Question

Consider that you visit an online store you have visited before. You quickly notice a “welcome back” message at the top of your page. You make a purchase: a fine set of grilling utensils. The next time you open your browser, ads shown in the sidebar included gas grills and accessories as well as deals from local butcher shops. Similar ads begin to appear on your social media pages and other websites you often visit. In addition, emails offering subscriptions to cooking magazines begin to arrive.

Does this type of targeted advertising violate a consumer’s privacy?     Why or why not?

Is it a benefit to consumers? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Most marketing campaigns rely on the fact that their company ads will have the greatest click-through-rate when they’re targeted towards specific users. However, there must be a better way to go about targeting advertisements toward specific users because most of the time, user searches are not confidential.

Targeted advertising is a form of advertising where online advertisers can use sophisticated methods to target the most receptive audiences with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.

They can also be behavioral things, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent activity. Targeted advertising is focused on certain traits and the consumers who are likely to have a strong preference will receive the message instead of those who have no interest and whose preferences do not match a product's attribute. This eliminates wastage.

These may pose some personal information risk with the companies, as these online selling companies need to be very sure about the safety of the consumers information. The data security to be the utmost priority, as there may be lot of chances of misouse of the data, but now most of the companies have taken lot of secured steps to secure the consumers data, hence consumers can be tension free while registering with e-commerce companies.

But by introduction of the e-commerce, consumers have benefitted a lot. People can analyse the products sitting in one place, no need to search in show rooms. Now they can understand see the virtual product online check its features very closely, compare rates of different brands, see their review and ratings by the users and also they have the return policies.

But also there are certain drawbacks such as they cannot touch and feel the product, and they doesn’t know about the vendor and his products in advance, though there is return back policy but its pain for customers.

Hence in both the cases it is both sides of coin to the customers, some have advantages and some disadvantages, hence customers must be very careful and cautious while doing and e-commerce buying.