25 research outputs found
The Tradeoff Fallacy - How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation
New survey results indicate that marketers are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that Americans give out information about themselves as a tradeoff for benefits they receive. To the contrary, the survey reveals most Americans do not believe that âdata for discountsâ is a square deal.
The findings also suggest, in contrast to other academicsâ claims, that Americansâ willingness to provide personal information to marketers cannot be explained by the publicâs poor knowledge of the ins and outs of digital commerce. In fact, people who know more about ways marketers can use their personal information are more likely rather than less likely to accept discounts in exchange for data when presented with a real-life scenario.
Our findings, instead, support a new explanation: a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their dataâand that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.
By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but alsoâover timeâfor the institution of consumer commerce.
 
Americans Canât Consent To Companiesâ Use Of Their Data
Consent has aways been a central part of Americansâ interactions with the commercial internet. Federal and state laws, as well as decisions from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), require either implicit (âopt outâ) or explicit (âopt inâ) permission from individuals for companies to take and use data about them. Genuine opt out and opt in consent requires that people have knowledge about commercial data-extraction practices as well as a belief they can do something about them. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the commercial internet, the latest Annenberg national survey finds that Americans have neither. High percentages of Americans donât know, admit they donât know, and believe they canât do anything about basic practices and policies around companiesâ use of peopleâs data. FACT: By law a travel site such as Expedia or Orbitz that compares prices on different airlines does not have to include the lowest airline prices. 72% donât know that; 49% of Americans admit they donât know. âą FACT: The Federal Health Insurance and Portability Act (HIPAA) does not stop apps that provide information about health â such as exercise and fertility apps â from selling data collected about the app users to marketers. 82% of Americans donât know; 45% admit they donât know. âą FACT: It is legal for an online store to charge people different prices depending on where they are located. 63% donât know, and 38% of Americans admit they donât know.
High levels of frustration, concern, and fear compound Americansâ confusion: 80% say they have little control over how marketers can learn about them online; 80% agree that what companies know about them from their online behaviors can harm them. These and related discoveries from our survey paint a picture of an unschooled and admittedly incapable society that rejects the internet industryâs insistence that people will accept tradeoffs for benefits and despairs of its inability to predictably control its digital life in the face of powerful corporate forces. At a time when individual consent lies at the core of key legal frameworks governing the collection and use of personal information, our findings describe an environment where genuine consent may not be possible. Our portrait of a society underprepared for the behind-the-screen pitfalls of internet commerce is drawn from a nationally representative multi-mode survey of 2,014 U.S. adults conducted during Fall 2022 for Pennâs Annenberg School by the University of Chicagoâs National Opinion Research Center. The aim of this report is to chart the particulars of Americansâ lack of knowledge about the commercial use of their data and their âdark resignationâ in connection to it. Our goal is also to raise questions and suggest solutions about public policies that allow companies to gather, analyze, trade, and otherwise benefit from information they extract from large populations of people who are uninformed about how that information will be used and deeply concerned about the consequences of its use. In short, we find that informed consent at scale is a myth, and we urge policymakers to act with that in mind
Americans Roundly Reject Tailored Political AdvertisingâAt a Time When Political Campaigns Are Embracing It
Americans, Marketers, and the Internet: 1999-2012
This is a collection of the reports on the Annenberg national surveys that explored Americans\u27 knowledge and opinions about the new digital-marketing world that was becoming part of their lives. So far weâve released seven reports on the subject, in 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010, and 2012. The reports raised or deepened a range of provocative topics that have become part of public, policy, and industry discourse. In addition to these reports, Iâve included three journal articles â from I/S, New Media & Society and the Journal of Consumer Affairs â that synthesize some of the findings and place them into policy frameworks. The journals have kindly allowed reproduction for this purpose
Recommended from our members
Rarity of monodominance in hyperdiverse Amazonian forests.
Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network (ATDN). Utilizing a simple defining metric of at least half of the treesââ„â10âcm diameter belonging to one species, we found only a few occurrences of monodominance in Amazonia, and the phenomenon was not significantly linked to previously hypothesized life history traits such wood density, seed mass, ectomycorrhizal associations, or Rhizobium nodulation. In our analysis, coppicing (the formation of sprouts at the base of the tree or on roots) was the only trait significantly linked to monodominance. While at specific locales coppicing or ectomycorrhizal associations may confer a considerable advantage to a tree species and lead to its monodominance, very few species have these traits. Mining of the ATDN dataset suggests that monodominance is quite rare in Amazonia, and may be linked primarily to edaphic factors