Among my several myriad "likes" on Facebook, including popular music artists, movies, or television shows, Amazon Student tends to stand out apart from my normal tendencies to publicize my interests. The reason for that is because Amazon Student has relatively mediocre, updates about their products or services advertised. they cater to teens and young adults basically, meaning its stuff they like but at slightly lower than average prices. This isn't all that attractive. As far as usefulness, one feature of its updates gives you indicators to when sales are. If you see an update by Amazon Student saying "Hunger Games on Sale Now for e-books! Only $0.99!" , you're likely to find other popular book titles on sale also. A little helpful, but somewhat obvious if you've been shopping for books the past year.
What draws people in to their mediocre site? Free Amazon Prime for a year and sweepstakes. I didn't need Facebook to tell me what Amazon is featuring already on their front page. However, the likeliness of good prizes and frequency of drawings for their sweepstakes are pretty high; which is very attractive to their target demographic. College people especially, love free things. We'll take anything we can get as long as its free and pertinent to our interests.
Amazon takes advantage of this and it wouldn't surprise me if they also take advantage of what they can get from Facebook's compendium of everyone's interests and activities. By entering yourself into the drawing, they ask your permission by "allowing Amazon Student to access your information" when you click Like. Maybe 1 in 1000 people will actually read that mundane Terms and Conditions policy that all sites have, and in it is basically a contract saying you're allowing them to take your information, and use it to their will. This means that we're sacrificing our privacy for something so little and all of our personal information becomes at risk to what companies can do with it. Maybe that drawing for that new iPad isn't worth it...
No comments:
Post a Comment