Granted, all my shit is blocked and what not, to the best I can do. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
“Almost every company”
You mean like 5-10 major companies?
There are thousands of smaller companies buying ad space and access to consumer data.
And “buying data” isn’t what it sounds like for the most part. Few companies are out there buying and selling raw data tied to individuals. For the most part it is a company buying heavily targeted ads from someone like Google that has ALL of your data. They know, with surgical precision, how to target ads at you. Company B just tells Google “ we want to target a 35 year old, white, dad of three that is lacking in his masculinity and wants to feel rugged, while not making him feel emasculated”.
The you get a Dr Squatch ad.
There’s like 5-6 possible soap smells made for men, surely you could find similar smells elsewhere?
This is gonna be the death of democracy when political advertising comes into play (as it already has).
“Point this piece of fake news at uneducated 40 year old single parents in <area>” - "point this piece of scientific news reinforcing my party’s message at university students who are interested in " and on and on.
My mom gets fake news advertisements on Facebook all the time, occasionally they are political in nature. Platforms aren’t doing their due diligence at all, so government must act to restrict the information that can be collected and the specificity of the targeting that may be employed.
Our economies worked in TV times, with broad-stroke advertising - why couldn’t they now? We don’t need this.
Facebook was the same. A company would hand them a token for a visitor that went to their site like say Amazon. They then tell Facebook if you see that visitor token show them an ad for this vacuum cleaner. No information ever traded hands except some anonymous id and money.
But I have had places actually sell my information. Comcast Various Banks The State of California
I had a weird last name attached to Comcast never used it anywhere elae. Started getting mail from various companies for Rev WeirdLastname
I registered an LLC, all these compliance companies now send me mail. Thanks California
Tech companies not so much they just target ads and I can block those
This varies state to state, but it’s likely that your LLC registration (including its members names) is public record. In that case, the state didn’t sell your info. Anyone can view that info and use it to contact you.
This sort of thing was rather startling to me when my wife and I bought our house. Apparently property sales are all public record where we live, so we started getting mail from random insurance companies within a month after moving.
Why do I only get ads about “Heart Doctor BEGS Americans to stop doing this with their blueberries”?
Consumer buying patterns and browsing behaviors are constantly changing in the aggregate. It’s not about an individual, it’s about “trends”.
And of course, a lot of it is also complete bullshit, as you suspected. People with MBAs in marketing are pretty good at justifying their parasitic existence to gullible executives.
It’s not that all of the data is useless. Every business needs some information to compete. But, these data miners have gone deep into the rabbit hole of “business intelligence” and are often hoarding information its own sake and to look good to the boss.
Effectively, as an advertiser, you can pay for some info on someone you have the option to show an ad to.
They’ll tell you things like “they are in their 40s and love anime and shopped at target recently”
The worst part is that typically, when you get hyper-specific enough, you can make unidentified info identifiable.
“Male, muslim, just got married, works as a plumber, late 20s, lives in this part of this city, has this device” and then paired with “has this IP” (narrows down to the block or house)
Also the US government buys the same info via shell companies.
.“has this IP” (narrows down to the block or house)
Even worse, They know what room you’re in.
I sold geolocation advertising and they know where your cell phone is within 15’.
Ever notice an ad from a competitor of a business you just visited? Car lots love this one. They geotag all the other car lots in town and if you go to one of them, the next time you check Kelly Blue book on this used Camry, an ad for a deal on a Honda Civic pops up.
Creepy as hell
I worked at a retail store that had some sort of Google beacon that would give our store the top search result if someone used Google in the store. At least I think that’s how it worked.
At this stage it’s bots collecting data to be parsed by bots to be interpreted by bots. Using assumption based connections to loosely tie IDs together and packaged like it’s the gospel.
Garbage orgs buying garbage info to sell garbage.
🙌
Companies like BlueKai collect and aggregate these to form …err aggregates, or groupings.
If one company wanted to sell their ads to “lonely”, “adult”, “men”, “needing hot milfs” and in “their area”, they’ll batch some groupings and sell it to that company to target.
People move all the time and so the hottest, most recent info pays the highest.
