Joseph Cox’s reporting on the geolocation/tracking shit the US Gov buys up really highlights the direct link between consumer tracking (to sell them shit) and government intrusion into privacy.
Please let me know how to buy bulk consumer data from Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/etc-ad platform.
Ad-Tech isn't the ones selling data; they want to be high up in the value chain. Your ISP/phone company _is_ literally selling your geo-location and data (internet) usage.
I'm not disputing a data broker sells data; I'm claiming that ad-platforms don't.
In general, those companies aren't interested in bundling up data on users and selling it to third parties because the data itself is the nest egg. They go out of their way to, if anything, provide services for anonymous matching of interested parties to users they've collected data on, but not in a way that lets those parties pull the data back out.
I find the motives of adtech darker than those of intelligence, especially when adtech intersects with dark patterns and driving addiction. I’ve seen what this can do to people, especially teens but adults too.
Intelligence at least nominally is supposed to be protecting me. Yes I realize there’s corruption and loose cannon agendas, but those are not its official reason to exist. Adtech on the other hand has the explicit goal of making me addicted, dumb, and poor. The corruption and ill intent isn’t an aberration due to poor oversight. It’s the point of the whole endeavor.
Even worse it targets my kids. Modern parenting is an endless battle to keep the kids out of obvious adtech and social media addiction funnels.
If the intelligence community is trying to buy from adtech, it’s because adtech is actually ahead in these areas. The darkest programs in intelligence history like MKUltra are less effective than what can be achieved with a smart phone, a dopamine loop, cute videos, and notifications.
Continuing the story, lets say we have a company and I'll make up another name for them: Scroogle. Scroogle operates a popular website and collects your location whenever your phone connects to the website. Scroogle does not sell this data to the USG.
Which company is complicit in the widespread sale of data? Perizon has it's own data ingest system separate from Scroogles. It's always been separate and it's been operating for decades; Scroogle is not complicit in Perizon's decisions.
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Now, there is certainly an arguement that Scroogle shouldn't collect all the data it does. But lets be calling a Spade a Spade here; Perizon is the company that fits your description.
Some journalist was like, "what happens if I go to [VHS Rental Store] and ask for the list of videos a supreme court nominee rented". And the store gave him the list and he subsequently published it and then congress panicked as they knew their rental history could be next.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
I was an early employee at Disqus (YC S07). I helped build its 3rd party commenting plugin, because I had a blog and believed in distributed discussion. I genuinely believe the company did too (the founders, the employees, etc.). But eventually the rubber hits the road, and Disqus was sold years later to Zeta Global [1], a “data-driven marketing company”.
As long as you have a database in the cloud with a non-trivial amount of user data, you don’t really have control over what becomes of it.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/05/zeta-global-acquires-comme...
Wow, I hadn't heard Google changed their mission statement. /s
How do I know? I briefly worked for a company that enabled this. I didn’t stay.
I think in the public sphere, many don't think of Big Tech as privacy intruders, even with Facebook's public failures, many continue to use their services. I'm not sure if most people care or don't care. But when Apple took the initiative to limit 3rd party cookies by asking it's users directly whether they wanted to allow it or not, the majority chose not to allow it. Which shows people don't want their data to be tracked.
On a related note, I don't think I've ever clicked on a banner ad on a site, or any twitter/youtube ad, etc. There's certainly an element of marketing that's brand awareness. But all the other metrics about click rates, and purchase intent, etc- I have no idea how this all adds up to the massive numbers that Big tech pulls in from ads on the Internet.
In 1998 I sat in a meeting at the oldest data broker in the country where someone gleefully explained how they could predict menstrual cycles from consumer purchase data and use that for targeted ads optimized weekly for emotional state and all other known personal preferences. This isn't something invented by FB and Google. They're the noobs in this world.
Step 1: become a U.S. Spy Agency.
I have no doubt that out of all the websites in existence some collect your location and sell it to any bidders. My point is that if you focus on the actual ad-platforms the behavior of selling location data is not what they do. If you have a problem with people selling location data you should be focusing on people selling location data and not some nebulous "ad-tech". Perizon does not validate if you're using the location data to catch criminals, sell shoes, or find your wife to beat her to death. Even without "ad-tech" Perizon still has a financial incentive to sell your data.
Feeds into what "system".
Do you really think Google/Amazon/Apple/etc are handing over your Name+Phone number to say Spokeo [1]? I just don't think you get it. Your phone company is the one that is selling your data to anybody not FAANG.
It's easy to say some "ad-tech" are doing X, but actually get a whiteboard out and start with say Google and list what products of theirs collect what data. Then list the process by which say the USG buys its from Google. I'm very interested in what names for the processes are going to be because I really doubt you'll find any for the ad-platforms.
A part of me still routinely wants Jon Stewart to move to Tennessee and run for the Turtle’s Congressional seat, on a platform of veteran and emergency worker welfare if nothing else.
Is Snowden some kind of 4d chess false flag? lol ....
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/30/5046958/nsa-secretly-tap...
No, adtech has the explicit goal of increasing revenue by increasing impressions on ads. Whether you become addicted, dumb, and/or poor as a result is considered an acceptable risk.
sure you do, as long as you remain in charge. once you sell it, of course you don't really have control. duh. but to say just because data exists means you can't decide what to do or not to do with it is absurd
True, but it was never this granular on this mass of a scale. I remember joking as a kid about the Nielson families that would kill a TV show because they went out to dinner instead of watching TV that night. The extrapolation that was applied to those kinds of numbers were always ripe for bad interpretation. The same thing can be said about polling numbers. The granularity is what makes modern day "ad tech" or tracking in general so damn dangerous in its accuracy
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?use...
And this is just the stuff they're public about. Also interesting to note that while they classify some of these as "warrants" or whatever else, they don't actually say whether it simply originated from a warrant, or whether they were legally obligated to comply due to the warrant.
Over the years it's been millions of accounts, and the data they gather from those millions of accounts also creates a vivid image of tens or hundreds of millions of other accounts.
Can't get the warrant to get the user data for some given person? No problem, get a reason to have a warrant for all 5,295 people she's ever communicated to over Google services. It effectively services as a warrant for her data specifically at that point.
come now, all of that data is much too big for a zip drive. you'd need a jazz at least
The parent comment said “every single person in adtech is complicit”.
Most employees do not possess that level of agency about what happens to their work.
Well, except of course, the US constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects
I agree - faang/etc do not need to sell the data outside their walled garden but there are tons of vendors with sdks in millions of apps and pixels on millions of websites that have considerable location/user data. It’s easy to find how to buy + activate that data which is the point I wanted to make.
> As long as you have a database in the cloud with a non-trivial amount of user data, you don’t really have control over what becomes of it.
Who I work for and what I do is the agency. If I want to better influence what happens to my work, I can make sure my work doesn't have this abuse incentive.
But in practice, almost everyone with these databases with significant amount of data is working for an entity with shareholders and creditors. It's much harder to stay in control forever in that world, especially if your company is not perpetually successful. Companies decline or fold all the time. Then they get sold off.
How much plausible deniability of all of this stuff that can be happily plugged into the Google, etc, APIs and tools should we extend to the big players? I'm sure there are plenty of people at all those companies who know that the data connection integrations they provide aren't only getting first-party, originally-sourced data. Google's ad platform doesn't need to explicitly get their hands dirty tying all the threads together for you or maintain a singular massive database of everything, they just need to supply enough hooks to let all the OTHER companies do it. Which is probably good in that everyone's ad-hoc attempt is probably less-accurate than Google could do on their own... but all that data is still floating around and it all originally got connected to use to target ads in these systems.
EDIT: And if you extend it to the publishing arms (e.g. Youtube or MSN or whatever) than I'd bet many of the big players in ad serving have other departments that are running integrations with some of those data aggregation platforms. They know how the game works for sure.
As an example, Apple complied with 90% of government requests for user data: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-complies-percent-us-go...
It sounds like you just aren't aware of how deep a rabbit-hole the ad-tech space is. Google gets to be the relatively-clean "platform" at the top, but they don't exist independently of the rest of the industry.
"With thousands of attributes on more than 300 million consumers and 126 million households, ConsumerView data provides a deeper understanding of your customers, resulting in more actionable insights across channels."
https://www.experian.com/assets/dataselect/brochures/consume...
"When a user enters a venue and dwells for at least two minutes, our Pilgrim technology records all of the signals available on the phone. It then matches that person to confirmed signals from our panel of 13 billion in order to register a visit. Utilizing stop detection technology and dwell time is crucial for reporting visits because we are capturing true visits as opposed to someone driving by or sitting in traffic nearby."
https://location.foursquare.com/visits/docs/how-does-visits-...
"Cross-device targeting is a method of advertising where you display ads on various devices belonging to one user from the target audience.
An average user uses the internet on three different devices. They look at their smartphone first thing in the morning, work on their PC, surf the internet on their tablet on their way home, and drift off to sleep with their TV streaming turned on. Imagine that you can display your relevant ad on each of their devices, with your message following the user throughout their day."
https://www.onaudience.com/resources/what-is-cross-device-ta...
... and many many many many many many others.
The Government rather not let anybody outside know what their current target group is.
Even the data that is collected by Facebook + Google, are mostly non consensual and we don't know what they do with it. Or it's like the classic gun to your head, to use our "free" services aka, if you don't pay for it, you are the customer.
I agree, but I don't want anyone to think blame should be shared equally (not that I think you were suggesting this, but that others could interpret it this way). I also don't think that being complicit in an act equates to sharing blame. There is accountable complacency and unaccountable. This is more why it is important to think about how our work can be abused. It always will be abused, and you'll never be able to figure out all the creative ways that they can be. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Intentional ignorance is accountable complacency. Everything is on a spectrum: complacency, blame, abuse, ignorance, etc. We do need to be careful in how we discretize the bins, and make sure we don't binarize. There's unwilling and unwitting complacency, and that should be accounted for. A lot does matter about how much control you have, as you said. But I also think recognition matters: if you realize that the tool will/is being abused then complacency is more explicit/accountable.
Things are easy to see post hoc, and we can always think "what if." I hope that, given what you wrote, you don't blame yourself. But now you, and others, have better tools to predict potential abuse. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions (the road to heaven is paved of the same stuff, which is why it is hard to distinguish).
there's a lot more to having start up culture than getting investment daddies.