Identity Theft - A nexus with online marketing business

Are you sure that your private information is still private to you? The new trend in marketing is the online marketing. It has already become so popular that more and more companies are cutting share from their conventional marketing budget and allocating it to online advertising. The popularity of online marketing is quite obvious as it doesn't take time to reach the entire mass of people across the globe. The only thing that you need to choose is a proper site and a proper set of people. However, the curse of Identity Theft comes along with online marketing.

Choosing proper site is quite easy as you just need to check that the content of the site is aligned to your business and the volume of traffic to that site is substantial. The second part i.e. personalization is very interesting in the area of online advertisement and that is where we have the threat of Identity Theft. Actually personalization of an advertisement already exists to some extent here and there. If you have watched the free version of Hulu, you might have encountered the initial request, where we need to set the category of advertisement that we would like to watch. This is nothing but adopting or personalizing online advertisement as per your requirement. This really makes sense, as otherwise people may choose to ignore the entire slot dedicated for advertisement. Different organizations and online marketing agencies are already working on implementing and enhancing the same through online marketing. On one hand this is an innovative idea and business model, and on the other hand this has become a hot topic revolving around identity theft. Billions of dollars have already been budgeted for this in the coming years. But what exactly a personalization means? Let us take an example that we are the online advertising agency and we want to put an online advertisement for sale of passenger car. The car comes in the premium segment and our target audience will be mainly young people between the age of 25 and 30 years, whose annual income not less than $85000. Now if we can figure out these people, we will show our advertisement only to this set of people. The same space can be utilized for other advertisement to a different set of people and needless to say that it will be tailored according to their need. Among many organizations, IT giant google is one of the front runners in this area. They are working in a big way to personalize online advertisement and as well as their search engine. They have already modified their search engine to implement personalization to some extent. This is quite evident from the google search. And you can check it yourself very easily. For that, you need to search google twice, once while you are signed in and once while you are signed off. Enter some search criteria relevant to you (as your name or your website name) and see the difference in search result in both cases. Thus, don’t get surprised next time while you see an advertisement or a search result from google that you were long craving for.

 

Ad personalisation is a good idea and most welcome to this era of modern technology. However, along with personalization of advertisement, the curse of identity theft comes hand in hand. The private information that is required to personalize advertisement is often collected without the information of the user. Recently, there have been lots of discussion on breaching the private information. With the advent of personalized advertisement, suddenly the identity theft has come back to limelight again. Few years ago, the same identity theft came into lime light because of sporadic fraudulent cases across the globe. It generally happens in one of the two ways i.e. direct shared by the human being who have access to this data and through some software, which is known as malware and virus. Troajn Horse is the most discussed name of malwares in this field. A Trojan horse gives a hacker remote access to the remote computer system and help him to gather required information. Trojan Horse is readily available in the underworld market and can be used as a mean of stealing information.

 

In spite of all these controversies, many organizations are strategizing their future plan around personalized advertisement, which is a cause of concern because of Identity Theft. As a front runner in this place, google is working on the data policy as how exactly that can be handled in their effort to personalize search and advertisement. When the data is being used to do different frauds, the same can be shared with the online marketing agencies in exchange of money. Software hackers and other relevant people see this private information as a huge market space. It’s not far while the private data will be treated as commodity in underworld market and will be traded like any other commodity. The identity theft has already come to an alarming stage and hence need complete awareness among people. The worst part of this identity theft is that the victim remains totally unaware about this entire episode. Their attention is brought back to it only when they find out some fraudulent activity. Going forward, you may have to keep an eye also on the kind of advertisements shown to you. You may get an indication from the online personalized advertisements that your private data is no more private but has become public!

Photo Credit - Taylor White