“Is Alexa Listening? Amazon Echo Sent Out Recording of Couple’s Conversation (New York Times)”
”Your phone may be listening to you (BBC Three)”
”Your Phone Is Listening and it's Not Paranoia (VICE)”

These are just three examples of the many seemingly countless headlines we get shown by news organizations who have ‘proven’ that our devices are secretly recording our every word. Most of these articles explain that, yes our devices are listening however “it’s not as sinister as it seems (VICE).” That said, it’s sometimes hard to believe when, after talking to your parents about Ikea you start receiving banner adverts and pop-ups about their sales.

So, whether this is a benign coincidence or a cloak-and-dagger grab for our private information it ultimately begs the question of how/why this type of marketing happens and how we, as consumers, can hold these gatekeepers of our information accountable?

History in the Making

The first thing we need to ask ourselves is why advertising is important in the first place; in both a traditional and modern sense?
Well according to Gerald Tellis’s book “Effective Advertising: Understanding When, How, and Why Advertising Works” historically speaking within the context of a free market economy advertising allows:

“firms (to) constantly compete with one each other for sales by offering consumers better quality or lower prices or both. Firms used brand names to represent a consistent level of quality at particular prices (then) used advertising to communicate to consumers what these brand names represented and at what prices and where they were available."

By being able to communicate effectively with consumers, businesses are able to sell their products. Then following the establishment of marketing firms companies were able to gather more information on specifically who their demographics were. By understanding, in a general sense, a consumers age, wealth bracket, gender and race this then allowed them to fine-tune their advertising practices.
However, it wasn’t until the advent of the digital era that allowed marketing agencies access to an enormous wealth of information about their various consumers.

Our Digital Footprint

Just as with traditional advertising strategies there are several different tactics marketers can use when trying to advertise to you online. Because of technological advances Behavioural Targeting (also known as Behavioural Advertising), although a fairly new tactic, has become hugely popular and a very widespread practice. Behavioural targeting has to do with the ‘cookies’ a website puts into your browser. To understand this type of advertising we first must define the various ways cookies are used. There are two different kinds; First Party and Third Party cookies. The former is, for the most part, the benign one. First party cookies allow the website to carry out many functions that simply improve the user experience (remembering your password or which items you added to the basket). Third party cookies, however, are the ones that you should be more aware of. They track your browsing habits and gather information over multiple different websites. Companies then are able to use this data to see your purchasing history and can build a rather extensive digital persona of you. Essentially this is how you can look up various kinds of toothpaste and then for the rest of the day, be bombarded by ads for Colgate or Sensodyne.

The Dark Side of Digital Advertising

Unfortunately for us as consumers there is a lot of money to be made in the buying and selling of third-party cookie information. Big businesses want to continuously fine-tune their demographic information and we’ve been nice enough to essentially gift wrap it for them.
But hey, what’s the problem? Why should we care about this?
At its core, the ethical dilemma we face is that of personal ownership. Who owns your private information? Do you think that you do?
I would hazard a guess that for most of us we no longer have singular ownership of our data. We now live in a world where big data is currency and we’ve allowed others to get incredibly rich off of selling our digital footprints.

The Big Question

Is behavioural advertising unethical?
Honestly, yes I think it started that way. Free to use social platforms like Facebook began their life (and still operate) by selling our personal information to the highest bidder.
Yes, this information is said to be anonymized however as the saying goes “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” By signing up to their platforms a value exchange takes place, one which most people are unaware of.
Just as you have personal autonomy over your physical body so should you know how your digital persona is being used. With the internet now being an irreversible part of everyday life, I believe individuals should have just as much agency over what companies do with your online persona as with their offline one.

References:
Nichols, S. (2018). Your Phone Is Listening and it's Not Paranoia. [online] Vice. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia [Accessed 22 May 2019].
Tellis, G. (2004). Effective advertising. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publ.