By dallasnews Administrator. Rather than having a turf war over who gets to surveil whom, maybe Facebook and the NSA should team up. The NSA probably already has a rich database of my calls, texts, travels, toenail clippings and repressed childhood memories; maybe, aided by such additional Big Data, Facebook could finally figure out how to show me ads for things I actually want to buy.
Allegedly the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads well, that or how to help teenagers swap naked pictures of themselves. Get smart opinions on the topics North Texans care about. Or with:.
By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Even that dour assessment dramatically overestimates the efficacy of modern advertising.
Yet if you consider the number of times you have ever clicked on or even noticed an online ad supposedly curated just for you, these numbers may not be surprising. Do I have mono again and, if so, did my spleen just explode? For a while last year, I was seeing a lot of ads for Mormon dating services. Just a few weeks later, I was seeing ads for discount engagement rings.
A few weeks after that, Facebook plastered my feeds with ads for diapers and child-care services. Online ads served to me usually fall into one of two categories: things that leave me feeling intensely, uncomfortably judged — teeth-whitening, weight-loss or hair-removal products — or things I already own and do not intend to duplicate.
