Is the business model of profile based advertisement targeting ethical ?
The facebook & Cambridge analytica data breach drama has opened millions of peoples eyes in the world. Before this no one really didn't care how facebook's advertisement business model operated, but now people are starting to question whether this model of advertising and digital marketing is ethical ?
We all know facebook & other technology giants such as Google collect huge amount of data of people around the world. This includes search patterns, profile information , mobile phone location information and the list goes on and on. We as users trust that our data would be secure (trusting that its all encrypted and not accessible by anyone in the cloud and all that jazz). But is it really secure ? just look at the facebook incident, and also is our personal information used in unethical ways for campaign targeting & advertising. Have technology companies gone too far and breached the laws of personal information in the name of "personalized , profile based digital marketing". It may seem that way with the facebook data breach case. Yes the data breach incident is a HUGE neglect and misjudgment from the company, but during this case there were several other important facts which were reveled about how facebook uses peoples personal profile to integrate the data to third party data aggregators and how facebook tracks digital behavior even if you are not logged into facebook. During Mark Zuckerberg's Testimony Before Congress it revealed that there were many points that need attention from the industry & the CEO him self seemed not very confident when answering these questions.
What about googles business model ? isn't it similar to facebooks advertising business ? Seems that the industry needs to go back and come to a clear regulation on deciding up to what extent that they should drill down on personal profile information for segmentation and profile based targeting.
We see that the technology industry in many areas are maturing, and digital marketing and social media is now maturing and becoming a norm fact in our lives. I'am pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg him self would have not imagined that facebook would becoming this big in the world and impact humans lives both positively and negatively. Its the negative stuff that they need to get rid of, and its not going to be an easy task because the platform alone is free to everyone and regulating a free open service is challenging. Facebook clearly didn't foresee that their platform would effect people in this manner and things would go out of control.
People are now thinking whether centralized social media platforms(social media platforms where the data would be owned by a single entity such as facebook or google) should be the future ? they are questioning and now implementing decentralized peer to peer social media platforms where no centralized entity would own the data. The data would reside on a blockchain architecture. The social media blockchain would be boosted with cryptocurrency. Users would earn cryptocurrency for the content they produce on the blockchain. This sounds all promising but its in a very early stage. Below are some of the platforms which are getting some attention in the industry
I think the industry needs to go back and clearly think on understanding what digital personal information really is and what should be used in a more ethical way for digital marketing & advertising.
Calvin Hindle
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