• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, October 9, 2014

Facebook this week announced a new advertising tool for "location-aware ads" that allows marketers to pull location information from your smartphone in order to serve you targeted ads. In theory, as you are passing, say, a Walgreens, an ad could pop into your Facebook stream inviting you into the store for a discount or other such offering. This, of course, assumes you walk the street, head down, attention focused only on your mobile screen instead of the DO NOT CROSS sign -- or most famously, a fountain -- in your direct path.

This also assumes that Facebook not only knows when you are near a drugstore, but also have walked into a hotel for a nooner or are in a bar instead of the client meeting you told your boss you were heading to an hour ago. In that case, though, getting a location-based ad is just the start of your problems.

Remember when the news feeds of nearly 700,000 Facebook users were manipulated to show more positive or negative posts? It shouldn't be too long before you get ads based on your emotional state of being while you are in that hotel or bar. This assumes you have a drink, post to Facebook, have another drink, post to Facebook, ad infinitum -- both indicative of a life not being well-lived.

As Facebook ads become more and more intimate (Have the right birth control for that nooner? Here's some sexy underwear she might appreciate as a gift... wouldn't some Champagne be great about now?), how will you react? Happy to have a reminder of things that you could be buying, but aren't because you are otherwise engaged? Pissed by the intrusion into an otherwise personal activity or state of mind? Thrilled to know that no matter where you are or what you are doing, someone has a product or service that would add to the experience -- and a handy way to purchase it?

Isn't there something fundamentally wrong that an entire industry is growing up around the notion that the more marketers know about you, where you are, what you are doing and where your head is (anonymously, OF COURSE) the more they can construct and serve ads for you to buy more stuff? Putting aside that our entire economy is dependent on consumer spending for things we probably don't need, shouldn't there be some limits on the use of data that never forgets, endlessly accumulating for the express purpose of selling more stuff?

For decades, marketers have collected offline data to try and predict when and where you would be most receptive to their ad messages. They've used everything from videotaping your movements in stores to tracking your eye movements as you consume media, from focus groups to get direct feedback on their messaging, to survey intercepts in malls to try and deduce when and how to sell you stuff. Now in the digital age, between what you volunteer about yourself on social media sites and what they glean from tracking you across the Internet (and of course on mobile), building a dossier on you has never been easier.

Some aspects of this are pretty cool, from recommendations of things to read, programs to watch, or notices about price drops. But I suspect we are very close to the general public's tolerance for "personalization" used primarily to pitch a product.

Perhaps our industry motto should really be: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."