Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby.
Some extremist will come along and assert that just means we shouldn't allow advertising at all...
1. If I search for diapers, and get ads for diapers, the usual pattern is to show the ads above the real search results, which tricks people into buying more expensive and/or lower quality products (after all, why else would the company need to pay to show up at the top of the search results?).
2. If I search for diapers on one site and get shown ads on a different site, then it follows that companies are trading information about me behind my back, which is not okay from a privacy perspective.
The opposite is worse.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
> One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever.
Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.
Yes, you've just explained why people may go to a different store, where they are a stranger, when they want to buy something they don't want the local cashier to know about.
The classic example is a 16 year old who buys condoms at a store where no one is likely to recognize him, but others include buying adult diapers, buying a single plunger, and buying hard liquor.
The cashier at the new store might figure out what's going on, but does not know who "you" are.
Which is why the example you quoted is called contextual marketing - it's based on a very small context of the things you are currently buying.
That link, however, expands beyond that to user profiling with 'So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores'.
> targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
"Targeted ads' includes targeted based on context advertising and targeted based on user profiling.
The g'g'parent comment was specifically about advertising 'without personal information', which is only one type of targeted ads. Please do not use language which confuses the two as it makes it seem like you don't understand the relevant issues.
