> who you sleep with because both you and the person you share your bed with keep your phones nearby
> whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are keeping you up
> whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and search for things like "loan repayment"
> your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have
> your restaurant visits and shopping habits
> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer
> your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone
> whether you suffer from depression by how you slide your finger across your phone’s screen
> if your spouse is considering leaving you because she's been searching online for a divorce lawyer
No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either -- especially if their only hurdle is to get you to click "OK" to agree to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications.
We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.
I just now set up a small site for it at https://whynottrack.com/! It's open source -- GitHub link in the footer -- so anyone can PR changes / reasons / etc.
I suppose calls for better regulation, purpose oriented data collection and stricter enforcement and penalties but by no means does simply don't track/collect data is an answer where there are actual practical applications.
Interestingly, this attitude used to be default even here on Hacker News ~5 years ago. I am so glad to see it's changing. Why I'm finding this interesting? Because this audience always knew what's going on even without layman articles like this, but did not care for some reason. This shows how just knowing isn't enough sometimes. Public sentiment matters.
I'm sure that's happened.
> to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications... New Declaration of Human Rights
In the same breath: complain about long documents that no one reads, propose authoring an unenforceable, even longer document that no one will read.
People close to you probably know all these things already. Even if you don't.
>No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either //
This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole.
I think you're right. They can get to the point where they care, but my intuition is that it'd take a real crisis, and even then there's plenty of incentive with this topic to move on as fast as possible. We (the public) are pretty fickle, and it's psychologically threatening to admit we've had a voyeur living in our bedroom for a decade.
Or, in lieu of that, walk me through how that would be done with Facebook's, Google's, or Apple's data via your first-hand knowledge of those data and where and how they are stored and accessed?
These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms, AFAIK. It reminds me of the genetically engineered foods bogeyman that, in spite of a complete lack of empirical evidence, continues to be trotted out as a huge danger.
At the very least, at a bare minimum, I think we need legislation that covers how this kind of data processing happens by third-party companies and we need to provide a way for citizens to at least see what data has been collected about them and what 'insights' it has generated.
If the information is stored on servers in China, then the Chinese government has it as well. Maybe you aren't a Chinese citizen so you don't care, but it's at least worth considering.
The politicians we elect to craft and enact legislation that affects the big data companies are always at risk of being essentially blackmailed by those companies with the incredibly detailed and personal information that those companies have on politicians.
Notable examples:
* Strava revealed the position of US military bases
* Muslim prayer apps sharing location data with US military
In my own experience, I work for a call center. We have many important American companies as clients. They give us access to their systems so that we can service their clients. I am overseas dealing with their customers and I can access their personal information. I can see their face linked to their Facebook profile. I admit I've been tempted to misuse the information any time a customer makes me angry.
I personally think that if I give this data to a company, and they keep it "safe" and only to support features that are beneficial to me, that's totally OK, but I wouldn't like companies reselling my mobility data to health insurers (without aggregation or cohorting) to give me a 100% customized insurance rate, regardless of how beneficial that would be.
Data that's used to distill people down to a number and value them precisely seems to have a potential to enforce systematic inequalities and further improve the lives of "haves" at the cost of "have nots".
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/largest-personal-data-leaka...
Venture capitalist Peter Sims wrote about being tracked in a blog post this September. Back in 2011, he wrote, he was in an Uber car in Manhattan when he started receiving text messages from someone he barely knew telling him exactly where he was. That person later told him that she was at an Uber launch party in Chicago, where Sims' movements were being tracked via God View on a large public screen.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-i...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726004/uber-god-mode-set...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5n7/ubers-god-view-was-on...
Use a list like this as a starting point.
https://www.oag.ca.gov/data-brokers
Commuter data is good, so is foot traffic. Data sets centered around health and income or quality of life can be beneficial as well. The game is to use publicly available information about your person to tie them conclusively to set of entries in an 'anonymized' data set.
If you aren't at least investigative journalist tier or the resources you need cost too much/require a corporate presence, then hire someone to do it for you who already has the pipeline set up. PI's have been available to Joe Q. for years and they still are. This all just makes them even more efficient.
I'd argue that it doesn't need to be "Joe Q. Public", because companies are made up of Joe Q. Publics.
I'd happily share basically all of that information with that specific group of people - except maybe my neighbor that keeps reporting me to the city, they don't need to know my life, but if in turn I could know who was googling city ordinances in the middle of the night it might make up for it.
At worst I get a funny look for something I googled in the middle of the night?
To your point, it's 100% the government I'm worried about. They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.
Society scares me more. The government has the authority, but society has the power and the inclination to weaponise it. The government would never bother reacting to anything that RMS said but people did.
I think we should all be looking at this as either they're getting -all- of your data and sharing it with -everyone- (because that means more $$$) or they're NOT getting your data and they CANT share it cuz they don't have it.
We cannot trust companies to respect our privacy because it goes against their core value of turning a profit.
Minor nitpick: you can't measure speed with an accelerometer, at least not with a cheap one like the one in your phone. I mean, in theory you can numerically integrate the acceleration to get the speed, but in practice the noise will be so big as to render the result useless after a few seconds. It's much better to have a GPS and derive the speed from the position.
Signed: someone who spent too long programming an IMU and fighting with stupid bosses full of misconceptions.
Other than that, I totally agree with your comment.
That's got to be extremely noisy, does anyone have any links about this?
https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-4...
IQ:
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/121877211...
So what is it? Exploding email addresses? Making friends with someone with DMV database access? Temporary credit-card numbers? Tinted windows? Never carrying a wallet? Having an entourage take care of all of this for you? All of the above? Anyway, it would be nice if the zillionaires who have put a lot of resources into personal safety told us what they've learned. Heck, if adopted wide enough their practices might put the crunch on data criminals (though probably also data businesses, which would maybe be a reason they'd resist it.)
Shit I would love to know this for myself! Is there a service or app that can crunch the numbers and tell me?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-sur...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554
Edit: I'd add that you likely don't need any tracker to get a rough estimate.
If you walk faster than people around you who are roughly the same age, then you'll likely outlive them.
That may be a reason to take it slow and smell the roses, since you have more time :)
It's not incredibly accurate but Vo2Max is regarded as an important indicator of your cardiovascular health.
The things you mentioned are kind of how it was before the advent modern civilization. Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business.
That said, there's not an immediately obvious connection between surveillance and our neighbors knowing things. I have 0 information about who my neighborhors are sleeping with based on their cell phone tracking.
As already noted the difference in scale, but obviously if you didn't like what the old biddies tracked about you in your small town you could move to a new one and start over - you can't with the global surveillance system.
finally it should be obvious that not everyone lived in a small enough town that the old biddy network was actually useful for tracking you.
The computer on the other hand, is an eternal record and can be dumped into the open by any hacker or wannabe-hacker for ill intent or just for fun.
I guess, there's no appropriate reputation scale for what we see on the internet (it's either perfectly trustworthy or a total sham), there's no forgetfulness in terms of minor misdeeds, and there's no way to argue with the public consensus once they've made up their hivemind...
"No really, I've changed in the 10 years since I wrote that post!"
https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
Actually no, not a wink, it’s terrifying :D D:
This is why "Big Tech" is a joke. Spying, like legally selling opiates, is not a legitimate business. It does not matter how much money can be made doing it.
Perfect. Except it is insulting to vultures, who at least put carrion back in the food chain.
This is straight-up theft of our data and privacy, for profit, and it needs to be both outlawed and shamed.
Seriously, but these slime should be more despised than common burglars (tho maybe a notch above mobsters). Seriously, these people are not respectable, and should not be respected or tolerated in polite society. So, don't.
Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/
Spread it around.
As opposed to most companies that are tracking me to try to take advantage of me.
When people ask how I'm doing, I tell them and that includes whether my problems are impacting my daily routines and needs. (Not lately)
I've shared the results of my IQ tests and had plenty of discussions about the validity and lack thereof of those results (145-160+ depending on test). Facebook likes are the least good mechanism to work that out by.
I think one of the helpful things I do is share really good places to eat and find things I want. (Nirmal's is my favorite in Seattle)
I hope driving monitoring helps us shift from a penalize infrequent rule breaking instances to helping manage attention and grow skill. I speed when conditions let that be safe.
I suffer depression and have my whole life as everyone I know is aware and now is more public on the internet.
You'll have to ask her but I'm not looking to leave. I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships so if we were going that direction she'd be among the first people I spoke with. If she feels she needs to leave I'll try and help us both find happier lives but I hope it never comes to that.
I respect that you have a different level of openness. I think a good criticism of my post is that I have a ton of privilege to feel safe sharing these things. I've chosen to live a life I feel entirely comfortable sharing. Clearly I'm not handing out credentials but... I prefer a world that is more honest and intimate and that simply requires I be open, honest, and self-reflective.
> I've shared the results of my IQ tests (145-160+)
I wonder if the part of the population with <100 IQs are similarly open with their results.
> I speed when conditions let that be safe.
Admitting to breaking the law is an excuse for higher insurance premiums and for the police to hassle you.
> I suffer depression
This is one of the few relatively "safe" mental health conditions to announce. Who's lining up to hire someone who's openly struggling with addiction or has psychopathy?
> I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships
Let's say your partner gets served ads about how your single, attractive co-worker has been googling you late at night, how your location histories have significant overlap, and by clicking the ad they can find out more. Not everyone will get suspicious, but some people definitely will click.
~~~
It would be great if we could all be open like you say you are, but society isn't even close to ready for that. Any rapid transition (like wide-scale encryption breaks) would be traumatic on so many levels.
If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.
It’s not exactly a problem for most people. Even I who’s privacy conscious don’t particularly care I block ads with ad blockers anyway.
Them knowing is not the problem. Them using it to harm me is the problem. These are different thing, latter is a problem, former is not.
Let pick this one example :
'your restaurant visits and shopping habits'
Just them knowing is not problem, in fact them knowing can also benefit me: e.g when they want to give me gift.
Any car 2010 and later "smart/stupid": https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1, so even if you leave your phone at home, don't assume that you aren't tracked.
Being watched by sky wizard and judged at all times is their expectation. It is their agency.
Write down whatever you want, how does one resolve the reality? We have documents in place to cover all these things.
Yet here we are still.
You’re doing what the people you aren’t ok with do; expect everyone to undertake creating and importing some wholly new perspective.
We know how to regain our agency: take control of it away from the aristocracy.
The species has done this again and again. It’s not new.
Also I happen to think we'd be a better society if we all knew everything about each other. Instead of discouraging companies from analyzing us, encourage them to publish everything all the time. Let governments join in on the fun. Everyone should be tracking an analyzing everyone else.
Solves the issue with companies manipulating us to sell our data, because if they publish it they can't sell it. Solves the ransomware problem as well. Publish everything, no privacy for anyone. You can't blackmail someone for data everyone has.
I wanna know what you think right now. I'm not asking you to tell me, I'll scan your brain instead. And I'll know what your dream last night was. And you'll know the same for me as well.
That's the future, prove me wrong.
You say that you think this would lead to a better society. That aside, how would you personally feel if this vision was to become reality?
For me, I’m certain my mind being totally exposed like that would lead to debilitating mental illness and possibly even the loss of the will to live. I can’t imagine human beings, either as individuals or a collective, being fundamentally equipped to deal with such a thing.
I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value.
The problem is when privacy is only available to the rich and powerful, while the details about the rest of us are hoarded and used by the very same powerful people who pay such a premium for their privacy.
If we allow the collection of information, that information should absolutely be public, but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.
You should set the example. Go ahead and post your e-mail address and password for us.
Anyone who thinks such transparency is a good idea should read Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Light of Other Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
The problem that need to be solves is not how to hide information but how to fix the issue that arise when the information are public.
Lets talk about one example :
Right now it is a problem if my credit card number become public because it can be used for unauthorized purchase.
Simply having my credit card number become public is not an issue perse but for it to be used for unauthorized purchase is the problem.
But what if I can have my credit card number public while nobody can use it for unauthorized purchase ? then I won't have issue for it being public.
Care to specify which list entries you have trouble believing?
1. Why should they profit off of my data without my consent? (Hint: they shouldn't.)
2. Why is it so hard for me to get value out of it? Shit, if it's gonna be collected, aggregated, and analyzed anyway, I should just do it my damn self and actually get something out of it. It's like we need an open source community for personal data collection, aggregation, and analysis.
Maybe I am old school or too naive, but I don't see how I would make a personal margin with my own data.
If you are already looking through a bunch of ads for the sole purpose of trying to buy something, then your personal data is valuable to you because it saves you time. But that's definitely not the situation with most big tech products.
Pay no attention to the fact that you’re not getting versions of these things that maximize your benefit either...
“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” -Larry and Sergey in 1998
2. They are giving you value (via free services)
Sure there are a few companies you pay that also collect your data and I wish they didn't but even then they'd raise the price (maybe willing to pay more) if they didn't subside the service via your info
As a developer I have a hard time imagining building an application that doesn't use data to provide a higher level of experience in some way. Of course there is a very long rabbit hole on how data collected to create a novel experience then gets used in other ways to provide revenue.
We just live in a world where applications are able to hide almost everything that is happening behind the scenes from the user, and advertising drives the majority of free applications, and this opens a gateway to major abuse...
There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything doesn't mean we should throw it out!
I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society
All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos and not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
Burn it all down.
Easier said than done. What we're seeing is advertising as a business carried to its logical conclusion. If you "burn it all down", you have to end, in effect, all advertising. Advertisers try to target their budget as effectively as possible; the more they know about their target demographic, the better able they are to do that.
Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database.
No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.
Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc.
You're ever getting away.
Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone
For example: You want to vote in an online poll by company A. Company A collects data about you and sells it, so you must agree to their privacy policy. Company A's privacy policy discloses that they sell your data to Companies B, C and D. Companies B, C and D have provided a list of its customers to Company A, and Company A includes those lists as well. In addition, the customers of those companies provide lists (as all data brokers would be required to do).
If its seems like it could get overly complicated with huge lists of data brokers for a simple online poll, that's the idea. You shouldn't have to wonder how many entities you're giving access to your information when, for example, you want to vote for MLB All-stars. MLB wants your name, address, email, phone number, and they disclose they'll "share it with partners" but they don't say who those partners are, how many exist, and if they have their own "partners". Vote for your favorite player and you could be getting a phone call for life insurance 15 minutes later after your number has been passed through 5 different companies.
If you keep PII, you'd also need to keep some contact info for the subject, and use it to ensure they know about their rights / the data. The existence of the data-related right would imply an obligation to inform the subject about it.
I guess I'd prefer a web interface displaying all the data holders with little "delete" buttons, over getting a gazillion letters, but if this is implemented by a single organization that actually has all your data (even if only for the purpose of faciltating GDPR), it could be a central point of failure.
You go to a website about babies, you get baby ads.
You go to a website about electrified fences, you get ads for trucks, tractors, backhoe rentals (even in your area because of your IP address - but that's it)
It's damn near equivalent to local / cable TV.
Also, what ever happened to showing ads to people who aren’t already interested in your product to expand your brand and maybe bring in new customers? The current ad model feels overfitted to me.
As for the common complaint that you always see ads for products you already purchased, that's actually a very good time to make an impression. What are the odds that you are thinking about buying a new dishwasher at any given moment? Probably next to 0. You probably would completely ignore any dishwasher ad you saw. Now imagine you just replaced your dishwasher with a new one. You probably noticed that dishwasher ad now. You might have even clicked on it to see if you got a good deal on it. You probably care more right now about dishwasher specs than you ever have in your life up to this point. Maybe there's a better deal out there. This is the perfect time to send you more dishwasher ads.
I'd think that the more interesting thing would be to try and find some proxies we can use as an ersatz empirical test. For example, what about ad prices? If personalization based on tracking really does work better than other forms of ad targeting, then one would expect that that difference would yield a noteworthy difference in ad prices.
In short: If it really works so well, then you'd expect personally targeted ads to cost significantly more per impression than ads that use content-based targeting. And I'd assume that that information is reasonably public.
Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products. And the open data exchanges were a great moat against platform centralization like FB. The fight against open data exchanges make the comparative advantage FB has in advertising to you larger. That's actually pretty bad, because FB has some pretty bad incentives wrt to the attention economy and optimizing for engagement. A world where advertising on independent websites is effective is a much better one - it would let websites put out better content, it would decrease the power of social networks, it could fund better journalism (which is being decimated right now), etc.
Well, sometimes. But what people want is not always good for them or for society at large. Targeted advertising has a side effect of hiding what exactly is being advertised to society. There's obviously the extreme cases of "vices," but what about things like junk food? People love it. Targeted advertising can induce cravings that make people buy and eat things they know are not good for them. Or for another example, what about pesticides and gas guzzling trucks? I don't want all my neighbors' vanity being exploited in order to pollute my neighborhood. We can openly talk about what we all see on TV, in newspapers, or on billboards, but if I'm not seeing the same ads as my neighbors online, those conversations aren't going to happen.
Couldn't have happened to a worse industry
Otherwise, get the fuck off my attention span, stop bloating the web, and stop polluting public spaces with irrelevant information!
I mean, why not both? I simply cannot think of someone who dislikes tracking-as-advertisement and is pro central clearinghouses for more targeted personal information.
> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive!
Only with the unstated premise that tracking _will_ happen and it's better if that tracking is done in a decentralized fashion. Sure, I can agree that there shouldn't be a monopoly at the focus on online tracking-as-advertising, but there's an additional argument that the space _should not exist in itself_. These arguments have been rehashed endlessly online and especially on HN so they probably don't bear repeating here, but the either or choice you represent is disingenuous.
EDIT: fixed a typo
Maybe this works well for some products, like "I know i need to buy milk, what should i buy?" but it has often been used in a form that appears like an abusive relationship.
Think about all of the kid-targeted ads from 30 years ago which peddled sugars and psychological tricks to get kids frothing at the mouth over their food and toy products. These weren't merely advertisements, but targeted attacks to the brain. And of course things haven't changed, it's just iconic to talk about early TV's cereal commercials hah. As with many product advertisements, they're not just trying to make you aware of the product - they're trying to bypass your consciousness and hook straight into your brain.
That was 30 years ago, and we've had the misfortune of seeing this evolve. Now social media advertisements are hyper targeted with similar tactics but more nefarious goals. Misinformation at the hands of targeted advertisements has been the source many-a controversies of recent years.
My point is i'd agree with you if advertisements haven't been so blatantly manipulative over the last 50+ years. If they were simply "Hey, you like X, try Y?"; but they're not. That ship sailed before i was even born. And it's only gotten worse with time.
Based on this, the only solution is to make sure nobody has any information that may possible be leaked and, at the time or later, be connected to me.
In addition to that nobody targets ads with value, because valuable products are super rare and don't need advertising because those show up in magazines, on blogs etc created by people interested in the field, because sharing those products give value to their readers.
I tested it recently on youtube, both by my locked in account (15? year old google account with a ton of info) and in a firefox container. The first ad was for some casual mobile game/scam and the second was for something I can't remember anymore. I also don't remember the first ad I got on the account that wasn't logged in, but the second one was for a website that sold used iPhones, something that I am very much interested in.
So, despite knowing a ton of me, Google couldn't show me a related ad that was better than the ad it showed when it had no data.
For a very long time the ads in gmail were all about getting loans no matter how poor my credit was, when my issue was that I need a good place to invest my money, not take on expensive loans.
Currently they were trying to sell me extra chargers for electric cars, of which I don't own any.
Facebook showed me a generic ad for cancer awareness aimed at somebody 15 years older than me (they know my real date of birth).
Previous to that they showed me a ton of ads for extra comfy travel trousers.
Twitter got the closest by showing me ads for places to buy crypto (yes I am interested in that space, no I won't by stuff from ads that scream scam to me).
I don't know what will replace ads, and it is possible that ads might bring some value in specific cases but in general they are a waste of money. I suspect Google etc knows this, but can't say it for obvious reasons.
Brand awareness ads might make sense, but it doesn't really make sense to target those much.
This is a very specific statement. It may be true. But, even if we accept for the sake of argument that it is, it's not quite the same statement as, "Mass personal data collection has never resulted in personal harm," which, while seeming quite similar, also happens to be false.
What is the math here? How do you account for society-wide lost productivity from spending time consuming advertising? Or for people making sub-optimal purchasing decisions when products that are worse for their needs happen to have bigger advertising budgets?
Work in advertising by any chance?
If you read the article, it's not primarily about advertising. It's about privacy and the negative impact to society on losing it.
The ad tech firms were certainly pivotal in creating the dystopian surveillance world we live in. They deserve every single bit of bad rap they get for that and, personally speaking, I really hope there's a lot more bad rap heading their way.
>the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm
I don't know if you're deliberately positioning that duplicitously or not. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Whether there are cookie-based breaches or not is, in practical terms, irrelevant. Read the article. With cookies, and without breaches, the Facebooks and Googles of the world allow advertisers to promote smoking to children or payday loans to those with financial troubles.
Advertising is a wide spectrum. At one end it's relatively benign: billboards and the like. Some feel even that is unacceptable. At the other is the FB/G hyper-targeted end. In and of itself it is extremely creepy. But the article is about much more than just the weird experience of wondering how they knew to target you for erectile dysfunction treatment. Or divorce lawyers.
Ad tech has bootstrapped a global panopticon. That's the problem here.
Oh, and next time your insurance premium goes up mysteriously, have a think about your browsing history.
>If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products.
in practice, these two concepts are incompatible. everyone has buttons that can be pushed with the help of detailed psychological profiles made by advertisers.
if you push those buttons enough times, it's typically unhealthy for the person and financially beneficial for the pusher all the while.
How could you possibly make this claim in good faith, let alone believe it?
EDIT: typo
Is not advertising, it's sales: the seller establishes a personal relationship with the buyer, finds out what the buyer's needs and wants are, and proposes a product or service to them that satisfies those needs and wants. Advertising is nothing like that.
Not to mention that most things that get advertised for, nobody sells the way I just described above. The only products most people buy that get sold that way are houses and cars, and those aren't the kinds of things advertisers are trying to sell using harvested personal data. Most products that people buy that are advertised that way, they choose themselves, they don't have a personal sales person helping them.
Do you have a link for this?
Now if I had the same degree of control over all of my personal data we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Disclaimer: I worked in advertising.
Data is concretely used to maximize engagement, outrage, polarization, etc. in order to get more attention, which is at a root of a lot of the public discourse challenges we have these days. It would be much more benign if tracking was really just about trying to see what I am most likely to buy and target that to me.
Personally I dislike also the "tracking to show me what I'm most likely to buy" but this itself (assuming such thing could exist in a vacuum, which seems unrealistic to me) has an inherently limited impact.
It's not okay to take a person and hold them against their will, even if they've signed some sort of agreement. Indentured servitude and slavery are considered non-viable business arrangements. No matter what I promise you or what our trade-off is, these contracts cannot exist.
I think the only way this reasonably ends is when the rest of society catches up to that conclusion. It might be a while, though. I honestly don't think most people _want_ to know what's going on, since it's quite frightening and there's nothing they can do about it. This is going to have to get more and more stressful to the average citizen until most folks realize what kind of world we've crept into.
Of course the idea of an "Advertising Economy" should cause people to pause a bit since advertising, by its nature, can only help maximize profits for somebody else. In theory the money that gets pumped into advertising can only be squeezed from the profits of other companies who are doing some optimization, weighing the cost of advertising vs the increase in their market. The maximum amount it makes sense to pay an advertiser is proportional to the increase in the audience they provide, with the assumption that your profit - fee * population_ads > profit * population_no_ads.
One thing should be very clear, advertising cannot create value, it can only extract some of the surplus value that other companies are creating. This puts a pretty hard limit on how big advertisers can grow.
The solution to this was of course to take the byproduct of advertising, the generation of large amounts of demographic data, and transform that into a product. Suddenly selling, sorting and manipulating data create an entirely new class of products and create demand for new professionals as well.
The advertising industry, specializing in creating the illusion of value when their may be none, has done a brilliant job of convincing everyone that data is inherently values. Allowing tech companies to sell not only their data, that is often of questionable actual value, but the infrastructure to use this data, and sell training in the skills necessary to work with big data.
The "data economy" is just advertising turned in on itself. Anyone who works with data knows deep down that all of this is a farce, but I think we still have a bit of time before all of this hits the fan, so enjoy the ride.
Like how it took decades for society to come around to human influenced climate change, it will probably take a while for people to accept the social and mental health costs associated with the extraction and use of this resource, or we will get to a point where people are manipulated enough to be insulated from such a realization.
I mean, so what if my neighbor gets a different ad than I did? maybe he's into red shirts and I like blue shirts. so what if he got a cheaper plane ticket advertisement? I'm not going to buy a ticket unless it's cheap enough to do so. so what if i didn't get an advertisment for a college degree, it's not going to impact whether or not I'm going back to school, etc. so what if an ad uses emotional language specifically targetted towards my political demographic, it's not going to make a difference to me after I investigate the matter objectively.
Privacy is important because it protects you from the influence of others. The more companies know about you, the more power they have over you. If they know you are desperate for money, they will take advantage of your situation and show you ads for abusive payday loans. If they know your race, they may not show you ads for certain exclusive places or services, and you would never know that you were discriminated against. If they know what tempts you, they will design products to keep you hooked, even if that can damage your health, hurt your work, or take time away from your family or from basic needs like sleep. If they know what your fears are, they will use them to lie to you about politics and manipulate you into voting for their preferred candidate. Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us in an effort to undermine public trust and cooperation. The list goes on and on.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-...
Sure it's not a big deal if you buy a red shirt and I buy a blue shirt but it is a big deal if you can piece together the security questions (thankfully falling out of fashion as a recovery method) for my bank account.
It's not a big deal when you don't get an advertisement for your local university but if an authoritarian government roots out gay people because they have access to credit card data for Grindr subscription charges that's probably not great.
I guess my impression is that it's not what's happened so far (although certainly innumerable lives have been sullied for weeks, months or years at a time due to identity theft, credit card fraud, and the rest), it's the potential of what could be.
The author is extremely paranoid. She uses the word "should" a whole lot, but does not back up her dictatorial statements with any reasoning.
This article has failed to scare me as intended.
I learned this the hard way trying to sell something that competed with free tools from Facebook/Google/[other giant data monetizing companies]. Our tool was/is competitive, but we aren't in the business of data harvesting or advertising - so, the engineering cost (many years of effort) would have to be paid from actually selling the product. The response? People want the free ones, and could really care less how the engineers that built it were paid as long as THEY (the consumer of the tool) got it for free.
As long as the "someone else will pay for X so I can have it for free" attitude is acceptable and widespread, we're likely stuck with a pervasive and deep data economy.
The biggest barrier to this has been that lots of valuable data (eg. Facebook's social graph, Android contact data) is data about relationships between people, not the people themselves, and so would logically have multiple owners. But that's not really a big barrier with modern technology: the crypto world solved multi-person ownership with multisig wallets several years ago.
Having a price for something doesn't exactly help victims of human trafficking (whether the illegal organ trade, prostitution or anything else). What can help those victims is regulation and aggressive criminal prosecution of anyone who seeks to gain from the suffering of others.
Unless people actually have a realistic and practical way of "revoking access" to their data which results in serious penalties for companies which continue to use said data (including company-destroying or even criminal penalties for senior managers/benefactors) then the negative-externalities of data-collection won't ever really be curtailed.
The potential pitfalls of the data economy are about overbearing or violent governments, or about poorly managed data protection. This has much more to do with the bad actors than the tools they are using. It's sort of like saying we should ban information distribution because bad actors can spread misinformation.
I use adblockers and vpns and other such things but then I have accounts with facebooks and whatsapps. Could I camouflage my 'scent' with perfume? What's more - could I feed misleading data in? I really wouldn't mind being a VIP in the eyes of these shitty algorithms.
That would be insane. If they know how sedentary you are, or if you aren't sleeping well, or if you are driving too fast, driving at dangerous hours, or if you hang out at the bar too much ... can you imagine the implications?
It gets even wilder with things like Fitbit Charge 4 where this data, in the hands of data brokers, can include data like your resting heart rate, your SpO2 levels, exactly where/when you walk.
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guid...
Sure, you can draw attention to something bad, but if all you ever do is live off the drama and frantically declare that X "needs to stop" (I loathe that airheaded phrase like few others), what good are you? Who's going to stop it? Passive voice does not impress. When I need to eat, I eat. I don't say "I need to eat" and leave it at that. I'd starve.
Clearly you think it can be stopped. Clearly you think it's not just an unfortunate malady of the age that we must bear. You think it can be fixed. Where's your proposal? How are we going to shift the tech economy away from surveillance?
The growth of the data economy is like the growth of finance. Neither finance nor data gathering actually produce anything. They can help produce something, inform or facilitate the production, but it's not productive in itself. In the limit, you're left with a hot potato economy where people gather data to sell for the purpose of gathering more data.
Maybe this is incentivized by the killing of the industrial base. Everything we buy is from China. All the US does is consume.
The author is fearmongering big tech because she envies all the money they are making. Facebook does not sell user data, and I'm pretty sure the author knows this but intentionally perpetuates this misconception anyways. Facebook would collect about as much user data regardless of whether they used it for targeted advertising.
> They generate profits by ... selling [your personal information] to ... prospective employers ...
?
This one seems unlikely but who knows.
And incidentally, PDL was the source of a 1.2-billion person data breach a few years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/billion-records-exposed-online/
Imagine this in a plain document with no CSS:
<body>
<h2>Why We Should End the Data Economy</h2>
<p>The data economy depends on violating our
right to privacy on a massive scale,
collecting as much personal data as possible
for profit.</p>
<p>...</p>
...
Connecting another dot on this point: The creation and widespread use of such profiles -which are not merely comprised of data, but are summary conclusions about people- may well make the U.S. into a genuinely caste society. Without rules regarding things like data aging, publicly accessible profile monitoring, and bad data correction… and when to provide some sort rehabilitation method, people will eventually become just a collection of their mistakes and forced into one bucket or another.
We need something akin to the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a set of laws that provide better guide-rails for when data can be collected, by who, for what purpose, when it can be sold or used for a purpose other than why it was first collected, etc.
All the hypothetical examples are realistic, but... what are the names of companies that are actually providing that level of data about me?
the key here, is, just don't buy products you don't want or don't need. as long as you do that, you'll be fine. I have yet to meet a single Ad that forced me to buy a product I didn't really want or need. And, just don't let the ads manipulate you.
It also stifles original thought that is conceived independent of how things are or what people like ("culture becomes stuck").
When dealing with data you need to be aware of your own unfixable shortcomings as an observer. And if you can influence people's behavior at scale you're no longer an independent observer anyway, complicating things further (a measurement that becomes a target stops being a measurement).
There isn't one truth you could uncover in data; life is an open-ended chaotic system. Let's keep it that way.
Recognizing the limitation of these systems is key to be able to use them well and when not to use them.
Simply letting your browser emulate the browsing habits of a wide variety of people could knock down your uniqueness if done in bulk. I’m pretty sure there was a chrome extension a while ago that browsered major sites to obfuscate your actual traffic. I also like the EFF’s panopticon if you’d like to see some real value uniqueness scores.
The WEF is 100% pro datamining the shit out of everyone, and AFAIK they only invite people who share their vision of the future. So, why is DFINITY making presentations for them while also sponsoring anti datamining journalism?
I'm not saying that "THIS IS WRONG!" I'm just confused as to what's going on here.
Search random stuff you are not interested in and see them desperately throw money into the toilet.
Search plane tickets to Congo, saxophones, windsurf equipment, paintings of toucans... the most random shit you can think of.
Then you will start seeing ads for that, which is seeing the ad tech imploding in front of your eyes.
The more you do it and the more other people do it, the less profitable ad tech becomes.
Also search for stuff outside your demographics, like stuff for older people, so they get your profile wrong.
In this case, make mass data collection and targeted advertising illegal.
>... and what are you going to replace it with?
The model(s) we had before - generalized advertising based on who advertisers believe the broader audience that watches X show or views Y website is.
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/fmr-israeli-soldier...
I wrote this back in 2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
And here is the solution: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html
Thoughts?
End such economy basically means the users will start paying for the internet. Never gonna happen.
People will get tired of the junk mail and companies will lose money trying to peddle data.
The biggest faux pas is "your PII is sold to the highest bidder". Not true, your PII (and mine) is sold to any bidder who hits the minimum threshold/rate, currently less the 12cents CPM
Working on serious problems like climate change would be hobbled without the rise of the data economy. But to be an economy it must have rules that protect private, personal and ethically important entities.
But the nature of "digital property" has changed things. If you think the printing press changed the nature of human societies, just wait until the internet has existed for a few hundred years and their corresponding number of generations.
Capitalist market economies, trade-centric as they are, have evolved around a world in which all property is exclusive. However starting from printing press up to "model-T"--style mass production (the development of industrial societies) reduced the cost of copying and duplicating stuff more more until the creation of the internet brought about "digital goods" (such as all your personal data) which has duplication costs _below_ marginal (I think digital copying has essentially ZERO cost).
Digital goods provide a huge boon if we are able to stop trying to force-fit them into a system which works great for physical (i.e. exclusive) goods. Why and how did Microsoft become what it is during the 90s? because of huge savings in duplicating their software in a society that expected said duplication to have a not-negible cost.
Not in 2021. In 2018, GDPR went into force in the EU. In 2018, CCPA went into force in California, US. In 2021, VCDPA went into force in Virginia, US. At least with GDPR serious fines were passed.
The right to data privacy is no longer a John-Lennon-like hippie idea. It is law. Now go and fix you business model.
I rather like this simile. Kudos!