[btrautsc]

I agree.

While its easy to point at Facebook and say "they are so creepy" - this sounds like the type of challenge every marketing department faces. "What is the attribution of X,Y,Z ad campaigns?"

Connecting purchase + email + 'where the ad happened' via social solves that.

[geofft]

> While its easy to point at Facebook and say "they are so creepy" - this sounds like the type of challenge every marketing department faces. "What is the attribution of X,Y,Z ad campaigns?"

That can still be creepy. (If you're meaning that the accusation of "creepy" should be directed at modern marketing in general and not just Facebook, yes, I'd agree with that, though a good part of how we got here is large centralized aggregators like Facebook.)

I think there are plenty of non-advertising contexts where "using people's data to influence their behavior more effectively" can easily cross from normal to creepy as you start collecting more data. If you give your SO a certain flower because you remember a conversation the two of you had a while ago about that flower, that's normal and even thoughtful. If you give your SO a certain flower because you hired people to follow them before you even started dating and you got a report that they always stopped to admire a certain flower on their walk to work, that's creepy.

[tclancy]

Absolutely, but I think it's time to start asking:

1. Is that ok that we accept this sort of Pavlovian training from anyone, much less for-profit companies?

2. Is it ok now that the entities are so easily able to completely track the effectiveness of their advertising and thus empowered to amplify whatever works to increase their success rather than some metric like human happiness?

[neycoda]

Imagine all of our phones' lockscreens being unlockable only by face unlock and not fingerprint... you know, our face which is all over the internet and trackable across websites and in-store and public cameras.

[AlexandrB]

Every profession has challenges. Most of them don’t resort to violating the rights of others to solve those challenges.

[manigandham]

What rights are being violated here?

[pjc50]

"Attribution" in this sense is always going to be the enemy of privacy, because it boils down to the question of "what was on your screen when you decided to make this purchase".

[contravariant]

The fact that there is a commercial motivation doesn't make it less creepy.