How much information about yourself do you reveal online?

Have you ever thought that the advertising you see on the internet is tailored to you? Almost everyone has once revealed their address for online purchases, ordered catalogues, participated in competitions or raffles or owns customer cards. But where does this data end up? And what do the data you disclose on social networks have to do with personalised advertising?

The arrival of social networking sites in the early 2000s put the discussion about user privacy in the foreground. Privacy concerns with social networking services involves having the right to store, re-purpose, provide to third parties and display information pertaining to oneself via the internet. Through features like messages, invitations, photos or open platform applications, others gain access to the users’ private information. While data from rewards cards, transactional data, personal information of consumers, who set up an account on shopping sites, are structured, the data from social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat are rather unstructured. Latter are more difficult to analyse. When you register on one of these social media platforms, you may wonder how anonymous you really are, as you specify personal information such as your name, date of birth, or e-mail address. What happens with this data? Social networks like Facebook or MySpace keep track of all user interactions and save them for later use. Younger users in particular, are often unaware that free services can collect masses of data from users.

Personalised advertising

You search for a bag and suddenly, dozens of ads appear on various pages or on your Facebook profile — this has probably happened to everyone before in some way or another. Through daily browsing, mobile communication via smartphone, purchases on the internet, or registration for online gaming or raffles, users leave information that can be commercially used by advertising services. This specific form of marketing communication called “search advertising” can be used to propose subjects and advertisements that match the person’s interests. On social media sites, there are personalised adverts are tailored to the person’s age, browsing and purchasing behaviour. On Facebook, for instance, users get advertising based on pages (games, music groups, companies) that they actually like. The likes and comments of users serve as a framework for individualised advertising. After visiting the homepage — even if the webpage is already closed —ads of products you have looked at, appear on other websites. The goal is to generate new customers, retain them and thereby generate sales.

Cookies read data like the IP address, date, time, where users come from as well as which pages they have visited and do visit while browsing. They are used to analyse and evaluate the purchasing and browsing behaviour of individuals. Using this, as well as browser and device identification, users’ browsing behaviour is analysed to deliver advertising that suits their personal interests. Cookies are small text files that help websites recognize an internet user after their first visit. When closing the browser, they will be saved on the computer and called up the next time the page is opened. The website can thereby adapt to the user. Cookies provide website operators and web service providers with detailed information about which web pages internet user invoke and what interactions they encounter there. If these data are brought together in one central location, it is called a user profile. Depending on the level of detail of the data collected, this allows conclusions to be drawn about product interests, purchase intentions and leisure activities – valuable information which helps advertisers to associate site visitors with specific customer groups and customized user channels.

Many people naively browse the web, not always aware of the dangers. Personal information is private and, if possible, should not be disclosed online — unless to a legitimate site that requires it to provide a service.  Once revealed data cannot be removed from the internet, especially because they can be copied, stored and redistributed by third parties.

Keywords

Personal advertising, privacy, social media, GDPR, information brokerage, search advertising

External writers: Philipp Feuerherm, Frank-Thomas Wenzel, Melanie Spies

Author: Ida Pichler