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Facebook Will Track What Physical Stores You Go Into (popsci.com)
Facebook will soon roll out a feature that will allow advertisers to see which brick and mortar stores you've physically walked into. These details are collected from anyone who has the location services feature turned on, Facebook says. The will allow advertisers to see in real time which Facebook ads are turning into actual sales. Popular Science reports: Using the location services on your phone, Facebook will keep a tally of who goes to what stores, and show the anonymized numbers to advertisers, as evidence that buying ads on Facebook is getting people to visit brick-and-mortar businesses. It's a great thing for Facebook, which will now have excellent data to prove (or disprove) on a user-to-user basis what a store is getting for its advertising dollar. But it's a pretty frightening idea that a company will have information not unlike your credit card statement all from location services data.
Turns out all you needed to do to get people to voluntarily wear a GPS tracker is tell them it makes talking to their friends easier.
Yet another reason to keep Location Services off other than it drains my phone battery.
Fuck you Facebook.
I consider myself a borderline-tinfoil-hat privacy advocate, and I really see this as a non-issue.
If you voluntarily install a tracking application on your phone, and give it permission to access your GPS - That doesn't "violate" anything (except "common sense").
Yes, I would consider anyone allowing this a complete idiot; but in no way does this affect anyone that doesn't want it to track them.
Like it or not Facebook is how people connect now. There's a lot of introverts on this forum (myself included) who have used for that. But if you genuinely want to be around people Facebook is how you meet up. For example: all the table top gaming stores in my neighborhood use it to coordinate events, and all the dnd groups use it to find and connect players.
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I have to say:
Loyalty cards were invented because they allowed tracking of customer preferences etc.
Quite what data they get from them that actually results in greater sales I can't fathom (surely you can only give coupons for things, which results in less profit on things I probably don't want as I chose their competitor anyway) but in the era of having nothing like that, I'm sure it was a boost to discover that people who buy hot dog sausages also buy hot dog rolls.
But nowadays? And Facebook ads? You're suggesting that giving shops data on how many Facebook ads they bought resulted in someone walking into a store and buying products (which is purely correlative, not causative) is somehow profitable enough that it covers the bad press? I mean, honestly? How is that possible?
And surely it's "too late" if they've bought some Facebook ads to then tell the stores how many people went on to buy something. And couldn't that be done just as easily with a coupon, voucher, code etc. that's only in the Facebook advert? And then extrapolating from that to purely "we should buy more Facebook ads"?
I'm just not sure that I get this at all. How is it relevant to most stores, how many stores advertise on Facebook at all, how do you tie the correlation to a causation, what kind of rates are you expecting (aren't ad responses measured in PER THOUSAND and even then each is only a pittance of a measure?), and quite how does having all those statistics available magically make you more money than, say, putting up a sign or taking 5% off something?
It's Big Data applied to random human interactions again.
I just don't get _why_ advertising works; it's annoying!
Yes, when it's too intrusive or "in your face." But marketing research for many decades has shown that "unconscious" (or "subconscious") processing for ads still has significant effects.
It's particularly prominent for simple things like brand familiarity. You may not be actively watching a TV commercial as you talk to a friend during the ad, but if your eye goes across the screen, you might see a product name. Or hear the product name mentioned repeatedly. Same thing with glancing through a newspaper or magazine -- you might not stop and read the ad, but repeated exposure to name brands will eventually register familiarity... even if you're not consciously thinking very much about it.
And thus when you go to the store, you start looking at the shelf for detergent and you see Tide. You've never really thought about laundry detergent consciously, but this name looks more familiar. So perhaps you're more likely to buy it.
It doesn't make (smart) people more willing to buy your product!
DING DING DING!!
Smart people are NOT the target audience for most ads. Smart people do weird stuff like research what laundry detergent might actually work better BEFORE they even go to the store. They might stop and read material and ingredients lists on the detergent before buying. They might even pull out their phone and verify that the claim to have "natural" ingredients even means anything, or if the detergent is just selling the same basic crap at twice the price for a "natural" label. (Pretty common practice these days.)
Smart people use and seek out information to influence a purchase. Advertising is all about finding ways to convince you to buy something on the basis of something other than rational thought and valid information. If it were about those things, the best ads would just consist of a list of specs for good products... and obviously they don't.