Granted, this was after I had made a personal commitment to a life in advertising. Some would say my positive response was out of empathy for the profession. While this might have had some kind of effect on my reaction, I honestly feel that I would have felt more or less the same way otherwise. Instead of being presented with ads for hair re-growth miracle products and trips to locations I’d love to visit but could never afford, I was receiving advertisements for tickets to my favorite band’s Dallas tour date and sales at local running-shoe stores. How could this possibly be a bad thing?
It turned out there were a good amount of people who did not regard this extraction of personal information to be such a marvelous occurrence. Not only do I defend this marketing mining with its usefulness, but I also would very much like the opportunity to remind these naysayers that the Internet is no place for information they wouldn’t want, or expect, to be public.
But alas, there are still those naïve enough to believe in a magical world where the Internet is a safe and secure place. Those poor rubes, I assume they are the same ones who make identity theft a simple task for digital thieves. It’s not that I wouldn’t want a world where this wishful thinking was a reality, but it is simply not possible.
I can (sort of) understand how some would regard Facebook’s move to sell off its users’ marketing information as a violation of privacy. There is this kind of perceived safety under the veil of a “private profile,” but still, I would never think that this kind of privacy was extended to the administrators of that site. I would assume that they had the right to access my information, or even sell it, in exchange for providing me and hundreds of millions of others with a free social networking website. I do suppose that I have always been leery of anything “free,” assuming that there always has to be a catch—and there almost always is.
The creators of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others like them did not put the time and effort in creating a site that provides a service free-of-charge to simply bring joy to its users. No, they of course invested their time and money for the same reason most people do—to make money. And to make money, this often implies one of two things: the consumer pays for the content or the advertisers pay for the content. I, for one, still prefer the latter, even if that requires marketers rustling through my personal interests and contacts. I use the word “personal” loosely considering it is information voluntarily posted on an online venue.
The Digital Age has certainly altered the idea of privacy. Just the other day I was thinking about how my cell phone is constantly giving away my geographic location and preventing me from ever getting away with the murder of my mortal enemies (Damn!). But at the same time, I no longer waste time driving around lost, I can find local businesses right when I need them and I am even made aware that my friends are at the bar just next door so I can join them instead of continuing to spend the rest of my night alone. (That last one is based on a true story.)
While there are compromises to privacy in exchange for a life with this kind of convenience, I personally feel that it is worth it. I love being able to connect with distant family, people I’ve encountered throughout every stage of my life and new contacts halfway around the world that I may never even meet in person. I like having the opportunity to share my life with others and display my interests. If marketers are interested in that information and want to use it for targeting purposes, let them. Advertisements will plague me everywhere anyway, so it might as well be messages that might actually appeal to me. It’s ultimately up to me whether or not I buy the advertised products anyway.
It seems as if privacy is now practically limited to what goes on within one’s own head and heart, and the only true gatekeepers to this information is one’s own mouth and hands. It has become a personal responsibility of each person opting into an online presence to control what information is shared and that that is not. I feel that it is time for people to understand that this kind of restraint is the only way to ensure privacy in today’s digitalized world.
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