Web Advertisements

The facility that the HTTP protocol provides for extracting the IP address of a Web user's computer and its subsequent use by many Websites to determine the country or the geographical region in which the computer is located, has always seemed to me to be an unnecessary intrusion of my privacy. For Websites of course this information is quite useful as it facilitates the display of highly targeted advertisements that focus on products and services that might be of local interest. However, a slightly unnerving aspect of this type of IP-targeted advertising is sometimes witnessed by those of us who occasionally visit foreign-language websites. Here we find to our alarm that the website's advertisements suddenly change of their own volition from the local language to English, as if sensing somehow that we are actually native English speakers. Of course as IT experts know, the website has no such sensory perception, - only the ability to associate the visitor's IP address with the appropriate geographical location and thereby determine his native language. I am a student of German and frequently visit the website of the German newspaper "Bild", with the aim of improving my German, - although that might well be a forlorn hope. To my chagrin, the "Bild" website is also given to this propensity to recast all its advertisements from their normal German into English, the instant it recognises my UK-based IP address. I am now resigned to this, and try to console myself with the thought that as the products being advertised are usually of the kind that have an international market, such as Nokia mobiles or BMW cars, their advertising can not really be characterised as deliberate targeting of unsuspecting UK-based web-surfers, - even when facilitated by the unscrupulous use of surreptitiously obtained IP-address data. However, I was not so sanguine about one particular advertisement that recently appeared on the "Bild" website' The advertisement was in fact a recruiting poster for the Royal Air Force, exhorting its readers to enlist and promising them a rewarding career as an airman. I found this poster bizarre. I could not imagine something so definingly British as service with the RAF being allowed to be sponsored by a foreign website. No rational being in the Air Force, I would have thought, would ever have authorised such a course of action , - not least because of the obvious potential for cruel parody that such a poster had, with its use of a German website as a recruiting agency for one of Her Majesty's services. In my mind's eye I could well see a Monty Pythonesque sketch, with a Prussian recruiting sergeant barking at cowering English recruits. It occurred to me that such thoughtless form of advertising could only be encountered in the wholly computerised world of the Internet, where human wisdom takes a back seat and so-called intelligent software undertakes action and decisions which in the real world belong to humans. Reflecting on this extra-ordinary advertisement and chuckling to myself with amusement as well as disbelief, I could not help wallowing in a certain schadenfreude at the amazing faux-pas that this advertisement had managed to commit. For it told me that the so called artificial intelligence of modern computers, that we humans are constantly reminded of, is in reality only a step away from artificial stupidity, as this astonishing advertisement has clearly demonstrated.