83% Of Consumers Believe Personalized Ads Are Morally Wrong (forbes.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: A massive majority of consumers believe that using their data to personalize ads is unethical. And a further 76% believe that personalization to create tailored newsfeeds -- precisely what Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications do every day -- is unethical.

At least, that's what they say on surveys.

RSA surveyed 6,000 adults in Europe and America to evaluate how our attitudes are changing towards data, privacy, and personalization. The results don't look good for surveillance capitalism, or for the free services we rely on every day for social networking, news, and information-finding. "Less than half (48 percent) of consumers believe there are ethical ways companies can use their data," RSA, a fraud prevention and security company, said when releasing the survey results. Oh, and when a compan y gets hacked? Consumers blame the company, not the hacker, the report says.

Comments

kill them all

[gravewax]

I think you can drop the personalised "Consumers believe Ads are morally wrong". Ad's used to be kinda ok, but now companies like Google and other Ad purveyors have become such arseholes and so intrusive that I think you would find a majority think they need to be blocked. It seems they think it is their right to intrude on us and how dare we look to stop them. I think it was about 2 years ago when they broke the camels back with the sound and video Ad's, especially the automatic playback or mouseover ones, now all my browsers have an Ad blocker installed, hell even where I am currently contracted is looking at putting an ad blocker into their corporate desktop image.

All advertising is morally wrong.

[TigerPlish]

All adverts are morally wrong.

They either:

1. Prey on your fears

2. Exploit your darkest, deepest desires

3. Promise you an easy-out to your problems

The best things in life speak for themselves and need no pushing. You find them or they find you by word of mouth, or you see it on your own, or.... you just know about it through some inexplicable mechanism.

Re:All advertising is morally wrong.

[Yosho]

Actually, I'd say that there are advertisements that aren't morally wrong. A company that advertises its product by simply stating what it is and how it compares to its competition is doing nothing wrong -- and, in fact, that's how advertisements basically worked before the 1920's. People writing advertisements assumed that other people were rational actors, and that if you wanted somebody to buy your product, you simply had to demonstrate that you made the best product.

That is, until Edward Bernays, arguably the second most evil man of the 20th century, discovered the concept of exploiting peoples' emotions in order to convince them to buy things they didn't need. That turned out to be shockingly effective, and it's all been downhill since then.

So wrong

[Livius]

I find 'personalized' adverts to be morally wrong, profoundly so.

Aside from violating my dignity as an individual who can make my own choices, the sheer volume of advertising guarantees that I will block them out, either mentally or technologically, which means they are misrepresenting the value of the services to the businesses buying the advertising. So two strikes against them on the question of morality.

But more often than not I am finding them to be factually wrong, in the sense that whatever guess their algorithm is making about me is wildly inaccurate. For example a few Google searches for the price of an object is far more likely to mean that I have made a purchase of one than it is that I will be highly motivated to make new purchases daily for the following six months.

Or their inference is so exact and narrow as to be transparently absurd. E.g. Local women seeking 53-year-old!

And then there's the ones where I try to find a restaurant in a city I'm going to visit and I can't block out adverts for restaurants for the area where I live (you know, the one place I'm guaranteed not to physically be in any time I travel).

Personalized Ads for the thing I already bought?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Econ 101 stuff. The marginal utility of the next $thing is usually close to zero.
E.g. if I already bought an 80" TV, the chances I need another one are pretty darn small.
That's the kind of "personalized" ads that Zuckerbook keeps showing me. I really don't understand why people are paying for ads on Zuckerbook. And the ads are invisible to me anyway because I don't even look at them. In that case I'm there to see what my friends are posting and nothing else.
One of these days the advertisers are going to catch on.

Re: It's okay

[Fly Swatter]

No, your example is one of idealistic marketing, which doesn't exist.

For marketers, the holy grail is getting some idiot to want something that they won't actually ever need or use.

Re: Get a real browser

[ElderKorean]

Donâ(TM)t forget that most people also use a mobile phone that was created by an advertising company.

What % pay for apps vs. use "free" ad model?

[misnohmer]

How many of those 83% refuse to use any app which provides them such personalized ads and/or collects their data in exchange for a "free" app? People say a lot of things on the surveys, but do otherwise in life. I seriously doubt that 83% of people purchase apps when given the "free" option with targeted advertisements.

Devils advocate / rant

[geekymachoman]

I hate ads, personalized or not, and I use an adblocker. However, I also run a site that requires hours of attention every day from multiple people, and many of people here use it often.

When we suggest our users to do donations, they refused.
When we suggested premium membership model, they refused.

99% of the users want the content that 4 people maintain, for free, demand it what's more, and we even got blamed that we're extorting users by having a premium membership and ads, not realizing that if the ads were gone tomorrow - the service would be gone too.. and premium membership was a way for us to DISABLE ads. Eventually, we got rid of premium as it was useless.
Don't want personalized or otherwise fucking ads ? Pay for the shit you use, because ... I don't get the servers for free, nor the bandwidth... nor the knowledge how to program, set servers up, maintain all of that and create content.