By Sarah Wright | August 17, 2017
Yesterday I was online shopping for jeans. I had gone into the store earlier and tried them on for fit, but I wanted to look on the website and buy them when it was convenient. I found a few pairs and added them to my cart, but wanted to wait until the next day to purchase, so I emptied my cart and exited my browser for the night.
The next day, as I was on my phone scrolling through Facebook, I noticed an ad for the jeans I had been looking at. The caption was “We noticed you noticing me” and it proceeded to provide a carousel of all the pairs I had added to my cart. I was surprised, yet admittedly impressed that they had kept track of this, and the ad served as a reminder to check the site later that day (I still have not purchased the jeans.)
As much as all of this cookie tracking is convenient, it can also feel creepy, like an unexpected invasion of privacy. It is easy to forget that our internet activity is being watched. Sometimes this can be helpful, like when you see a reminder to make a purchase you did not complete. But if you forgot about it, are you really in dire need of the product at all?
At the same time, we are coming to expect this type of service. If we see an ad that is completely irrelevant to us, we are offended. A friend of mine was talking about their daughter seeing an ad on her feed that she didn’t want. “Facebook doesn’t even know me!” she cried in disgust. She had come to expect that Facebook DID know what she wanted to see, and anything unrelated was a result of Facebook not doing their job.
A coffee shop employee who remembers your regular order is not creepy, they are considerate. In the same way, this technology of remembering can be excellent. It is simply people programming algorithms to remember what you search so they can make your experience on their site better. Some people are in the habit of clearing their cookies so incidents like this do not happen. Will we ever move into a state of society where this is not “creepy” and is simply expected as the current state of technology?
Many things that would have been considered creepy 20 years ago are taken for granted now, things like location sharing, making family vlogs on YouTube of your house and kids. Even basic things that used to be sacred, like sharing your name and birthdate, are considered the standard practice to sign up for most things online.
In all of this, it is important to remember the value of your personal information. Taking steps to update your privacy settings and even limiting the ability of sites to track you are ways of controlling this information. However, when you think about the personalized shopping experience is simply part of the computer code trying to aid your memory, it may not seem so “creepy” after all.
