What Do Your Online Ads Say About You? Here's a Tool That'll Let You Know
You know how you might one day type the word “camel” as in “camel-colored coat” into an email and suddenly start seeing ads for flights to the desert and camel rental services pop up in your inbox? No?
Well, even if you haven’t experienced that exact situation, odds are you’ve noticed how the ads that appear when you browse the Internet have become more and more odd, tailored towards the stage of your life you probably find yourself in. Are the Internet gods stalking you? And what could be deduced about you from the kinds of ads that are being targeted towards you?
A browser extension called Floodwatch promises to let you know exactly that. The extension was created by the Office of Creative Research, an organization founded by three former New York Times employees and a Pulitzer Prize-winning data scientist. Once installed, Floodwatch monitors the ads that appear throughout your browsing sessions, in much the same way you’re already being monitored by cookies, Google, Facebook, and all of the millions of people who profit off of your personal information. The big difference, however, is that the kind folks at OCR promise not to sell your data to anyone else; instead, they’ll give that information back to you to make you more aware of the kind of information being sold to advertisers about you.
“The ad industry currently has the power to gather whatever information they want about you and tailor their marketing strategies to whoever they’ve decided you are,” OCR explains on the Floodwatch website. “This is not only invasive, it’s resulting in a browsing environment that constantly reinforces a demographic identity being ascribed to you by corporations — if they think you’re an upper middle-class woman in her 30s you might see only ads for fancy purses, diapers and wedding gowns, while your lower-income male counterpart might see ads for payday loans, big-screen TVs and fast food.”
This kind of identity creation, they argue, leads to a form of discrimination that many may not even be aware of. With enough users, the creators of Floodwatch believe that they can “reverse engineer” the algorithms being used by advertisers in an effort to identify those discriminatory practices with solid enough proof that they can be made public.
Besides being an interesting project, just seeing what is being said about you behind the scenes without worrying about that information being made public is a fascinatingly voyeuristic view into your own life. At the very least you might be able to explain away all of those random porn ads that keep popping up even though you obviously never watch porn, right?
[Pic via Flickr - chluna]
