Big Data Gets Personal:Behavioral Targeting (Page 173)

1.Why behavioral tracking such an important ethical dilemma today?

Nowadays, people behavior is being tracked from site to site in order to expose you to certain “targeted” ads. Many of the tracking tools gather incredibly personal information such as age, gender, race, income, marital status, health concerns, TV shows and etc. All these data collected has extraordinary commercial value which helps in marketing. The Web has created new opportunities and challenges regarding privacy issues in the occasions when you don’t want to get tracked. If the data collected is being misused by others, it might lead to moral and ethical dilemmas as your movements and identities can easily be gathered. Companies are tracking user’s behavior across the web without user’s approval and with the information tracked, no identifiable value was provided to them.

Stakeholders in favor of behavioral tracking include:

• Companies which want to sell products or services to consumer who access internet

• Law enforcement agencies especially for criminals

• Advertisers and marketers as it makes their job easier

• Websites (Google, Facebook, etc.) which have the user’s data as companies are always looking for ways to monetize their huge collection of online behavior data

Stakeholders opposed to behavioral tracking include:

• Common citizen- Users who value privacy and don’t want to be inundated with advertisements

• Government organization of each country

2. How do businesses benefit from behavioral tracking?

Benefits to businesses:

Behavioral tracking have a huge impact on the businesses nowadays. Before the behavioral tracking comes into play, the advertising fee was costly and it was not delivered to the right audiences sometimes because it was shown to everyone but not the targeted audiences, the advertisement was not effective, so the profit was not boosted effectively. After the existence of the behavioral tracking, the companies are able to predict what the customers want and what are they looking for and so they could advertise on the web page that the customer always visit. This helps the advertisement to be more effective and it helps to boost the company’s profit.

Benefits to people:

Behavioral tracking is not only benefiting the business but also to people. For instances, imagine if we are looking for a phone, and we will keep surfing the web to get information about the phone and it features. Therefore, when the web captured our surfing history and track our preference, it will have many pop-up advertisement which is related to the phone we are looking. Hence, it helps to save our time to search on our own but we could just click on the pop-up advertisement.

3.What would happen if there were no behavioral tracking on the Internet?

• The advertising received will be less efficient as it will be without targeting capabilities. The advertisement received will tend to be less informative, less relevant, less interesting and lesser value provided to you.  Online ads would operate much like ads in newspapers, magazines, and television. The ads would be more broad-based without the ability to directly target only those who may be interested in the ad.

• This way of doing marketing will also incurred cost to the goods sell as more effort is needed to put by the company to market their brand than accessing the data in an easier way through customer behavioral tracking which eventually lead to poor online experience to the consumers.

• On the other hand, the absence of behavioral tracking would provide more privacy for users. It would also lessen the chances of the data and profiles built from them being used against individuals. The lack of behavioral targeting would also remove the possibility of people being unfairly denied a variety of services such as credit and insurance because of their associations with other people and their negative behavior.