Blink:

I enjoy posting about consumer marketing, specifically consumer targeting. Have you been following the Apple and Facebook privacy feud? As one of my favorite columnists Paul Krugman suggests, when it comes to high tech, which is currently under global scrutiny, we need to cut through all their “technobabble.”

Read On:

Background in English – Privacy Is all about a tech company’s ability to track user’s behavior online (a.k.a. data) and sell it to advertisers targeting consumers. Facebook believes in the open internet with no limitation to tracking so it can fuel its ad business which generated approximately $25 billion in the first three months of 2021. They (Zuckerberg) got into a hissy fit late last year when Apple introduced a new iPhone operating system requiring each app to ask permission for tracking user data across the internet. Facebook claims permission tracking hurts small businesses to effectively grow since they cannot afford the data brokers, thus advertise competitively. Fact: Only 6 percent of U.S. daily users, closer to 15 percent globally (source: Flurry Analytics) opted to allow Apple to sell its data.

Thanks to a borderless digital space, the data is already out there! I am just highlighting the feud between Apple and Facebook. If you cut through all the technobabble, Facebook’s real concern is about transparency if consumers opted out thus it would threaten their advertising tracking business model – the ability for advertisers to trace purchase conversions for their ads. I am only addressing two of the tech behemoths. What about Google? They have minimal privacy features for its Android mobile software – advertising revenue is one of their driving engines.

I have been a long-time advocate it is time to reel in and regulate high tech. Big brother is watching! And listening. Another future area of concern is the utilization of voice profiling via voice technologies (e.g., Siri) by consumer marketers – analyzing the sound of our speech to provide behavioral clues.

Alexa, “what do you think about privacy?”