
A radio station’s Nielsen data may estimate the station has 150,000 weekly listenership age 18+, but that radio station’s website knows exactly how many people visited it in that same week, or streamed that station online rather than listen by a regular terrestrial radio signal. The same data is available to every website owner-operator online.
Here is how your privacy is affected
How is your private information shared online?
Every website you visit, every link you click, every topic you search on Google, every product or service you buy online, where you are when you do all these things, what type of device you use…every little detail of your online activity is logged. It is all cross-referenced, cross-tabulated with your age, gender, ethnicity, income level, all the personal interests you express and much more, and a profile of you as a consumer is whirring on computer servers.
You would be shocked how finely detailed a portrait of your life is available online. It is so detailed and accurate it could correctly be described as intimate.
Certainly, there are laws in place that put curbs on how your online information is gathered and accessed. For example, the CAN-SPAMM Act of 2003 says you are not supposed to be sent unsolicited email without having given consent. Your medical data is closely guarded due to HIPAA laws. For information on how your data is harvested and used, the Federal Trade Commission provides this report.
You can also protect your online activity from scrutiny by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) available through online security companies such as Norton or McAfee. All of your internet activity is shrouded to protect your privacy.
For online search, the browser Duck Duck Go also does not harvest your search data and sell it.
Still, the question is, how intrusive is digital marketing? When I received that Walmart ad, my phone was being detected. A retailer can look back and serve ads to every telephone that walked into their store in the last three months. Or, alternately, it could serve ads to everyone who walked into their competitor’s store in the last three months. That means your phone has been tracked always and data on your movements is stored. You can limit this tracking by going into your phone’s settings and turning off Location Services, WiFi and Bluetooth before you go into a store. You should also open various apps you have on your phone and turn off location tracking.
Even creepier? Recently I sent an email to someone in which I mentioned the possibility of using a particular service. I did not search online about that type of service. I only mentioned it in a passing comment in an email. Almost immediately I was served ads for exactly that service on websites I visited. The only way that could have happened is that my email was being “read”. Technically, no one or no computer was actually reading my email, but email does get scanned for “key words” and that is how I was served an ad.
Still not creeped out? Try this. Have you ever had the experience of talking to someone via an in person conversation (not over a phone) about a product…and then received ads about it? I asked a friend who works for one of the mega-online companies whether they listen to people over their devices. He didn’t address directly about phones being used, but he did tell me that the home assistant devices that sit on your kitchen counter, by which you voice activate it to set timers and turn on and off various home systems, do indeed listen in. If it hears a dog bark, you’ll get served ads for pet products. If it hears a baby cry, you’ll get ads for baby products.
Even when you haven’t given a voice command to activate the device, it passively listens.
What does it all mean?
Do you get the picture? Our lives are totally immersed online and by our habits we give away the most intimate details of ourselves to strangers who want to sell us something. No detail is too small that it is not recorded onto servers. No detail escapes notice.
What it all means:
In our pursuit of information and consumer goods we have given away our privacy to strangers who, though they don’t necessarily mean us harm, certainly have their own interests ahead of ours.
Make no mistake, you gave permission for this. You clicked “Accept” on a website’s cookie policy, or agreed to a clause buried in the mice type of a lengthy “disclosure” policy that handed over access to marketers. The online search sites harvest your search data and sell it to marketers.
Because your most intimate data is out there, if it ever fell into the hands of sinister hackers or if the government decided to use it nefariously, you would be easy prey for fraud and abuse.
Here’s the very uncomfortable question: if we have some dark secret material that we search out online, the kind of stuff we would be mortified if anyone knew…friend, someone DOES know. Certainly, God knows, but your online data containing those secret online visits is in the hands of strangers who know.
Only God should have this much omniscience about our lives. Digital marketers are not worthy of having that intimate of a portrait of us.
Conclusions
Let me confess that I am just as active online as anyone and have yielded, wittingly and not, to giving up much of my life online. Almost all of us have. So, what of it? We cannot retrieve it back and expunge it from remote servers. My thoughts are:
Online shopping is incredibly convenient, having purchase shipped to your door. And the selection is vastly superior now to in-store shopping. We have given away our privacy for the sake of convenience. But be mindful of the choices presented when you check out to pay. Do not accept the option to have offers and promotions sent to you. Not only will you get that vendor’s offers, but your information will be sold to other vendors.
Do not accept the option for the pay portal page to save your card informartion for future purchases.
Using a VPN masks much of your data, although I’ve found it also slows down your computer’s processing speed. Duck Duck Go is a browser that does not harvest your online search data.
Be circumspect about what you share on social media.
Matthew 12:36-37 says, “And I tell you this, you must give an account on judgment day for every idle word you speak. The words you say will either acquit you or condemn you.”
Only God should have omniscient knowledge of our life. As much as is within our power, we should not make the internet second, just behind the Lord.