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.
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.
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?
My job specifically? Probably nothing major except for some spam. We dont sell our customers info like a lot of places do. If we did then, the profile we have on you could be cross referenced with other companies and build a more complete profile on you. Allowing less scrupulous people to infer and fill in the blanks on the missing info for you and try to profit off that.
What do I stand to lose by your company doing research on me?
Nothing really. Most people are fine with it, and it’s ok if you’re fine with it too.
For me it’s just the principle. Honestly my life would be more enjoyable if I could just switch this off but I fucking hate advertising. It really, really bothers me on an uncomfortable level. Basically, I want to choose the products and services I’m interested in engaging with at any time, I do not want products and services to be proposed to me.
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!
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 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.
Ad companies like Google run on your digital exhaust. They make it easy to embed their analytics, login, payment, crash reporting, and other tools into websites and applications.
This data is collected and combined with their other data sources. They know your physical location via GPS or approximate based on your internet provider. If you use Google DNS they know all the websites you are going to and when. Not using Google DNS?, That’s cool, most websites have some component that integrates with Google. Use android apps? Almost all of those use play services, so Google gets that info too.
Hanging out with your friends tonight? Ad companies can use location data to figure out who you hang with and build a social graph of people who are around you all the time. It’s almost Valentine’s Day… better buy a gift for that person you live with. Here are some suggestions based on what they have been looking at.
They own most people’s email accounts, they know what you watch on YouTube, they know about your preferences, they know what you might buy and when. They are a search company so they will ingest any and all data about you on the web. If you bought it with Google pay or see an email receipt they know if their advertising is effective.
On top of that, now this data is all fed into machine learning algorithms to further mine the dataset.
They know more about you than you do.
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.
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’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”.
I’ve gotten in actual arguments about how “military grade” means easy to replace, not durable
Seems to me that if one was running a spy agency like, say, the CIA or something, it’d be a very useful move to get one of your employees to get a job at one of those companies, so that in addition to ones own spying, one could also piggyback off the spy infrastructure of the ad companies. I imagine the government might get some of that information already, but if you were a foreign government, or trying to get info you weren’t technically supposed to have, I can imagine it might make a lot of sense
They don’t need to “get someone on the inside”, they have been using FISA and Section 702 for decades. Plus the Prism project that got leaked by Snowden.
Yeah that works if it’s a company in your jurisdiction, but for countries like Russia it’s probably an easy win to just have someone on the inside who can look up whatever you want. Probably costs a lot less to maintain as well, if you’re after individual targets and not casting a wide net.
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.
Can you say more about those whiteboard conversations? What exactly are they doing that’s unethical? I can speculate about dark patterns related to engagement and spend escalation, but I’m curious to hear your more informed perspective.
Youre pretty accurate wrt dark patterns but there’s other stuff like user journeys that map out for instance how much and when to deliver a casino coupon to a user based on research into addictive behavioural patterns.
Hypothetically: how does the glycemic index of typical lunch foods impact mood and when in that cycle is an addict most likely to succumb?
Put it like this: if it can be done, it is being done.
I had a promising career in Datascience very early on (2005 - this was before the CUDA framework was released) and I quickly realised that there was very little good that could come of that work under capitalism. I have friends who had aspirations in aerospace who realised that all they would end up building is weapons. Similar deal. I left it behind and I have a comfortable life in good old fashioned data management now. It isn’t sexy but I can sleep at night.
Doesn’t most people also manupulate each other as well? Like gaslighting and etc.
I’m glad I’m chronically uninteresting. If I had literally any information of value I’d be much more careful but now I’m just one of many in a massive crowd of more interesting people.
I’m still blocking advertisements though. Fuck that shit.
Uh oh, you just claimed to be uninteresting… I think that trigger language gets you flagged for further follow-up?! You are now on their radar buddy!!!
(/s btw)
Says me, who is totally a spy. Yup, absolutely they should read all of my data.
(but a spy would never say that so…)
Reminds me of the Bill Hicks bit about marketing and advertising. “Oh he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar, that’s a great market!”
I mean you consume goods and utilize services, so in the context of advertising, yes you are interesting and valuable.
(Also in the context of being a fellow human being, just so you know ❤️, but that’s a separate topic)
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. 🕵️ 🕵️ 🕵️
This phrasing may have a chilling effect on discussions on our platform. I believe your opinion could still come through a statement which doesn’t attack the commenter as much - discouraging those who may have future job offers while not scaring commenters off in the future.
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 don’t understand why companies don’t have network-wide adblockers on their employee systems and intranets. Used to be in the Air Force, ads everywhere. Now work for a contractor, still ads everywhere.
Don’t they know that blocking ads can speed up their networks? That ads track activity and may be revealing sensitive information about employees?
I don’t get it.
More like because this: The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous
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?
Who’s watching ads and clicking on them…
My wife works in advertising. Online ads are about building brand recognition. It’s affecting it’s primary goal by having you see the advertisement. Clicking on the ad is another metric, but it’s not necessarily the goal, more of icing on the cake.
ad business so profitable?
The companies/govt agencies have huge budgets to get people to see their message. The big reason the house brand of whatever at the store is 10% cheaper is that brand doesn’t advertise. You the consumer are paying for advertising by buying products that are advertised.
The big reason the house brand of whatever at the store is 10% cheaper is that brand doesn’t advertise
That’s what someone in advertising would say. Co-branded (store brands) are cheaper because they are not as good as the brand name. The co-brand manufacturing company intentionally makes them with less quality, even if they are literally made in the same factory as brand names. If they didn’t, the brand name company would complain and pull their business.
Then there are brands like Nabisco that do everything in house. Oreos are way better than most copies because they have better ingredients and quality control.
No I don’t want to hear anyone’s spiel about how they think co-branded food is better than brand names. That’s your opinion. The facts are that co-manufacturing factories literally adjust their quality based on what the brands pay them.
There’s millions of apps with ads, billions of websites with ads, trillions of hours of videos with ads. Advertising is terrible, but if you can’t see how they make money, your blind.
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 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.
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!
