The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You, a campaign by NAMLE’s Youth Advisory Council
Recently I thought about trying to learn the guitar. As I searched up beginner guitar tutorials and songs with easy chords, ads to buy beginner guitars started flooding my entire feed. I’m sure this isn’t a coincidence. Companies have been tracking my search patterns and liked videos to cater my feed.
It’s a little creepy, but this can be a good thing sometimes. Instead of digging around on the internet to find beginner guitars, they’re directly shown to me when tapping through Instagram stories or scrolling through Pinterest.
I know that companies use my online activity and data. So the question isn’t if a company is tracking and using my data, it’s how.
What is online data and how is it created?
User data can include information you provide directly, information collected about your activity, and information inferred from your behavior, such as search history, interactions, and time spent on a site
Companies can collect data in many ways. One method is through cookies, small pieces of data that websites store in your browser. Cookies are used to keep information a user made on a site. For example, if I add a guitar case to my Amazon cart and click out of the website, it will be there when I come back. It can also keep me signed into Facebook every time I want to look for used guitars on Marketplace.
Companies also log your search history, clicked links, and videos watched. This shows them what you’re consistently interested in. If I look up on YouTube how to play Futile Devices on the piano once but look up how to play Stairway to Heaven 15 times, I’ll be recommended way more guitar tutorials.
How companies use data to personalize your experience
Your behavior online such as clicks, location, and searches can be turned into metrics. The metrics are used to see your patterns. They tell companies what you do on the internet and more importantly, predict what you’ll want to see more of. That way they can advertise products and recommend sites that are more personalized to you. It also helps advertisers target a more specific audience.
If a motorcycle company wants to advertise their new bike, they don’t want to spend money trying to reach someone like me who has never searched for motorcycles before. The guitar company on the other hand would rather push their products to one person like me than ten random people who’ve never expressed interest in learning the guitar.
Some companies also make a profile of who you are outside of your internet habits. If you use Google you can see what categories they sort you into based on your online activity. If you go to My Ad Center you can see what Google assumes about you. They guess things like your relationship status, household income, education and homeownership. When I looked at mine, it was right. It accurately predicted that I was in college, renting an apartment, and not a parent. I directly never told Google or any other platform this. But the data they’ve collected about me for years lets them learn it over time. Some of this information can be used to personalize advertising, depending on the platform and your own settings.
What control you have over your data
All this talk about what companies can track may seem overwhelming and a bit freaky. If you feel this way, you’re not alone. According to Pew Research, 81% of Americans believe there are more risks to companies collecting data than benefits. 79% are concerned about how their data is being used.
I find myself spending a lot of time online. I actually turned off my screen time tracker on my phone because I didn’t want to be reminded how much time I spend on Tik Tok and Instagram.
Because I’ve grown up with this unique environment, I tend to openly share our information, sometimes oversharing. This can make me more vulnerable to profiling and targeted by companies/advertisers. But there are ways to have control over the data you share.
Most sites have ways to opt out or disable tracking. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has a guide on how to limit your digital footprint. They recommend disabling your device’s Advertising ID, vetting apps before you download them, and denying third party apps access to unnecessary data.
I checked my privacy settings on my iPhone and found that I could give the 2048 game app access to my location and Lyft access to my photo library. You can manage which apps have access to this data through your settings. The CISA has instructions on how to do this for different devices.
Getting personalized ads for song tutorials and guitar bags can be helpful, but it’s important to understand how and why companies and websites track and use your data. By better understanding how your internet behavior impacts what is shown to you, you can learn how to make more informed choices about the data you share and the permissions you give apps to have more agency in your digital life.
This blog was written by NAMLE Youth Advisory Council member Maggie LeBeau, as part of the campaign, “The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You“