Author: Kevin Walsh, Paul Roetzer
Publisher: HubSpot
Publication Year: 2019
Summary: The following video notes that individuals frequently make a trade off between privacy and convenience in order to receive personalized content, which firms can then use to target how they market to audiences. This brings up issues of ethics in using artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing. Paul notes that there is currently a race to push forward AI technology, and any time such a race occurs, people will push forward regardless of any ethical considerations with the idea being that if you’re not the first, others will be. For AI to truly personalize a user’s experience, massive amounts of data are needed. Yet nobody really stops to think about how Google Maps knows where you’re going all of the time. Paul points out that the most shocking thing about it all is how desensitized people are to it, citing examples where Alexa sent several random messages to a user and how at one point Ring employees had access to any and all videos stored on Ring servers. These stories made headlines for a day before they were immediately buried and forgotten by the public. With the current situation being little to no government oversight, it is currently companies and brands setting the standards for how much data is collected, how it is used, and how transparent to be about it.
