In this day age, our phones know everything about us. This information is particularly useful to advertisers and tech companies such as Google and Facebook. With this information these companies can place ads targeted to each specific phone user. This has brought up privacy issues since consumers do not realized that their private information is being tracked.
Drawbridge is a company that tracks an individual’s “behavioral patterns” on all the devices the individual uses. For example, if someone clicked on a link from an ad on his/her phone and later opens this link on his/her laptop or tablet, Drawbridge would alert its partners about this. Then Drawbridge would advertisements congruent to the individual’s interests.
But is this too far? Another company that specialises in personalized advertisements, Flurry, stated that they had even more specific data on users but does not use it because of privacy concerns. Should more users be aware of this and what would the effects be of knowing that their information is being tracked so closely? Or are users happy that they have useful ads that actually apply to their lives?