Sites like ebay and amazon.com are playing off of our desire for speed and our tendency towards impulse. With ads tailored and adjusted towards you they can effectively lure you in by showing you a low price that someone else might not get because of different surfing habits. Of course it does make me uncomfortable to know that these companies know about how much I would pay for a shirt or a new book (which for me is not much).
Imagine this in real life (Tyson). An employee at Best Buy following you around in their blue shirt seeing exactly what you look at, buy and don’t buy based on the price. They would see you go to their competitors and see what you buy for what price and either make their prices lower or higher. That kind of creeps me out. With as much business as online stores such as these get I am surprised that this has not been addressed earlier. It is a shady business practice that should be eliminated.
I personally don’t believe that data mining is an “essential business process”. I really don’t want an internet site to know exactly what I am looking at all the time. Sure it helps with their advertising but I never click on ads that come up anyways for fear of annoying pop ups and spyware.
It says in the Washington Post article that “Advertising.com Inc. and Claria Corp. -- which match ads to Web-surfing histories rather than to search queries…..registered last month to hold initial public offerings.” I find this incredibly wrong. Someone is really making money off of knowing exactly what I look at instead of what I simply search for? In my opinion this is extremely wrong. I care a lot less if someone tries to sell me a CD because I searched a certain band than someone who bases their advertising directly off what I look at online. But at the same time, If I look up a picture of Lindsay Lohan then I don’t necessarily want to buy her stupid CD.
Oh and the creator of my favorite website, TV-Links, was arrested and his site was taken down. Sad Day.
http://www.daily.colex.org/site-owner-tv-links-illegally-arrested-on-whim-of-media-tycoons/
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