A lot has been said about the privacy pitfalls of personalized ads:
- Only 6% of US consumers opted in to cross-app tracking (which drives personalization) after Apple released its new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature in 2021.
- An independent human rights body in Ireland has just labelled the real-time bidding process behind personalized ads as the “biggest data breach” ever.
- Major players like Apple and Duck Duck Go! have just released big budget TV ads calling the data tracking and broking that drives personalization “creepy”.
- Pew Research shows a growing consumer swing against invasive data surveillance for personalization, with 81 per cent of US consumers surveyed citing concerns about the practice in 2019, up from 68 per cent in 2012.
Consumers are divided on the value of being served personalized ads, feeling on one hand that having their digital exhaust tracked and profiled improves the online experience and on the other hand worrying about that data being used in an incidence of increasing data abuse.
If you’re in the worried camp, we have some heartening news: If you’re using MySudo all-in-one privacy app for compartmentalization—the world’s most powerful data privacy strategy and one of the app’s unique capabilities—then being served personalized ads as a result of being tracked within a dedicated Sudo digital identity can be useful to you—still creepy, but useful nonetheless.
And that’s because you can choose to silo (compartmentalize) your internet searches within the private browser of a dedicated Sudo digital identity that you create for the specific purpose and accept privacy-invasive tracking just for that purpose because it will bring you tailored content and ads that might help you.
Personal health is a great example of this. You could silo your personal health research (say, looking into your medical condition, clinical trials, medication options, etc.) within a Sudo that you might label “Health Sudo” so that the ads and content you’re served relate directly to your health condition. You could also preserve your search history, mark favorites, set bookmarks, receive discount coupons for remedies, be offered new research material, or even be referred to doctors or hospitals specializing in your condition – all via your Health Sudo. By using a Sudo for your personal health online activity, you can still have all the benefits of tracking, but break the data trail that would lead directly to you personally if you were simply searching from one of your device’s built-in web browsers that you’ve used for plenty of other purposes already.
