Cookies Turn a Sweet Profit

For the past 21 years using cookies has been an integral part of our online experience, but in recent years the use of them has changed a bit. Instead of being used for memory of settings on sites and for shopping, cookies are now being used by adverting companies to behaviorally profile users to make selling their products more efficient. Utilizing 3^rd party tracking cookies (as explained in the Wall Street Journal video), they are able to monitor your browsing history and use the sites you visited to determine what products you are most interested in and what items you would find appealing. These actions of these advertisers are fairly unknown to most people, and have actually caused a privacy concerns for those aware of this. This modernized strategy is to sell products to individuals rather than groups, and these companies used the data collected by cookies to do so. Although there is now individualized attention, the ads seen by consumers are the same as ever.  This means that they are still filled with the formulaic social idles (as stated in Steve Craig’s article) that have been used for centuries like the man’s man, overly sensualistic attractive female, and the numerous racial and gender stereotypes we see to this day (as stated in both . Though the examples used in these ads are extremely exaggerated compared to real life, there is a grain of truth in each to keep them going and help give them power.  Though we hate to admit it, most people know or at least have seen in person someone that fit the mold of these exaggerated characters in these commercial; the college boy who can’t cook to save his life like in Hot Pocket ads, the party girl who’ll do anything after a couple drinks like in most alcohol ads, and we have all encountered one person of a particular ethnicity that unfortunately fit the negative stereotypes said about their race. Though we know , with minute exceptions, that most of these stereotypes are untrue, but why do we listen to them? Mainly because they’re shoved in our faces every day as we are bombarded with thousands of advertisements a day, and these ads farther perpetuate the stereotypes. They are deeply ingrained in our society because we are heavily influenced by our media, and advertisers, since they are able to advertise to us directly, are able to choose the right people to keep said stereotypes going, and are profiting from it. Using cookies to track history to advertise may be a debatable topic, but we can all agree that the content in them, depending on the ad, are definitely harmful to our society as a whole.