Data control and privacy is an increasingly important topic. According to a recent Realtime Research survey by Invisibly, 3 out of 4 people do not want targeted marketing ads.
The survey drew upon 1, 247 people. The key trends included 68 percent of respondents implying data privacy is important to them. From this, 82% percent of respondents said they would support measures that would prevent companies and devices from collecting or sharing their data.
Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that seeks to find specific traits, interests, and preferences of a consumer, and then to direct adverts at them. Generally, advertisers discover this information by tracking a person’s activity on the Internet.
The tracking process happens when companies use cookies and other tracking methods to follow a person as they surf online.
Not everyone is happy with this, and for many this mechanism has turned the Internet into a surveillance nightmare. It is also part of the process that has led to a proliferation of damaging fake news and pointless clickbait.
It is perhaps not surprising that a key area that features as a point of particular angst is targeted adverts. In relation to this matter, 76 percent of respondents indicated they do not like getting targeted marketing ads online and would prefer this activity to stop.
Within this there was a slight gender imbalance with more men than women saying they do not mind receiving targeted online adverts. However, overall the results show most people are concerned with their online privacy and would support changes that would prevent the collecting and sharing of data without consent.
Dr. Don Vaughn, Head of Product at Invisibly tells Digital Journal: “The problem we have here is one of consent. People don’t like the fact that data is collected and shared about them when they have not implicitly consented to it, which is why Invisibly is launching a 100 percent consumer-consented data platform where people get paid for the data they choose to share. We’re working to change the industry to one where data is never collected or shared without direct consent.”
A related area is with third-party data providers who use collected data relating to what people are interested in and where they have interacted with online in order to create audience lists that advertisers can then use to find a suitable market for their adverts.
Change will not be easy. Major tech firms like Google and Facebook, plus their subsidiaries like Instagram and YouTube, make 83 percent upward of their revenues from selling ads.
