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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It just meets a MIL spec. Could mean anything really.
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.
I’d imagine many countries have spies working at all the big tech companies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 and oversaw pushing violent narratives in developing countries, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 feet pole"
No Shit Sherlock!!
I worked in a non-decision making ITS adjacent capacity between banks and lawyers during the 2008 downturn. I knew full well our company was contracting with awful banks but I got the job while unemployed for several months when there wasn't any jobs. People don't always have a realistic choice in the matter, I was poor and it was entry level $35k cubicle gruntwork. Nothing I did couldn't be replaced by any idiot with basic MS office skills in a 10 minute interview. Me taking the high road would have just fucked up my life for no reason. I left as soon as the job market recovered.
Anyway, I pulled all of my money out of Wells Fargo and tell anyone who will listen to do the same, out of the 30 big banks we worked with they were leaps and bounds more willfully incompetent then all of the others combined. I don't claim to be a good person, I just do what I do like anyone else, I think you're looking at this situation far to ideologically. In corrupt systems we are all complicit on all ends, there is no moral high ground other than starving to death and refusing the system entirely which is nonsense. Nearly all corporations are actively doing evil and a large portion of non-profits are only marginally better.
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that Wells Fargo is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank. You have been warned.
Well the OP isn't saying they got rich off of it. Lots of people just need jobs.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm maybe I’m just desensitized, but what are they going to do with that information? Going to try and sell me stupid shit?
Sell it to people who will manipulate you and your family. Even subtle changes could shape the direction of your life. Or, they could say people with your preferences are in a certain area and fund some other area instead. Could be anything. The less data they have, the better.
Edit: gave->have
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).
sell it to police. sell it to a stalker or vengeful ex. sell it to prospective employers, landlords, debt collectors, and scammers. this is just a taste, off the top of my head.