The European Union is complaining about Google again. Old world says the new world doesn’t play by its rules, again.
In the old world, companies provided services and charged for those services. We needed to be protected from fly-by-night companies who took our money but didn’t provide the advertised services.
In the new world, companies provide services for free. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Grooveshark let us e-mail, write, calculate, store and display our pictures, read the news, socialise, rant, or play music without paying a penny.
We don’t need to be protected because if the service doesn’t work as advertised, we can drop it. No three months notice, no stopping standing orders. Just quit.
How do these companies do it? How do they get the money to pay their brilliant staff and the investors who bought their server farms?
They do it, very cleverly, by allowing people who sell things to advertise to the people who want those things.
This is significant improvement in the advertising business. In the old world, the people selling cars put adverts in newspapers, on TV and on huge billboards beside busy roads. Most of the people reading newspapers, watching TV or stuck in a traffic jam don’t want these adverts, but they put up with them. Most of the people seeing these adverts don’t want a new car.
It is an inefficient way of selling. Get your message to a couple of a million people in the hope that a couple of hundred are interested.
Google and Facebook know their customers better than most of the old world companies. They know who is actively interested in cars. They don’t sell this information to the car companies. The car companies create an advert and pay Google to display it to those who are interested.
If I am thinking about a new car and an advert for Ford pops up as I’m reading my mail, I may click it and be taken to a Ford site.
Ford now have a bloke who is thinking about a new car looking at their cars.
This is much better than the old world. Why does the European Union think it needs to protect me from this? Why didn’t the EU try to protect me from scatter-gun advertising?
The EU is concerned about personal data. I’m not. I keep my passwords safe, but my likes and dislikes, my opinions, I’m happy for the world to know. The kids who use Facebook are happy for lots of people to know them. They can be more famous than kids used to be.
And what use is your data if only you know it?
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