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Privacy and advertising in a post-broadcast era.

In today’s lecture, the audience in the post-broadcast era was spoken about. One of the largest implications of the post-broadcast era, wherein entertainment becomes more individualised, widely and constantly accessible, can be found in advertising. One of the largest developments in recent years has been the ability to directly address your target audience through web advertising. Be this through product placement or Facebook advertising, due to the demographics collected almost everywhere on the web (age, gender, country), in combination with the niche viewing audiences created by the diversification of the media terrain, advertising is more directed than ever. And although this means that advertising is more successful and therefore more profitable than ever, it also raises a few questions:

• Is the collection of private information and search history for marketing purposes ethical, or an invasion of privacy?
• While showing consumers advertising that is more relevant to them, as paid for by companies, actual content is forgone – is it okay to dictate what content people see?
• Should there be a way for consumers to opt out of things such as Facebook advertising or, as a free interface, should this be taken as the ‘price’ for the service?
• Should further restraints be placed on offline data collection?
• Should consumers be able to put constraints on precisely what data is shared in market targeting?
• Does the collection of our personal information actually effect us? Could it be used maliciously?

While the media industry is becoming a more diverse and interactive medium, the lines between what is acceptable and unacceptable for consumer/producer relations is becoming more and more blurred. However, with advertising platforms like Facebook, a ubiquitous and often necessary service, autonomy from marketing and data collection is increasingly more difficult to control or even avoid.