CSotD: Click “Like” if you value your privacy
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Slowpoke's latest, in which Jen Sorensen is as puzzled as I am over the amazing Mom from my hometown who keeps discovering things the experts haven't figured out.
I'm a little — but only a little — puzzled by this strange intersection of Madison Avenue and "1984," whereby advertisements are, at least to my mind, targeted so precisely as to be creepy. In "1984," part of the chilling control Big Brother exercised was that there was no attempt to hide the constant surveillance everyone was under: Big Brother was watching you, and you'd better behave.
You would think this would make a poor partner with advertising, particularly since the sorts of chuckleheads who will fall for anything seem, on the surface, to be obsessed with protecting themselves against a mythical hoard of Internet rapists and burgurgalurs.
These are the parents who will allow their child to play a sport or be in the school play but then insist that no photos be posted on the Internet, in the belief that, while the child molesters in their own town don't go to school events, a pederast 1,000 miles away will spot the pic, buy a plane ticket and a six-pack of Mike's Hard Lemonade and show up on their doorstep. (I'm officially dubbing this "Hansen's Theory.")
But apparently their caution is not universal, simply misdirected.
And, anyway, how many fools do you require? Jokes about the widows of Nigerian tycoons ignore the fact that, if you set the price tag high enough, you only need to hook one sucker to prosper from even an obvious fraud, and that there's both a lid for every pot and a sucker born every minute and when the two concepts merge, somebody becomes wealthy.
And it's never the pigeon.
Targeted advertising to credulous consumers began innocently enough with the creepy reveal that the advertiser knew where you were, so that you'd get ads like this 2006 gem, which was funny and off-target enough that I saved it:
Fort Edward, NY, is a farming town just outside of Glens Falls, and small enough that, trust me, if any of those five girls had lived there, we'd have noticed.
The latest fine-tuning in these stalker ads is that, if you go to a shopping site, look around and decide either to come back later or not to bother, you may find ads for that site, and even for the exact product you looked at, popping up on other, unrelated pages.
To me, it's a combination of creepy and annoying, but, again, if it didn't work, they'd probably stop doing it.
And some are simply puzzling. I can't believe that Muslima, a Muslim dating service, is advertising heavily enough across the board to pop up as often as they do, but, on the other hand, I don't know why they would target me, since I doubt that incredibly cute 20-something girls in hajibs routinely include in their searches the words "agnostic" or "lapsed Catholic," much less the terms "fat," "bald" and "broke."
Yet the ads show up on one website or another nearly every day. I suspect I was unwittingly nominated for the role of "Khyber Ken, the Halal Hunk" by some Muslim Facebook friend who clicked on a photo of the Ka'aba that said, "'Like' this if you recognize it and want us to pilfer and exploit your entire contact list."
(I've noticed that the "click on this if you remember it" spam-trap meme at Facebook began with things like spindle-inserts for 45 records that you really did have to be ever-so-slightly on the ball to remember, but has since devolved into things like Corning Ware, presumably because making the pics easy to identify not only increases the number of clicks but produces a list of more gullible marks.)
What Jen points out in this strip is the common tactic of making the mark think he's in on the trick: We're smarter than those other people, and here's how we're gonna win!
The question I have, and it is one I'm sure Sorensen has asked herself, though it's not voiced directly in the cartoon, is "Whatever happened to the FTC?"
That is, the "Language Professors Hate Him" ad is cheesy and does make that "you and me are smarter than them there perfessers" appeal, but at least they have a specific self-proclaimed expert to tout (perhaps not the one in this example), and it probably wouldn't be hard for them to find a real language professor who strenuously disapproved of his teaching methods.
But there was a day when, if you said a housewife in Fort Edward was making $58,000 a year working from home through your methods, somebody official would demand an introduction to said housewife.
I know this because, for a time, I was one of the reporters who would then be invited to write a story about how the scam had been busted.
Maybe it's like feeding the poor, clothing the naked and healing the sick. Protecting the credulous is no longer a priority, except for the hopeless socialists among us.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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