Scary Digital Marketing

Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and 100 other companies are tracking you. They know everything you look at on the Internet. They also track every place you go geographically in the real world.

Think about what I can do with that. I can target everyone who has walked into a Goldberg and Osborne law office in the last five days and put ads for Learner and Rowe in front of them on TV, YouTube and all over the Internet. I can put ads for Home Depot in front of most everyone who walked into a Lowe’s in the last five days. If you walked into a Jared Jewelry Store, I can put ads for Kay Jewelers on one of the next websites you visit.

If my client is a plumber, I can put ads in front of every person who searched on Google for, “how to fix a leaky faucet.”

More than that, I can customize the ad to say, “Don’t fix a leaky faucet yourself. You might flood your house. Hire Super Plumber to do it right.”

What can you do about this? Turn off location services on your phone so Apple and Android stop recording every place you go. You could clear your browsing history and cookies in your favorite web browser and do that on a regular basis. On Facebook, set your privacy settings on high. You cannot keep these companies from tracking you altogether, but you can significantly limit what they record and sell.