Timmy Cheung's Blog

I would like to refer to Connie Li’s recent blog titled “The World Wide Web…… They Know What You Like!”

After Connie mentioned about the whole personal marketing scheme online, I did a little experiment myself. I took a good 20 minutes browsing around popular online shopping site from Future Shop (an electronics retailer) to Ssense.com (an online clothing retailer). Then I went ahead to start scrolling through my Facebook news feed, and to no surprise, the ads that appeared on the right side of the screen were from sites that I had just been to. Some ads were not from companies that I have visited online recently, but they sold similar products that I was in search for in different companies.

I have found this type of marketing not only for products or retail companies, but for even job recruitment. I have been searching for a part-time job recently and been browsing around online recruiting websites. Without realizing, Facebook suddenly appeared with more ads about different job opportunities.

I think this method of online marketing is very evolutionary. Most of us still think of online ads as pop-ups and are usually irrelevant. But now, ads are targeted towards the consumer. This is a very cost-efficient way of directing certain products/services to the specific target market it was designed for.

However, this all poses one question for me: Privacy. So all these marketers are able to track down information about the sites I have visited? Shouldn’t this be a major privacy concern? Are they allowed to go through my website history to to obtain information about which sites I have recently visited?

I think the biggest problem with this type of online marketing is the privacy issues. As Connie mentioned in her blog, she feels like they are “stalking” her.