How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services
troyhunt.com
troyhunt.com
It's not shady "Take a free trip!" websites.
It's your Dominoes Pizza order, it's your trip to Target, it's everything you do. (A sales person for one of the big companies listed those specific groups, but said it was basically everyone.)
The big companies in the industry (LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters' CLEAR) buy everyone's data. Anything they can get their hands on.
As far as I can tell, everyone in the country's data is being stored; everywhere you have ever lived, all of your phone numbers, voting records, debts, legal history, marriages, past names and aliases, email addresses, everything.
It's all in a handful of huge private systems. Systems that were originally marketed to law enforcement agencies, but are now being shopped to private companies as well. Insant CheckMate is just a tiny tiny fraction of what is actually captured by these data brokers.
Source: You'll have to take my word for it.
Interesting tidbit -- They have alerts setup in the system; E.g. if you search for the wrong person you'll get a call from headquarters asking why you're pulling up Kanye West's home phone number, etc.
Advertisers and publishers can also sell this data directly on exchanges (a relatively new thing) like Adobe's Audience Marketplace [2].
[1] http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/marketing-technology-...
[2] https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/source-...
People also forget about "public data". Student organizations (sport tournaments, student bands, chess club, etc) and middle school/high school/college graduation lists are big ones for targeting young consumers. Facebook/Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg. Hyper-targeting is very real and companies know way more about you than you think.
Pay cash and be mindful of what data gets online.
* On a more positive note, I'm excited to see how digital personal assistants integrate this kind of data for personalization.
Fwiw, I agree with you. ;)
Source: Someone tried to sell me this sort of thing once as part of an age verification service.
Iirc, their marketing said they were ~95% accurate.
That is what I'd be worried about. I gave them false assurance and I'd feel responsible.
Everything I do is being tracked, recorded and passed around by companies big and small. Yep, got it.
Anyone care to speculate on how we actually change this situation? Or is it that there's really not much utility in privacy for most people, so we can just forget about it permanently. I realize that the paths to change are either regulatory or technical (and I find the latter more likely), but seriously: paint the picture.
Should we just accept this as the norm?
(edit: grammar)
I've heard the big-brother nightmare scenario type answers before, but I'm curious to see how they are more likely to negatively affect me than a car accident or slipping in the shower.
Even with government agencies (NSA/FBI) overstepping or trying to overstep their limits, isn't the root problem with policy makers keeping them in line?
You have only to listen to his rhetoric on foreign policy to connect the dots about how giving him power is potentially harmful to the U.S. Unless you think he's going to try to sell everyone steaks and golf course timeshares as the POTUS, then I'm worried.
I then decided to have it shipped directly to my parents (I wanted to use the item over the holidays) and set up an account in their name. After checkout, option B was suddenly available. Yay, they fixed it. I made the order.
Back to my account: option B was still missing. Huh.
I then made several new accounts using various addresses over the city. The pattern that emerged was that in more affluent zip codes option B was available, in poorer parts it wasn't.
Several days later, my email was answered: they claimed not to offer B to any new accounts on principle. This clearly wasn't the case.
My sample set wasn't big, and maybe it was a bug or A/B testing plus coincidence, but it made me think.
Big brother will not kill you or bite you with big fanfare. Instead, you will be struck by inconveniences. Online shopping will be more pleasant for some and maybe even impossible for others. That flashy item you want will be available for others but you will be told that it's out of stock. All of this will be explained away as mistakes.
A boring dystopia? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787650
Wait, actually, one difference. The algorithm adjusts much quicker than social norms, which is why it seems to affect you more. Changing of social norms is usually only observed by people who are older than the average HN reader.
If they had more info, they could avoid blanket policies such as avoiding riskier shipping options with all new customers, and use with customers they can prove are not fraudulent.
But here's my anecdote:
I bought a metal collar extender at Macy's with my credit card. It was an impulse buy at checkout and I have never searched, emailed, liked, etc. this product in my life. I get on Amazon a week later and I have a recommendation carousel of metal collar extenders. I was so surprised I even checked my email for a receipt to see if that's how Amazon retargeted me [there was none].
But then I just stopped caring, because I realized that if anything Amazon was incurring an opportunity cost for not recommending me something more useful, and I have more important things to do with my time than to worry about how I'm being retargeted on Amazon.
Condoms? Plan B? Dildos? Lube? Imagine having to explain to a family member sitting next to you why those items are showing up in your Amazon recommendations.
I recall an example a few years ago about a store's marketing system telling a father that his teen daughter was pregnant before she ever told him. Because the store's system had correctly inferred from her previous purchases that she was pregnant and started giving recommendations for stuff like diapers.
Suppose a homosexual in the closet was buying sexually explicit things or an atheist in a religiously strict home or country was buying blasphemous materials.
Ironically, your anecdote presents much worse scenarios than the parent comment's anecdote.
Again, this isn't a problem with retargeting. What if I just bought sex toys directly on Amazon and they made product recommendations for it while I was browsing at work? Or what if Facebook and Google showed me adult ads while reading Forbes.com?
That's on Amazon et al for displaying adult sex toy recommendations. Same as your nightmare scenario of where I'm a persecuted homosexual in Saudi Arabia, and Amazon makes homosexual product recommendations to me while the religious police man is looking over my shoulder.
They lose customers. Ad networks lose websites. Walled gardens lose users.
That's why you don't see promoted dildos on Amazon, Forbes, and Facebook even now - and why your nightmare scenario is just a bad daydream about rubber cocks.
That is part of my point. It will never be perfect, but perfect enough to get a benefit for businesses. If this leaves you as part of a small percentile at the road side, that is your problem not their's. In the end, you may be regularly unfairly disadvantaged because of it nevertheless.
Besides, the business lost a customer with you, so it's obviously not perfect enough for them either.
I notice the targeted advertising all the time, and I've never been tempted to buy. Their predictive algorithms on what I'd like to buy next are hopelessly wrong and often (like the faucet) simply incompetent.
Since I don't have a credit card, I IM'd a friend if I could use his credit card for the booking. I went over to his place, and when I did the booking process at his home, suddenly I could book without a credit card.
My hypothesis is that the hotel website didn't trust me in the hackerspace since I was connecting to them over a VPN.
You aren't until you are at which point it is too late. "First they came for..." yatta yatta.
Power is often only given in small, seemingly harmless chunks. When someone tries to take too much power - people take notice and prevent it because they know what others often do with too much power.
The problem as I see it is that too few people notice the small chips and blocks of power they willingly give away until they realize they've given away too much and no longer hold the majority of the power. Only then do they see the foolishness in what they have done, but by then it is already too late: they are powerless.
I'm saying this because I don't see any solution. Our data can be sold. Our data can be 'shared' by our less educated friends,etc. Our data can be 'leaked' through all kinds of breaches/hacks/etc from both private companies or even governmental(incompetence, old software).
Treat our public records as public, as an interface to the outer word. Why do we think that our names, emails, phone numbers or addresses are private? What's the point of them being private?
Privacy is extremely important. We get lots of utility from privacy and in fact require it to reach states of adequate mental and physical health.
But people with guns and money can prevent us from having it, despite how much utility it is, despite that it is considered a basic right, and regardless of whether we want to change it.
Perhaps therein lies the real problem: for the most part these oversteps are barely noticeable. 'Doing something' amounts to a kind of activism. I can accept that as the necessary course of action at this point in time. Working for the right to privacy in the future could be analogous to protecting natural resources.
Use anonymous prepaid credit/gift cards (bought with cash) online.
Delete your cookies,
Browse in incognito.
Disable Javascript.
Block ads.
Don't install the social media app (and if you do, definitely don't give LinkedIn/Facebook/whoever unfettered access to your contact lists and email accounts!). Use the mobile website (in mobile Chrome, in incognito. Yeah, you'll have to log in more often...)
"Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art." - Hakim Bey, "Poetic Terrorism", T.A.Z, 1991
Or pay somebody to do it for you.
A lot of these things are publicly available from government entities. Voter records (available from sites like voterfind.com) include your address, and phone number in some locales. Marriage licenses are public record. If a debt goes to court, it becomes a public record. Any and all legal incidents are public record. Property taxes are public record.
That doesn't mean they get used or treated as such.
kinda ironic
Other smaller retailers, including Target and hundreds of others, will pool their transaction data into blind coops like Abacus, or syndicate it via companies like dunnhumby.
When Dominoes/Target type organisations do sell data it's typically done in a non-PII (personally identifiable information) format, for legal, ethical and brand reasons. This way companies can utilise the data do things like understand purchase personalities/habits by postcode type thing but they dont directly know who you are. There is another subset of companies that claim they can take this non-PII data and re-match it to people but I'm skeptical about how accurate this is.
Another an area not mentioned of personal darta storage that is every growing is programmatic media. In this ad servers attempt to identify you and call on stored information which is then used in a stock market like real-time environment to bid for ad views. Like when ads follow you around the internet, but for every sophisticated information/algorithmic rationale on who you are. Nothing nefarious but marketers want to show ads that are likely to be interesting and result in a sale (or other company goal).
http://r1.officer.com/files/base/image/OFCR/2013/04/16x9/640...
Valve, being an NIH shop, use a UDP call instead of an API like most groups[2]. At a minimum, you can get the Steam name of every player on any server.
I mean, sure, you can collect data however you want, but I don't think any legitimate business want it unless you collected it legitimately. Or am I wrong?
I assume they can still track your purchases by credit card #.
I'm several decades past 21. There's no way in hell that I'm an underage drinker. When pressed the last time I was there, I was told that age verification up to the age of 50 is store policy.
In bars occasionally young women will come in who will give you free packs of cigarettes in exchange for scanning your ID. I've heard, mind you, this could be completely false, the cigarette companies sell that data to insurance companies.
I was just thinking about how since one usually uses the same identity for many different accounts and interests online, it would be very easy to find someone by looking for people that match those specific sets of interests. You would have to make separate identities for every sort of interest, and never mention the other from a different profile.
If you're going to use multiple identities, they shouldn't have overlapping interests, or common friends, accounts, etc, etc. And they shouldn't ever refer to each other. However, it's fine to have a bunch of identities that break all of those rules, just for the fun of it. You have unassociated clouds of associated identities.
Dig into Mirimir, if you're interested. There are several more-or-less associated identities. Some of them are obvious. Some would take a little work to find. But then, Mirimir is just a relatively superficial pseudonym.
If you can find a presence of the company in such countries (and for most you have to provide some sort of tax id to buy national domain sulfix) then you can enter unique data there, and call a lawyer. profit.