Not a fans of these people saying how bad thing are but refuse to elaborate. Like sure, i know ads and socmed company will collect my data piece by piece and put it together to know who i am and target me with stupid ads, but i also love to know if there’s more to it. It’s not to convince me but it’s to convince others.
I worked at an ad agency and we’d literally have every user’s email, name, phone etc in random spreadsheets that everyone had access to.
As an intern I had root access to just about everything on the company server because I was one of the people who “knew computers” who wasn’t a dev.
There was constant debate about how to trick people into giving over their data etc (e.g. email sign-up for some free crap that you never actually got). Or getting people to allow apps permission to access their contacts, as then you’ve got 100 new people, and enough info about them to get them to open a spam email.
Also, if the user fell for a trick, their details are suddenly high value, as they are dumb enough to be a “mark” (or maybe their English isn’t very good), so their stuff can be sold to scam companies or just scummy people.
Privacy is a layer of defence, and shitty people feel entitled to take it away from you.
“…root access to just about everything on the company server.”
The urge to set up a cron for a random time after my departure to sudo rm -rf / would be so strong.
Or a Python script that quietly swaps all the data tables’ values, so the aggregate information looks valid but is functionally worthless.
That last sentence is a beautiful summary. I’m totally going to steal it. I promise to try and remember to give credit.
Some things that my company does:
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Has someone watching you browse our site live. We can see everything you do in real time. All your searches, missclicks, mouse movements, etc. Only thing it cant see is credit card info.
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Uses these live views to create a profile on you. Are you in the deep south and searched for something that could be “conservative”? Your now on our Conservative mailing list. Vise-versa as well, We have email marketing campaigns that are written to cater to demographics. For each email sales campaign we put out, there are about 8 varieties of those emails that are tailored to what we think you want.
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Keep databases of all our customers and people who visit the site, with as much info as possible. IP, location, estimated salary, spending potential, whether or not you are more likely to click on our links. All kinds of info that isnt really protected in any meaningful way. Most of it is just on a Google Drive.
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For our big spenders and repeat customers, we have a separate database that has even more personal info. The marketing manager has even gone so far as to look up Facebook and Linkden and whatnot on you and take whatever they can find. Family, friends, hobbies, jobs, anything that they think can be useful to sell more stuff. Again, none of this is really secured to well.
Im not in the marketing department of my job so theres probably a lot more that im not aware of. These are just a few things we do and im sure this is mild in comparison to bigger companies. My job is a small family business with like 10 people working there.
Yeah, the first time I saw he granularity of what Analytics could collect on a site, I was mortified. Like yeah, they may not record your specific name, but if they know every page you visit and everything you buy, you’re still a unique and trackable entity.
This is why I run several layers of adblock on my network and use plugins to search random terms that seem real, while also clicking every ad that makes it through.
My goal ceased being to contain my interests/info when I realized how much they knew. Now my goal is to just make the data as poisoned as possible.
But what does your company do with this data? You put me on an email list, but if you have my spam only email… Then what? What do I stand to lose by your company doing research on me?
Why don’t you give everyone here that kind of info then?
What are you going to give me in return?
It sounds like everyone already has all that info, and all they seem to do with it is recommend gifts my mom would like based on her search history.
I get targeted political ads, but who cares about those? I don’t form my opinion based on ads.
You are so special thinking you are immune to propaganda.
It’s pretty easy for ads, they’re clearly labeled and anything in an advertisement is propaganda with little merit.
Ah, who among us hasn’t been through an “I’m not influenced by propaganda because I know it’s propaganda (even if it’s granularly targeted to my biases)” phase? Many of us never get past it. I hope you manage to.
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The key word here is ‘security.’
Ad networks have been used to spread malware before, for example.
The data aspect does allow for much more nuanced pictures of people’s lives than you might think - Google the story about the teenage girl who Target knew was pregnant before she’d told her family as a sample (and that was only from purchase data).
But realistically advertisers know a lot less than you think they do. They have the data, but don’t know what to do with it outside of aggregate approaches that move the needle for a subset of their audience (who tend to just be very suggestible in general).
I think you’re the only person who I have ever seen say this aloud in a public forum—I totally agree. This doesn’t just apply to advertising. “I used to work for a plastics company—YOU DONT EVEN KNOW HOW BAD MICROPLASTICS ARE” No further elaboration
Like, how bad are they?! Tell me! You can’t just say that and leave!
They may have an NDA.
I work for a major data aggregator of public records, which uses a lot of the same techniques the these ad places use to profile people.
You would be astounded by the sheer amount of information we have on individual people from addresses, hard pii such as criminal and finance records and your ssn if in the USA, who your neighbors and family are, your assets such as housing/vehicles etc, and even your individual devices like your phone.
I was done dirty by one of these ‘services’. I was applying for housing and the report came back and had mixed my background up with a multiple felon who had inly a vaguely similar name. It turns out I was denied the chance to rent and I had very little recourse to correct the record. Laws around this stuff really stink in the USA.
In summary, CoreLogic/SafeRent can get stuffed.
Not to mention if you use a bit of game and network theory you can extrapolate political leanings, health conditions, sexual preferences, affairs, etc. All of the most personal and intimate details of a person’s life are one data analysis away if you have a few things. Purchase histories from your rewards cards, browsing history, viewing history, most watched tv shows, if you mute ads or not; everything is tracked and aggregated and available for purchase. Even supposedly anonymized data can be de-anonymized with relative ease.
I remember a story from years ago where a woman started getting pre-natal coupons from Target. She didn’t even know she was pregnant. She took a test a couple of days later and found out. They had determined she was likely pregnant due to the changes in her food-purchasing habits that she had been doing instinctually.
I read about that Target thing as well. I seem to remember someone who worked for them stated that their shopper data analysis algorithm was so accurate, it was able to predict a pregnancy’s due date within about a five to seven days margin of error. I’m in the US, with conservative states passing all these draconian anti-abortion laws, I saw a ton of women searching for “period tracking” apps that didn’t share data for fear of being tracked by the government. Someone should be able to use technology to track and maintain their own health without fear of big brother snooping around.
It’s wild how much data is collected and what companies and governments can do with it.
Glad to see someone say this. It’s a total appeal to authority argument. With they would’ve explained why they think it’s bad and let us come to our own conclusion.
Exactly, this is just a baseless statement of something we all know to be true and already agree with. It’s like those posts that basically just say “rich people don’t pay much tax, this is bad!”, I’d love to read some details but just stating the obvious isn’t informing the interested or convincing the uninterested.
Attribution (how do I prove the ad I bought actually influenced a person’s decision to do something) is still not a solved problem. If a company’s furniture business increased revenue 10% in a quarter, what percent of that was due to marketing. Also which campaign attributed the most to that increase? Because companies often run multiple campaigns through different channels and vendors.
If I can prove spending 50M on TV ads resulted in 150M in additional sales, that company would probably spend 150M on the next campaign to try and generate 450M.
The problem is what kind of data it takes to prove attribution. If I could say ID 123 saw an impression on Jan 31, made an Internet search in that vertical on Feb 1, and traveled to a location with that product on Feb 2. That would be pretty fucking convincing, but it also involves knowing ID 123 person’s activities in extreme granularity.
That’s a use case for selling furniture, but what else could you accomplish? Honey pot people seeking abortions in places where it use illegal? Identify people who maybe politically subversive. Scams on scams.
Pretty much anyone with a budget and a goal can access a commercial surveillance network.
I used to work in ad-tech and this is exactly right. We had a lot of problems that caused a considerable amount of noise on the results:
- Cookie trackers getting added to the main blocklist for ad blockers basically rendered them useless
- IP tracking was basically done by matching IPv4 addresses which are not permanent. Apple launched a feature which made every person who had ever paid for an iCloud subscription resolve to the same IP in any given country.
- People generate so much data that it’s actually hard to try to tell a meaningful “story” out of it. Like GP is saying 90% of a marketing budget is wasted but it’s hard to tell which 90% that is.
I also think “attribution” is fundamentally flawed. Like the Coca Cola ads they show at Christmas are the most successful ad campaign ever but no one goes on their website after watching one of them.
I agree with him entirely, but the current problem is really that content creators need to get paid, but so do the hosts.
There are places to host that are creator-paid…the creator could also self-host. But if you want your content to be seen, you need to be in the big websites that get most their revenue from ads.
Get Patreon and Nebula bigger than YouTube and maybe more creators would host there. But that’s a bit of a prisoners dilemma.
No, they don’t need to get paid. People can do things for fun and not money.
Is this sarcasm? I don’t understand why they don’t need to get paid. I mean sure the hobbyist creator isn’t thinking about getting paid. But the people with the best content aren’t hobbyist, they are good because that’s all they do.
Those “people with the best content” getting paid through ad money had lead to lots of people optimizing their content not for quality but for ad friendliness and mass compatibility.
Sure they can. But no matter how you slice it, everybody has bills to pay. Servers and bandwidth aren’t cheap. Nor are people to run them, or the massive infrastructure that makes up YouTube (for example).
You host your videos in a computer under your desk, and it doesn’t cost much, but you are highly limited on how much you can serve and how big your audience is. You can grow either of them but that’s going to take time and money. Eventually it goes from a fun thing you do that you enjoy, to an expensive hobby, to a time-consuming money sink.
If you’re lucky you get to stay in one of the first two. You’re not huge, but you’re having fun and you’re not a sellout. Eventually you are faced with a choice…have fun and limit your arts reach, or get bigger and become a sellout. And the move itself to a larger ad supported platform will likely result in losing some of your more virtuous fans.
I started going DEEP into privacy protection and ad blocking maybe 8 years ago. I noticed that despite the fact that I was completely raw dogging the internet, the ads I was seeing were hilariously not my tempo. I was getting tampon ads, grindr ads, ads in foreign languages, and luxury car ads. So for every data collecting firm connecting the dots on who I am, there seemed to be 10 more than had no idea what they were doing and just casting wide ass nets.
Yeah I agree to some extent.
There’s that target / pregnancy story where basically they found that they would spook customers by revealing how much they actually knew. I don’t think is an adequate explanation though.
Honestly though, even without any nefarious shady tracking techniques, someone like Amazon should be able to figure out what stuff I might want to buy with alarming accuracy just based on previous purchases. They really don’t though, the best they can do is show me stuff I’ve already bought. Like “We see you bought a great coffee machine last month, what about this other coffee machine? Or perhaps we can tempt you with this fancy coffee machine?” I mean - show me some nice coffee mugs or something.
I always assumed that’s what the gambling and “hot women in your area want to meet you!” Ads were: least common denominators when they can’t target you well enough to place more reputable ads
It almost makes me sad that I don’t see those as much anymore. They have me pegged (and not in a fun way)
I feel like internet advertising is way overdue for a crash, its like the matrix I dont even see them anymore.
I just don’t understand how advertising still makes so much money. Who’s watching ads and clicking on them these days? Who sees an ad that isn’t annoying, pandering, or downright infuriating to them? The ad business is so profitable, it’s Google’s main revenue source and Netflix is getting rid of a paid tier just to focus on their ad-supported one.
How is the ad business so profitable?
We try to avoid ads, but there is vast majority who just watches ads and get influenced.
It’s about 15% of an engaged audience on every successful campaign where advertising really shifts behavior.
Over a few years I realized that it was likely the same subset of an unusually suggestive audience that the advertising was really for.
The industry likes to lie to itself that it’s effective in aggregate, but really it’s just people with poor suggestibility filters that are getting swayed through advertising channels.
Marketing channels are the much more interesting and worthwhile endeavor.
I work in an advertising-adjacent field (we won’t do any skeevy data-harvesting stuff, but still, ads) and I barely use any of the main social media sites, have an adblocker enabled on my router, use uBlock, GrapheneOS for my phone, Linux with a bunch of hardening, a VPN that’s always on etc.
My work computer doesn’t have any of that 'cause I need to be able to see ads on it, but sometimes if I forget and just browse around on my work computer with no ad protection… holy fuck it always surprises me how awful the internet is.
I work in an advertising-adjacent field (we won’t do any skeevy data-harvesting stuff, but still, ads)
My pal too; he makes signs.
I’ve worked at both Facebook and Google, and I’d second this sentiment. It is pretty disgusting that anyone with a passable knowledge of how to hide their tracks can basically get all of the information (messages, posts, photos, private information) they want about you. Sure, they might get fired if they’re caught, and maaaaaaaybe (read: probably not) face legal action, but they can do a lot of damage beforehand. And if they’re good enough, they won’t get caught.
I trust the people that I worked with there, but these are big organizations, and a lot more people than I would be comfortable with have essentially administrator access to private data.
Yeah. I work in IT as well. Not in a megacorp like Google or Facebook, but I’ve been in large private companies and government agencies that you would hope would have strict privacy and security policies. Guess what? They don’t.
Nobody in a position of power cares beyond the point of legal requirements, which are mostly shit. It’s kind of like “military grade”; it sounds impressive, but what it actually means is “this is as cheaply made as possible while still meeting the bare minimum legal standard”.
IMO it’s less about insiders stealing info. I’ve seen leads lists stolen and sold on the open market, etc. What we should really be concerned about is the above board, legal and absolutely promoted evil of advertising. I’ve worked in social Media and gaming(gambling) and let men tell you: the legal things these advertisers do are diabolical. The whiteboard conversations about how to structure a user journey are exploitation and immoral, unethical and downright evil and they are so by design. You’re doing a poor job if you’re not devising ways to skirt the law and use loopholes to manipulate people.
Doesn’t most people also manupulate each other as well? Like gaslighting and etc.
yay! you worked at facebook and google well knowing they exploit people’s emotions and tech illiteracy. Do you want a cookie?
I hope you’re working at Tiktok now. I can’t wait to praise you about how you tell everyone they’re exploiting teenagers and spying on them that we totally don’t know. 🕵️ 🕵️ 🕵️
why is this so normalized? every time some guy who knowingly does evil things and comes up and say that their work was evil like and now everyone should praise them… removed STFU, you aren’t revealing anything that’s not public knowledge.
“I spied on billions of people, I would avoid my ex company”
“I previously worked at amazon and made millions, now you should avoid it”
“I got rich by exploiting you, now that i’m out and doing other things, avoid my last company”
“I worked at <social media company> and oversaw pushing violent narratives in developing countries, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 feet pole”
No Shit Sherlock!!
Hmm maybe I’m just desensitized, but what are they going to do with that information? Going to try and sell me stupid shit?
Right now in the US? Not much outside of try to sell you stupid shit.
But the capability in the data is there for an authoritarian regime to do quite a lot to you as a result of the information.
So you know - if there was any pending threat of a narcissistic psychopath upending the government you might be concerned over what insights into individual mindsets can be accomplished with the data available…
Have health insurance?
Big into drinking, lots of bars and going to liquor stores whilst your mobile phone is with you and some apps have location access permissions?
Don’t be surprised if your health insurance goes up on account of being in a higher risk group…
(It’s not exactly hard to cross your location with store locations and it’s probably already done generally to try and determine your consumer habits)
And this is just a mild, mild example. Stuff to do with people’s sex life can have far more entertaining effects, especially in a highly moralistic country (like the US) or if cheating on a spouse.
Think about it this way: if you don’t jump through hops to make it hard to track your location, there is a record, forever of every place you go to with your phone and how long you stay there (and repeat visits with long stays would signal a pattern) as well as of everything you’re interested in enough to look it up and/or visit it on the Internet and it’s all crossed. Further, if you have email via one of the big providers such as Google, every email you sent, received or even just drafted but never sent is tracked.
Why do you think Google started pretty much forcing people to give them their phone number for the Google account that, for example, goes with their Google Mail?! It allows them to link all that sweet information and match it to a single individual.
And this is before we go into crossing data with the kind of physical life data on you: the insurance company records, car onership and rental, financial information and transactions, even public transport use (for those which use modern touch-in touch-out cards).
Image Transcription: Mastodon Post
Brendan, @[email protected]
Hey folks, I’ve seen a lot of talk going around about adblockers lately. I worked in the advertising technology and security industry for five years and the one core piece of advice I have is:
Holy fuck never give an advertiser your data. You cannot believe how bad it is. Don’t. I run three layers of ad block protection and I’d run more if it was feasible. If you want to support creators give them money.
And people on here have called me excessive for running NoScript + Ublock and actively researching all of the script sources that I enable. If it even has the letters ‘ad’ in it it is permanently forbidden. Along with everything google unless I need to sign in and tag manager is used, then I do it in an isolated environment.
Cant we figure out our tracking id and just feed it complete garage? Like is there an app for that?
Adnauseam
I built software around 2010-2014 around harvesting visitor data.
Shit was scary back then with how much we could predict. We were already laser targeting customers and people. I can only imagine what they’re doing now.
This was before the whole “big data” push when companies were cross-referencing data sources from other harvesters.
oh rly? then why, after i’ve used facebook daily for 15 years, does it thin my interests include “foot” and and actors ive never heard of? why does google, after about that same amount of usage plus me owning many androids and having an even deeper entanglement with it than with facebook, think i’m the opposite sex (!) and imagine countless interest for me that i don’t have, just like facebook?
iv yet to see any of these companies being very accurate about me.
Have you considered maybe you aren’t worth anything of value?
if not, a lot of business folks sure are delusional 🤣
Sounds like you’re not the only person using your devices, including network and router. And even if you are, if you live with others and not on a VPN you’re very likely sharing an open IP with people of different tastes as well as gender. I get my spouse’s YouTube recommendations all the time, even when not signed in and on a totally different machine, because to YouTube it’s all coming from the same IP.
It’s not a huge mystery.
ah, i am sharing the router and network. i hadn’t considered that, and i’ve wondered and wondered how such inaccurate info commanded so much money and uproar. thanks!
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