Justin Honra

Prof. Bean
WRD 103/321
05/26/2014
Privacy: An Outdated Concept
So I was emailing my therapist about switching to a different medication and Google
decided that it would be okay to read my messages. It started annoying me with medication ads
and ads for psychologists and psychiatrists. I dont know if it bothers everyone, but I kid you not,
one ad said something along the lines of crazy people help. I do NOT like to be called crazy. It
also suggested several inpatient locations for specific problems that I have. I honestly believe
that this is a HUGE invasion of privacy. Im not the crazy one. Google is crazy, not to mention
stupid.
- Not So Anonymous Gmail User
In todays digital age, our society has become heavily saturated with advertisements that
any moment of respite from them has become almost impossible. Personalized advertising, as
illustrated in Not So Anonymous Gmail Users experience, is the common method advertisers
use which involves extracting a persons digital information to produce and present ads relevant
to that person. The ubiquity of personalized advertising is promoting a complacent American
culture that normalizes the act of digital espionage by corporations and the United States
government. Privacy is an unalienable right protected under the U.S. Constitution. However, has
privacy become an outdated concept all in the name of capital?
According to Mark Tungate, author of Adland A Global History of Advertising, its safe
to say that advertising has been around for as long as there have been goods to sell and a medium
to talk them up (7). At its infancy, advertising was intimate, existing only in direct contact and
word-of-mouth. In 1447, German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press,
allowing one to quickly reproduce multiple texts. It was not until the printing press was used to
create newspapers, in combination with the Industrial Revolution, that the advertising industry
began to develop its level of ubiquity experienced today (Tungate, 2007).
The ability manufacturers had to mass produce goods and reach far flung audiences
through newspapers created a communication system between companies and potential
consumers. This early form of communication through newspapers could be understood through
the transmission model. According to the transmission model, an encoder (a company or
advertiser) created a message (an advertisement) and sent it though a medium (a newspaper) to
be received by a receiver (potential customer). The flow of information was linear coming from
companies, point A, and ending at the consumers, point B (Baran, 2011).
However, in todays digital age, the rise of societal dependency on the internet and
electronic devices such as smart phones has disrupted the linear flow of effective communication
from companies to consumers. More and more of peoples waking hours are spent looking at
various screens whether they are a television screen, a computer screen, or a screen of a mobile
device (Sutanto, 2013). Consumers are no longer effectively reachable through one channel as
they are becoming more fragmented in platform use and interests. To combat this, advertisers
have turned to personalized advertising or retargeting, a method in which advertisers extract a
persons previous internet browsing history via a tracking device called cookies and then
produce ads shown on Google, Facebook, etc. specific to the websites one has visited before.
Advertising has become a two way street for information. Ad agencies have the ability to collect
tremendous amounts of personal information from consumers and interpret them in a way to
better sell their products.