There is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1]
So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good.
There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well.
So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here.
Fair enough, but it's up to each individual to learn about these details and then make a decision if they still want to use Facebook. The media is doing their job reporting on this, and everyone else can learn from this and decide that hey, maybe using Facebook products are not worth the harm. Or maybe they are fine with it and like the relevant ads and continue to use Facebook.
If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it.
>If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it.
This answer is far too simplistic for the reality of the situation.
For example, what of the people who never used it (or did stop using it) and their correlated shadow profiles?[0] What is the supposed answer, then: Don't give your contact information to your friends? Don't use the internet, at all, because of Facebook Pixel?[1]
...but the bulk-share of the problem, for me specifically, is that treasure-troves of information on people are the ripest targets for either exploit or out-right theft. See the OPM hack[2] for a principle example of such theft and then look at the Snowden leaks, where he shows that <insert three-lettered agency here> was in major tech companies' bases, killing their do0dz.[3]
The potential problems (and their requisite solutions) aren't as simple as you're trying to paint them to be.
To summarise this long diatribe: I don't pretend to have an answer, to be sure, but to say that stopping Facebook usage is sufficient is disingenuous to the realities of what the company does; especially, since data about you is still being collected anyway.
If you attribute so little agency to people that becoming a heroin addict becomes someone else's responsibility (barring physical addiction in the womb or being shot up at gunpoint repeatedly) then there's little in this world that we can control anyways.
Your conclusion is entirely consistent with the facts. There is little in this world that we can control. It's really important to stop the bad actors from taking the little away from us.
Curiously, what is that little we can control? One could come up with an argument about how we control exactly zero in life. However even if it's true in a way, it might not be so useful to believe that since having that belief will lead to worse decisions (and a lot of psychology research shows that a belief that you don't have control is highly correlated with depression).
What are you claiming the downside to targeted advertising is? A change in self perception from a single (dubious) study doesn't suggest negative effects.
Why do I say the study was dubious? They showed a small number of undergraduates a luxury watch ad and told them it was being shown to them based on their behavior. Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there?
Most people using FB aren't thinking that though, they're just silently ignoring the ads on the side of the content they actually want.
>Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there?
An altered self image as the result of merely staring at a luxury watch advertisement is more than a little conncering. If psychological self assessment changes even in the context of a small study, what do hours of this stuff per day do to the human brain?
the precautionary principle implies that we don't run an unsupervised experiment on the psyche of two billion people on the planet which primarily serves the purpose of distributing money to facebook.
So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good.
There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well.
So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here.
[1]https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more...