Although we are still not where Minority Report had predicted, we have been moving toward that point and witnessing the emergence of new methods of personalized, targeted ads over the past few decades.

Personalized ads consist, partly, of our personal information that targets us more effectively, like in the case of Minority Report, where ads were presented to each individual based on their personal identity and interests. Other cases of personalization in advertising include ads that are presented to the viewers according to their interests, their geography, or based on their age, gender, socio-economic status, and other similar criteria.

Let’s suppose a more tangible example that we have already experienced. Imagine you go into a rock climbing website or forum because you are interested in pursuing this sport as a hobby. That’s where you most likely view ads about rock climbing equipment or tours and not ads related to cooking or home decoration, because, well, people who visit this website are, with a higher probability, interested in the first type of content and would click on it.

Of course, if you view an ad for a tour in another country or continent, or for a brand of equipment that is not available for you to buy online or in a local store, you are much less likely to click on it. Hence, location-based targeting helps both you and the business that is advertising to deliver the pertinent message to its rightful audience.

Personalization is not bad in itself. It makes our online experience more efficient because at least, the advertisement we are exposed to is more relevant to who and where we are and what we want and like. The problem arises when we are unaware of the influence that these messages have on us. Especially if we have a soft spot for what is being offered.

Let’s clarify this with another example. Suppose you are deciding to buy a car, you search for it online and find a website that gives you all the required information, unbiased information, about the many options you can choose from. Now, this site traces your activity using cookies and that way, even after you have left it, it gives the next servers you connect to, a clue about who you are and what you are interested in; This information lets car companies target you with enticing ads on your future surfs on the net, and this might not end until you buy something from them, or even afterward.

You might have had such an experience where you searched for something and saw the traces of that search in the next website you visited, which didn’t have any relevance to your previous search.

This personalized targeting can divert your decision, very subliminally and subtly, without you even noticing that it is not actually you who decided what to buy, but it was decided for you.

This can raise ethical issues and people don’t want to be manipulated, not by a service with personal agendas that may contradict our own intentions and values.

There have been some attempts in removing advertising in the form of ad-blockers or reimbursing users for the attention they spend on viewing ads. A successful project in this area is Basic Attention Token (BAT) that reimburses users for their paying attention to the ads they view online. It combines with an ad-blocking browser called Brave and that way, in case a user unblocks ads and views them, they get paid with tokens. This is an ethical and a practical solution that has been made possible and implemented on a blockchain platform.

Advertising isn’t essentially a bad thing. With the countless options that we have around every decision that we make, not having any preferences, no forces to make one thing more appealing over the others gives us a dizziness, and advertisement helps us get familiar with different options that we have and form preferences and tendencies around them. Having these preferences prevents decision fatigue and gives us a chance to spend our attention in places where conscious decision making is more critical.

As pioneers in the advertising industry, if we want to act responsibly and conscientiously, we should minimize the issues that are endangering users’ privacy by setting terms and policies that ensure data anonymization and transparency.

Weriz is aiming toward that point, to apply the best practices that make the user experience as well as what is happening on the business side as secure as possible and protect personal identity by removing personal information from the data. It still allows users benefit from personalized notifications that inform them about the trends and events that are essentially based on their interests, but it gives them a choice, a set of customizable options, to define how much and how often of it.

It will allow users to choose, whether they want to view ads or not and if they do, in what mode do they want to receive them, in a passive or an active mode? How frequently do they view them and in what categories? This will give an upper hand to the users who, willingly, choose to view personalized ads and make them feel protected instead of pried.