Google is proud to introduce a new tool for their advertisers.
Following people’s credit or debit card purchases, Google will be able to track someone’s
interest in an online ad with them shopping the item in a physical store.
This way they will be able to squeeze more money from the advertisements that didn’t
result in online purchases but lead the buyers into the stores on the streets.
“Google says it has access to roughly 70 percent of U.S. credit and debit card transactions
through partnerships with other companies that track that data.
By scanning this data, Google says it can automatically inform merchants when their
digital ads translate into sales at a brick-and-mortar store.”
Google wouldn’t be able to do this if there weren’t enough people who said it’s okay
because they are a private company and can do whatever they wish.
I disagree.
Let’s visualize what this really is.
This is stalking.
If you walked into a store to buy groceries, would you be okay if the owner of the shop
would take your ID, and recorded all of your purchases, things you looked at and for how
long, how much money you had in your wallet, and kept your spending history?
Maybe yes?
This was happening online more than a decade ago.
We’ve progressed very far since then.
The reality of today goes like this:
If you visit your favorite store, the owner sends agenst to follow for the rest of your day.
The moment you step outside of that building.
The agents would carefully record all of your purchases at other stores.
And also watch you in the gym, see your friends, walked into to your home, and checked what
TV programs you like to watch, what music you like to listen to, what clothes you wear
and have in your closet, they could check your correspondence, your acquaintances…
only to report back to the owner to do with it as they please.
Maybe to design more personlised ads, or perhaps sell it all to the “third parties”.
Would you still be okay with this?
You could say that you would then stop shopping at that store and went somewhere else.
Only to realize that they are all connected through chain of advertisers all of them interested
in one thing – the data.
Every store you visit, cinema you go to, work you do, whatever there is would send their
own agents to track you at 100% of your time.
Just because in real life these agents are cookies and advertising IDs doesn’t change
the fact that this is seriously disturbing.
This is no longer an attack on your privacy.
This is aiming at your human nature as a free individual.
The law is falling behind on the pace of the progress.
No one except for those making the biggest profit from this situation are able to devote
enough time to track the dramatic changes of the technological innovation.
Average citizen is after all left to express their choice once every four years.
Most people will never be aware that such technology that can connect their online activity
with physical purchases even exists.
And the marketers benefit from this hugely.
What’s in the biggest interest in the advertisers isn’t the biggest good for the everybody.
This has huge effects on our democracy.
By tracking our physical and online activities, it’s creating an unprecedented environment
of constant surveillance.
The eye that never blinks, if you will.
Google crossed the line many years ago but this is pushing things to a next level.
It normalizes profiling of entire physical and virtual human activity.
The only way to avoid this would be to stay off the grid, which is completely inconsistence
with sustainable life in modern society.
Combined with the effects of income inequality, lives of everybody are being decided on through
the lenses of profit hunting algorithms by the smallest number of elites in history of
human civilization.
The data collection is so vast that everything can be predicted based on your previous activity
and interests.
The offer is then cut down to the product that you are most likely to spend the biggest
pile of cash on.
Or in other words: it eliminates your freedom of choice.
Advertisers have become so powerful they are reshaping the society from its free fundamentals
back to the elitist order where the privileged few hold onto power and resources and decide
on other people’s lives.
The comfortable argument is that it’s great to be given what you want without looking
for it.
But that’s inconsistent with human nature to answer incentives to seek the biggest profit.
The personalized experience is narrowed down to the most expensive product you are willing
to pay for, while eliminating potentially cheaper options you might favor instead.
It is more reasonable to believe that
Self-learning machines are programmed on this basis.
Just like in another authoritarian era of human history when the success was measured
in the number slaves or serves someone owned, today it’s those who own the data accumulate
most of the wealth.
The new economy isn’t based on diversity of production, but around the self-sustaining
circle of targeted advertising with data mining and artificial intelligence.
The vast majority of people are excluded from entering this market.
And there goes one more reason to stop using card payments.