Christopher Mims 'Article' Hats Off To Internet Advertising

A Necessary Evil The average internet user has at least one social media account; and every one has seen an advertisement while on the internet. Now what if those annoying ads were in an indirect way responsible for “smart” devices. Those little annoying ads that the people wish with would just go away: they are actually learning from every action that people do on the internet. They are constantly collecting data from the average things that you do every day to try and get people to click on them. The internet that people use to watch their videos; do shopping; and research on: is supported by ads, but normal ads are not worth that much actually. To quote Tufekci, Zeynep’s What ‘free’ really costs, Facebook makes about 20 cents per user

In Christopher Mims Article “Hats Off to Web Advertising.” He quotes Mr Rajaram “Advertising was the first commercial domain to which machine learning was used at scale” (1). Advertisements collect vast amounts of data from daily internet users. Most of this data is used for “personalized internet experience” meaning that once the data is collected they company owning the ad will give a user an I.D. an place everything they collect through a mathematics equation that will “personalize” the results for the user. This from of optimization for the user is one of the most common way of using this data “One of the most direct applications of techniques incubated in ad tech is a company called SigOpt, the goal of which is to "optimize the whole world," says founder Scott Clark.” to quote Christopher in his article

Behind all the magic is a piece of software nicknamed the cookie. Max Lewontin informs that “cookies are often collected in the background,” in his article Should People Be Able to Demand That Websites 'Do Not Track' Them? (1). The fact that cookies are exchanged in the background of a persons browsing experience means there is no moment where what someone clicks on is not being saved to that website. The cookie allows websites to track where one person has been and what his/ her tendencies are on that website. People could think of cookies as a digital footprint. Within some browsers there is a do not track switch. In one paragraph of Max Lewontin’s “Should People Be Able to Demand That Websites 'Do Not Track' Them?” He says that only a small handful of websites have pledged to not tracking a user with this toggle turned. (1) This is suggesting that the toggle is a mere polite please asking the website not to track them. Since the cookies are exchanged in the background the website twitter won’t track people but this pledge does not stop third party advertisement for tracking. The reason this button does not work is because the amount of code that would go in to this has been to complicated to create so far. Now recall that an ad is worth very little to the company until it’s collected data. Mentioned in Zeynep Tufekci’s What ‘free’ Really