Your TV (at least in the past ) could not collect the following information:
- What ads did you stay for ?
- What ads did you listen to, or turn the volume up for ?
- What ads did you hear and see 50% of with 50% of the pixels being on screen at the time you heard them?
- How many times did you see an ad ?
- Whats the average times that an ad is seen before you might convert in an offhand channel ( including offline credit card purchases )?
- What ads changed your scroll velocity - if only for a few 100 milliseconds ?
- What content changed your scroll velocity ?
- Where were you when spent less time on your phone ?
- Where were you when you were more susceptible to a type of ad ?
These aren't signals that you might yourself notice, but these are being collected. They are being collected on almost every website you visit, and an incredibly large data set is being collected. This training set is for you and you alone, but similar training sets can be found.
This training set is now used to determine what content to show you next so that you can stick around for another ad.
This is 'optimizing for engagement'. We are well past the stage of "It's the superbowl so lets play an Axe commercial'.
Some of this sounds fairly hyperbolic to folks who haven't spent time in the industry - but I promise you this is very commonplace non-controversial data collection in the adtech space.
I draw a distinction between introducing ideas to people and manipulating the way people think.
Reading a book, digesting ideas and having a conversation in your mind with the author is incredibly healthy and IMO should be promoted.
Optimizing for "engagement" requires that you offer the mind an endless set of distractions in lieu of good engaging content. Over time the mind starts to degrade to a point where its difficult to digest long-form content and enjoy it as a much healthier habit.
I think I expected to see more of this by now given the number of incredibly liberal folks who work in Adtech.
Sorry to break it to you, you don't get to wash your hands clean of it's incredibly detrimental effects on people mental health, the state of mis-information, and the creation of tooling that manipulates the way people think.
Ads made money before hyper-targeting, and will continue to make money long after. Most folks in Adtech are making an incredibly comfortable living - while ignoring the collective harm that is being done by the industry.
No matter where you work, it's worth asking yourself a few questions.
* What is the mission of my company ?
* What is the revenue generating unit of my company ?
* Are the two aligned ?
* Am I comfortable with the answers to the above questions ?
https://www.psycopg.org/psycopg3/docs/advanced/typing.html#e...