Technology scares me, and don’t even get me started on how AI and that crazy shit have serious consequences that we are not adapted, that we have not considered at all. Tech companies emphasized their own revenue over making the humanity better – errr making its users better. And those incentives don’t align with what the actual users want.

For example, a keyboard software. Let’s say google’s GBoard. It is fantastic, it is smart enough to predict and corrects their typing mistakes. That is wonderful, amazing!

But at what cost? Every keystroke you hit is being logged, internally at least. In a storage in your own device that you might not exactly have access to it. Even if you have, it is still scary. Google’s own algorithms mention that they will never include User’s Identifiable Information as they are trying to make insights from our typing. That’s correct however.

Before that, let us make this simple category for our stakeholders:

  • We have the users (you, and me)
  • The platform owners (Facebook, Google, etc)
  • And the ads companies. By ads companies we mean companies that sell ads, or wanted to increase their product’s users by getting new users via Facebook and Google.

what is personally identifiable information?

In layman terms, it is your personal details. That could be your passport, your phone number, your email, or even your device ID (and yes, every phone device has its own unique ID provided by the OS, whether that was Apple or Android). Personally Identifiable information are of a huge value since they allow for targeted ads.

Targeted ads are a natural progression over what we used to have back then. Ads were random and they would popup everywhere – quite annoying. But, we thought that if we were able to somehow identify our user’s preferences by linking their internet surfing behaviours to ours, we can have a better understanding for what that specific user likes. And we put an emphasis on the specific user part. Facebook gained massive amount of money because it allows their ads companies partners to get a fine grained result and can target on behalf (this is very important) potenial customers. Let’s see again how that works, how it used to work and the current situation:

Previously:

  • an ads company will approach Google (a platform that has potentially huge userbase)
  • it will ask google to place ads banners on their website (which is google’s search page)
  • and google will charge them against the number of the banners that google had shown.

It was simple, annoying indeed but harmless. There was no AI there, no psychologist, just fucking annoying sex toys. That was the whole internet pre Facebook was. It had to improve however, cause google wanted to maximize money. So they started with showing relevant ads. And whenever a relevancy criteria is being used, your data is being logged. Scary, but not verily. Google wanted to gain more money by telling ads companies: hey we noticed that you paid us $1000 to show your ads, but only 3 users have clicked into those banners. What if we told you that we can increase the number of users that click into your ads? IMMENSE!

Click through Rate (CtR)

Basically this one measures how many users have actually clicked into your link, into your ad. It is important because it solves the first problem that ads companies face: they don’t know how many users are actually interested in said ads. And it also allowed platform owners to gain further money as they now offering what Telecom ppl calls Value Added. They are not just exploiting you to a new customer base, Ni. They also have insights that can better aim your campaigns. And make no mistake that platform owners are extremely defensive against their users’: they will never allow you to have raw data over their users, but will relay whatever ads you want to whomever they see fit to receive this ads.

Conversion Rate (CR)

CR is rather an amazing concept and a huge improvement over what we used to have earlier. Rather than telling you how many users have actually clicked on that link, they can also give you details about how many users have actually converted. Signed up to your website, or made a purchase or whatever. CR is the most important term ever since it gives a direct indicator of your marketing campaign and its effectiveness.

It scares me that in order to get a correct spelling, better grammar, i will have to use an ADs company app that will record my keystrokes and record all of the worlds’ keystrokes so i can spell Entreprneurship correctly.