Increased personalization in marketing could be driving people apart, Penn professor Joseph Turow warns in his latest book.<\/p>\n
Turow, a professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication, published \u201cThe Problem With Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age\u201d earlier this year. He examined the use of personal information in marketing and considered how artificial intelligence tools could change future practices in the field.<\/p>\n
In an interview, Turow explained that AI use in extreme personalization could make \u201cmake community and society harder to bring together\u201d because it is increasingly challenging for people to understand and communicate with one another.<\/p>\n
He also noted the consequences of publicly available data on a personal level.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Companies and marketers can \u201cliterally envelop you in a monopod\u201d if they have access to \u201chundreds of pieces of information about you,\u201d according to Turow. He added that down the line, it could even lead to phenomena such as articles having different headlines because analysts \u201cknow you\u2019ll click with more positive compared to negative headlines.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n Turow highlighted a phenomenon he called \u201cdigital resignation,\u201d through which people \u201cthrow up their hands and say, \u2018There\u2019s nothing I can do about it\u2019\u201d when faced with the scope of companies\u2019 knowledge.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s more and more prevalent in society is a sense of resignation about how this takes place \u2014\u00a0and companies encourage that,\u201d he added. \u201cThey encourage a kind of seductiveness\u201d where people give up their data \u201ceven when it\u2019s opt in, not just opt out.\u201d<\/p>\n Turow\u2019s publication comes after he led<\/a> a 2023 Annenberg School study on public awareness of how companies use personal data. At the time, he found that of over 2,000 participants given a true-or-false survey about consumer data security, only 23% received a passing grade and just one single respondent received an \u201cA.\u201d<\/p>\n According to his research<\/a>, 74% of Americans were resigned about data in 2023, up from 58% in 2015.\u00a0He also found that nearly 80% of Americans believed that it was urgent for Congress to pass legislation regarding data privacy and protections.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI is becoming increasingly prevalent on campus. The Wharton School announced that its students would have access to Claude Enterprise late in August, and Penn Information Systems & Computing expanded<\/a> access to the platform across the University on Sept. 7.\u00a0<\/p>\n