This question asks whether the increasingly sophisticated targeting used by online advertising does more harm than good, for consumers and for society.
Question type: To what extent
An ETG General Paper original study guide to the 2024 A-Level GP Paper 1 essay on science & technology. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, UCLES, Cambridge Assessment or SEAB. A study aid, not an official answer.
The question assumes targeting is one thing with one balance sheet, when relevance, manipulation, privacy loss and market efficiency are different effects that fall on different parties.
conditions: targeting brings more good where it is consented, transparent and commercial, and more harm where it is covert, manipulative or political, so the balance turns on the conditions of use.
How to approach it. Weigh whether sophisticated ad targeting brings more harm than good, defining harm and good and for whom, and resisting a flat condemnation or defence.
Sophisticated targeting brings more good than harm where it is consented and commercial, since relevance benefits both consumer and firm; but it brings more harm than good where it crosses from relevance into covert manipulation, exploiting psychological data and the young, so the net balance depends on which side of that line the targeting sits.
Search, maps, email and social platforms are free because targeted advertising pays for them, and billions opt in daily, a revealed preference that targeting delivers value people want. But consent given without understanding the data trade, and to terms few read, is thin consent, and the bargain looks worse once the price includes psychological profiling, manipulation of the vulnerable and a degraded information commons, so the popularity of the free service does not settle the net balance.
Sophisticated targeting brings more good than harm where it stays consented, transparent and commercial, and the free services prove its value; it brings more harm than good where it becomes covert manipulation, preys on the young, or carries falsehood into politics, so the verdict is conditional, and the regulatory line between relevance and manipulation is where the balance is decided.
The balance differs sharply by domain: in the commercial domain sophisticated targeting brings more good than harm, raising market efficiency and funding free services, but in the civic domain, where the same tools micro-target political and ideological messages, it brings more harm than good, so the honest answer is that the technology is net positive for markets and net negative for democracy.
Targeting that drives gambling, junk food or buy-now-pay-later debt to the vulnerable does civic-scale damage while wearing a commercial face, so the neat split between a benign market and a harmed democracy is too clean. But this strengthens rather than refutes the analysis: it shows the real fault line is not commercial versus civic but consented and contestable versus covert and unaccountable, and the political domain is simply where covert, unaccountable targeting is most concentrated and least correctable.
Sophisticated targeting is not one verdict but two: a net good in the commercial domain, where it makes markets efficient and funds the services people choose, and a net harm in the civic domain, where invisible micro-targeting corrodes the shared reasoning democracy needs, and because both run on one engine, the task is to keep the commercial gains while caging the civic harm.
Option A runs on conditions, drawing one line between relevance and manipulation and judging cases against it. Option B runs on domain, giving two opposite verdicts for the commercial and civic uses of the same technology. Both are defensible: A is the clean conditions-based 'to what extent' answer; B reaches a split verdict that reads as more analytical because it explains why a single yes or no is impossible.
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