Google starts tracking what people buy in physical stores
latimes.com
latimes.com
Privacy is the freedom from being watched, from having one's movements and actions and consumption and words observed, tabulated and stored. I hope that one day whether by laws or technological solutions, privacy will again be the norm in our lives.
For me, in my daily life, all of this is completely "private". Google having my data in mass and an identity profile on me that no human will ever specifically look at is just as good as private to me. The fact that computers will be handing this data, not other humans, is an important distinction for me. No human will ever see my individual data in all likelihood.
I don't think the lack of privacy is a problem, but rather the centralized power. It's really tough right now with so much power in information, but the only real information power coming in volume.
This feels like saying "I have nothing to hide".
The US, for example, is one presidency away from complete democratic failure. By which I mean all that data, which now is effectively, "in all likelihood", private via volume, can and will be abused.
Giving up and allowing privacy to fail now only makes disastrous consequences more likely later at the whim of that centralised power you mention.
Yes, it is. Defining privacy to mean the very opposite of "private" is pure doublethink/newspeak.
> Google having my data
You're not giving your data only to google. You're also giving it to anybody that hacks Google's servers to take their data at any point in the future (and anybody that buys it from the hackers), and any government (or other entity with sufficient power or influence) that orders (legally or illegally) Google to turn over their data, and anybody that Google might sell the data to should they have unfortunate financial troubles. This list will probably grow as the value of data grows and creative new ways to exploit data are discovered.
I commend Google for taking security seriously. You data is probably saver with them than than many business. However, they are still human so they make mistakes. Hacks will happen even with the very best well-funded security teams using impossibly good practices. When governments are involved, it may not even be Google's choice.
You need to remember that data doesn't go away, so the risk of who it may spread to only increases with time.
> other humans
Humans don't need to see your data for it to harm you. Your insurance company doesn't need a human to feed data from Google (or whomever) (possibly blinded through some sort of "rating service"?) through the machine learning and/or "risk assessment" heuristic du jour to raise your rates or deny coverage.
> centralized power
Pretending the world is just[1] - that your data will somehow be limited to only Google - gives Google a lot of power, that will be hard to reclaim. If by some miracle they are able to do better than most people throughout history that acquire power and only use their power for benevolent reasons, the same cannot be said indefinitely into the future.
Focusing on unlikely events is inefficient in that the preparations or measures taken against them often are not worth the expected benefit. Pointing out that there is always risk of improbable events is not always useful especially when mitigating these risks is costly. We increase the chances of being hit by a car when we leave the house or when we jaywalk.
Personally for me, the benefits from using services provided by Google or any other company outweigh the risks of my information falling into the wrong hands. The worst that I can hypothesize would be a political opponent using some data to pin a crime on me and throw me in jail. Or maybe some of this data could lead to me losing my job. Both unlikely scenarios. I am fortunate however because I live in a country where politicians are less likely to abuse their power (still a possibility of course) and I am not a political dissident nor a criminal. The same can't be said for everyone, so for people where the risks are far greater, they take extra precautions because it is worth it for them.
When you (I think, naively) traded your privacy and freedom for their services, you also traded a bit of my privacy and freedom, and that is unacceptable to me.
The same can be said about any of the other big surveillance capitalism companies (facebook, microsoft, etc).
I don't know why you think they will only hypothetically use this information against you. You are bombarded with machine generated attempts at psychological manipulation on a daily basis, and your private information is regularly leaked/sold to bad actors and out of control law enforcement agencies on a continuous basis.
You even say you are lucky you are not a political dissident, so you admit that, in your own mind, you have given up the right to participate in our democracy as you see fit.
I value it different and am fully rational in what I have done. Psychological manipulation? You mean ads and recommended youtube videos? If you could elaborate, this would interest me.
With regards to bad actors and overreaching LE, I really haven't felt the negatives to warrant changing my behaviour.
I have no idea what you mean giving up participating in democracy. How does choosing not to be a dissident mean I have given up the right to participate in the democratic process? I'm not American by the way. I'm in a country where I have my vote and I can speak up against my government without repercussion. If I were in an authoritarian one I'd be much more concerned.
Which benefits? Most of the services Google provides can be replaced for free or for very small amounts of money -- and without giving up your privacy.
Is saving $50-100/yr really worth granting Google the right to store and abuse your data forever, or the risk of your data ending up in the hands of criminals?
What matters to me is not the likelihood, but the possibility. Can someone who wants to at a later date, "pull my file" and see it all.
If its true then what we have is a classic example of the panopticon. They can't watch everybody all the time, but they can watch anybody whenever they want, even retroactively. That's bad news.
The "freedom from" elements have been de-emphasised lately as they're extremely unpopular with the right-wing:
"The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world."
we have lost freedom from fear because both politicians and terrorist profit by exploiting it.
I guess we need a middle wing that attempts to preserve as much liberty as possible for as many people as possible regardless of who feels it is unequal or offensive.
I say this because I feel that the fight for equality is in direct opposition to the fight for liberty.
In short, they're able to compute the intersection of the set of users who have viewed an ad with the set of people who purchased a product in a store, without either party disclosing their side of the set.
g_i = Google's identifier for customer i. s_j = Merchant identifer for customer j.
If g_i == s_j then customer i == j. These identifiers might be phone numbers or email addresses or other identifiers that both parties have.
Neither party wants the other to learn any identifiers it doesn't already known about.
So Google picks a random secret value G and sends g_i^G to the Merchant. The Merchant picks random secret value T and sends g_i^(G* T) back to Google. Additionally the merchant sends s_j^T to Google.
Then Google calculates s_j^(T* G). If s_j^(T* G) == g_i^(G* T) then s_j == g_i and i == j. So know Google knows the exact set of their users who purchased something at the Merchant.
Additionally, for each s_j^(T), the Merchant sends a homomorphically encrypted value for the amount they spent. Then Google can perform a homomorphic addition on these encrypted values of only the intersection it calculated. The Merchant can then decrypt it to get the total sum and share it back to Google.
So in the scheme I described
1) Google still learns who is purchasing at which merchant. 2) Google does not learn individual amounts. 3) Merchants can't perform the same calculation to learn which users saw their ads unless Google sends s_j^(T* G) back to them (not pictured in the slides).
Furthermore, although reversing a one-way hash is problematic, computing hashes for known inputs (such as an email address) is straight-forward. So it is possible to just test or probe datasets for known identifiers and persons. The potential for hash collisions is of little comfort.
> The primary objectives of the GDPR are to give citizens and residents back control of their personal data
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...
And it gives enough power to really control what companies are doing with people's data. And the fines are huge (up to 3% of the company's global gross amount) compared to what exists today.
How many people would opt-out of (or not opt-in to) a service like Google search?
Typically, there are three bullets on European privacy forms: handling personal data to provide the service, handling personal data for commercial and advertising purposes, sharing personal data with third parties (usually for commercial and advertising purposes). Pre-printed forms can only have the first ticked to yes, the other two must be filled in by the customer.
See also: https://www.google.it/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Nevertheless, it's a strong incentive for even the biggest companies to follow the law. EU has the capability and desire to enforce huge fines to make sure data protection laws are obeyed.
Facebook getting fined for privacy violations:
And we'd all be delighted with taxes as low as 15%!
Whether that saying is derogatory or not obviously depends on your point of view, but this new regulation isn't contradictory to the saying.
Whether or not that's actually the case is a different question. To your point, it's a much less cut-and-dry question as well.
Wow.
As a result, everything else that is moving media is surrounded by spam. Even if you pay 60 pound for a premium service (Think how much money it is, even if you have infinite money), you will spend 1/3 of that time watching Adverts.
It is like a Freemium Game Model but when you pay, it doesn't matter.
I have no idea why people are so careless with their time. Now that I ditched TV/Film, and found other ways to fill that time, I honestly feel better within myself. I twiddle around with robots while listening to the 20 hour audiobook (of your 90 minute film), or try to grow Carrots with some weird automated soil probe remotely at an Allotment.
Compared to the enjoyment I get from these time fillers, motion picture is honestly the lowest form of entertainment and the lest rewarding.
Other than those sorts of situations though, Visa/MC or the bank issuing the cards only know where the transaction occurred and how much it was and don't directly get SKU-level data on what was purchased barring some other sort of partnership with the merchant.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160517006038/en/Viac...
They used to have a "Business Intelligence Group" which acted as a Consulting firm to corporations who want to answer questions like "Where should my company set up more stores?" The group often sifted through their customer data to answer that question.
We don't know Walmart's feelings, they may like the arrangement. Business go cash free for all kinds of reasons. Customers that use credit spend more money than cash customers. Walmart probably isn't one of those places that benefit as much as a pub but they may have a small credit spending boost that covers the fees.
Walmart is a really smart and data driven company and I'm sure they've weighed their options about what is effective business practices for them.
[0] http://time.com/money/3541247/apple-pay-walmart-current-swip...
And as mentioned elsewhere, cash has a cost as well (theft, miscounting change, counting in and out cash drawers during shift changes, arranging daily deposits, trips to the bank, etc). As someone who worked retail 10+ years ago, I can assure you all these things happened, and probably added 2-3% to costs vs electronic payments.
That last article quotes it at up to 3% but most say 2%, so I am assuming there is a percentage and a fixed cost, and possibly a cap. In any case Walmart had a long history of being very unhappy with the relationship.
[1] http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2Q2BJ20140327 [2] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/business/merchants-may... [3] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2839144/heres-why-rite-... [4] http://time.com/money/3541247/apple-pay-walmart-current-swip...
Stacking that stuff and CC rewards can save you several percent of your retail spending a year. Paying cash is like paying sales tax twice.
[EDIT] to be clear, you effectively pay more to not be tracked in general, not just for avoiding a CC. Loyalty cards get you regardless of payment method. Also, lots of stores try really hard to get you to take "their" credit card (god, Target won't shut up about it) with unusually good rewards or discounts at their store. You can bet they get access to those data, including when you use it other places, even if Visa or MasterCard services it (and also gets the data)
Interestingly, the discounts are usually not on the "exclusive" items, but on basic necessities - like vegetables.
Also, the shop in question didn't even have debit/credit card readers until very recently. I suppose stores may be reluctant to pushing people into card payments simply because processing fees are too large if you're running on small margin.
Cash is an anonymous payment system which cannot be traced and is widely accepted. It's something that would be impossible to bootstrap today if it didn't already exist. Hence, it's crucial to keep it alive.
I just wanted to point out the possibility of tracking serial numbers on bills. Obviously it's not going to be as reliable, at least not now, but it could be made more so; for instance, if there was a sudden movement to use more cash for privacy. Of course, that seems unlikely; most people like the convenience of plastic/digital payments, and there's a lot of market pressure pushing people toward those payment methods, so deploying the infrastructure for more reliable cash tracking probably isn't worth a whole lot. But I haven't exactly run the numbers, and there are other possible incentives, so who knows..
Ironically I started to appreciate it, after I received a fake bill from a different store.
Not really; bills are individually identifiable and can be tracked by either party to the transaction, and even if the payment medium isn't tracked, the transaction can even tracked by other means (e.g., cameras + facial recognition.)
It's only really untraceable if you assure privacy of the location of the transaction, and neither party to the transaction chooses to track it, and even then if the next party out on either side is tracking, a lot can be revealed.
It's mostly older people using cash anymore.
For example, if you start having kids, and going into their sporting events or whatever, you'll find that any form of electronic payment is most likely not accepted in the pop-up cafeterias ran by parents. No cash? No coffee for you.
Cash is still a handy way to give your kid some money to spend. I know some people already get their second graders a debit card with a monthly allowance, though.
But yes, about 99.5% of the transaction volume in my household is electronic.
The primary use of cash is shopping in Christiania.
Doesn't have to be a silver bullet. Just to be better off than without cash.
I was responding to “the only way to break the circle is to purchase with cash”, which just is not enough if your goal is to not end up in a database with your buying behaviour tabulated and analysed. Better? Clearly. But it is neither sufficient nor necessary to break the circle.
That means a safe way I and a lot of people prefer is to get a bunch of cash from a cashpoint and use that to buy stuff to not get profiled...
My main gripe with shopping in Germany is everyone is standing there at the cash-register trying to find the correct ammount of cash to pay. There is a large amount of different coins you have to sorth through and they all look similar to me. But everyone does it (even the young) because everyone cares about privacy.
(b) it’s not necessarily about Trump – but considering the US has elected Trump, and considering how many freedoms Trump has tried to erase already, what’s if someone worse comes after Trump?
Only a problem for non-Eurozone visitors really.
I think the problem with long waiting queues at cash-registers isn't the amount of different coins but the people that 1) do not calculate what the need to pay 2) want to speak with the sellers because they have nobody else they can speak to
But that's all a thing of personal attitude: Do we always have to be fast at everything what we do? Do we always need to optimize everything and use every free minute? In my opinion the laxness comes with age and who knows if we will do the same things in some years that we are hating others for today?
https://www.revolution-payments.com/requirements-for-level-3...
> Level 3 processing can benefit businesses who sell to other businesses or government by lowering your transaction cost by as much as 1.50%.
> Line Item Details:
Of course, if they are like one of the places I worked...they just turn it on for everyone and pass it along regardless.
Google: You're already way too deep in our lives and now this. When will you ever stop? When you own us?
This may be a case where the savings (i.e. money from selling data in return for a big pile of cash) are actually passed on to the customer - e.g. transaction costs are lower for Visa/Mastercard for merchants, which is why they sometimes don't accept Amex and Discover.
It would be interesting to see if Visa and Mastercard have some clause which prevents Google from buying data from AMEX and Discover (competitive advantage for them because then Amex and Discover's transaction costs aren't subsidized) in return for agreeing to part with their data. Said another way, what's preventing Google from also getting data from Amex or Discover? Its not as if Google is going to say no.
A Googler already described this to me years ago as "closing the loop", where Google's ad network already exposed a customer to a brand/product, but Google only gets credit for the conversion if it happens in the same browser session online. By tying together stats between impression and conversion (purchase, even in-store), the ad network becomes more valuable -- or less, if there was already an assumption of this effect with previously overestimated results.
facebook showed me ChristianMingle ads for years despite marking myself as agnostic. I have a fair amount of experience with the Ad-words network and all I can see of facebook's ad network and target is that it sucks. I've never seen any place I've worked have much success deriving any meaningful value from facebook ads.
PPC Ad-words perhaps influences me if I'm researching a product or service, but that's mostly a function of search results placement rather than . Usually I scan down below the first few search results because those are people trying to tell me they're what I'm looking for and they usually aren't.
I will readily admit that I have to consider that I am a freakish outlier, though.
The world is rife with people who believe they are immune to marketing. Nearly no one believes the ad impressions subliminally control your mind and force you to buy their advertised product. By simply seeing a product image, logo, brand name, etc (even in your periphery), you are being (re)exposed to a product in hopes that over time, you will remember the impression that ad made on you. Advertisers know, from studying consumers, that advertising doesn't work equally on all people or at all times.
You should read or watch Tristan Harris describe how some of the best companies in the world (especially tech companies) are great at "persuading" their customers/users/visitors to go through a well defined loop, often taking advantage of quirks in human behavior.
As a developer who worked at a game company, I've seen the development process first-hand.
As an enthusiast of behavioral economics, I've seen proof that humans aren't as rational or and don't have as much "free will" as most Americans believe they have.
As an amateur dog trainer who has trained a blind and deaf dog, I've seen amazing progression of learning and intent that happens when using operant conditioning to train an animal.
Well there's no chance of a David vs Goliath so the only one I can think of is governments. Yeah...
Disclaimer: I haven't read it yet, so can't say if it meets your "thought out considerations" criteria.
[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25424120M/Who_Owns_the_Futur...
Google owns the internet at this point. For general use purposes, they ARE the internet. So avoiding them should really have at least SOME effect before it's even seriously considered.
What does getting off Google do?
It doesn't hurt them, as there's no way a significant number of people will take action, at least in the near future.
So, then it must be done for you. By not being in these services and having all this data collected on you, what do you actually gain? Likely, nothing at all. You won't be able to be tracked down as easily if Google turns evil, sure. If their data is breached in a meaningful way, sure again. But, for both of these, emphasis on "as easily". At this point, if you're looking to maliciously track down just about anyone, it's not hard at all. You'd have to go fully off the grid to get this. And in that scenario, what do you gain again? We follow down the same road of "I only gain something in very unlikely scenarios" again.
So to me, the only way this type of perspective makes sense is if you believe those very unlikely scenarios (from my view) are much more likely. And if they are, we're all fucked already, and being one of the few to be off the grid probably won't matter in the end.
Basically, at this point, you've already given yourself to Google. Rather than decide whether or not to trust them, I think putting more effort into trying to influence them towards "not being evil", as they say, is much more of a realistic move for someone with concerns over data, privacy, power/security of all this, etc.
Am I missing something?
PS: I understand Facebook - for some, there are no significant benefits you give up. For most, you're going to give up a lot more with Google.
The metaphor is still flawed thoguh doesn't add anything to the conversation here. What exactly is the equivalent of death here? Google has all your data - what could they do with it that will affect you realistically? Or if someone malicious gets it?
My point is that the likelihood of malicious activity is low, and so are the consequences. Am I missing something?
One danger is that with all that data about you and very advanced AI/ML tech Google can push you into making irrational purchase decisions (yeah, I know YOU are special, and advertising doesn't work on YOU) - e.g. buying a red sports car in your 40s.
The other is this data will be available to NSA, GCHQ, etc. and their controlling governments, politicians, their wealthy sponsors/muppetmasters, etc. Do you trust the politicians in USA, or any other courtry?
We are all man and not angels. Having all data on someone, you can always find shady stuff. Using that government and big business can make sure there are no influential union leaders, political parties offering real change, etc. It will be the end of (however imperfect) democracy.
Moving on, the remainder of the argument relies on the assumption of an antagonistic state, which if true, means you have a much bigger and immediate problem in the first place. Google or not, China seems to be doing pretty well as a surveillance state so that doesn't seem too convincing either.
So I don't think that opinions will change without a string of high profile incidents that substantiate both of the concerns you mention.
Or a political zombie. Did everyone forget ad-tech's role in the 2016 election?
That power doesn't come from your individual data point, but rather from the collective points. In order to have an effect on that power, you need mass action.
The rest of my comment back is already covered by the other child comment here by name_for_now, which I strongly agree with.
Personally I use a few Google services - search, News, Products, YouTube, without logging in and don't see why you'd ever NEED an account. If you have to use something like their analytics or cloud, just spin up a VPN-ed VM.
I guess for me, I don't care enough to make all those changes. As a Chrome user, the sync across things is nice, and I enjoy the interface. I'll take the ease at risk of someone having my data in a catastrophic situation. Obviously, your choice makes great sense for you.
Up until I read this article, I used to feel the opposite way. I think there is some value in everyone having privacy and personal space. It gives us an opportunity to decompress and relieve some of the stresses of our increasingly connected world.
However, discovering that Google (and others) are merging my online and offline behavior is making me doubt my viewpoint (the 70% figure really hit hard). If I can't escape it, why not just be apart of it? Surely life is a bit simpler: not having to pay for email, better search results (DDG vs Google)... It seems that whether you want to or not, you _will_ become part of the google/facebook/etc ecosystem.
The other reason I used non-google services was in some ways to "hedge" my position. By using a non-google email with a custom domain, I am not tied down to any email provider (note: I bought the domain explicitly for email use). If I ever became unsatisfied with my email service, I could always switch to a different provider without the hassle of creating a new email address. Now, maybe this is just a defeatist view, but I think google/facebook are too big to fail. If google disappeared tomorrow or in 10 years, there would be chaos -too much of the world depends on it. Does this give them enough power to exist in perpetuity? Maybe it's time to just cave in and use all google services. It sure is cheaper.
It's impossible to avoid having at least some data in various services, but if you divide and conquer, keep accounts separate as much as possible, don't have accounts with companies that collect data about you in other ways (or use fake names and email aliases), you can break up their picture of you.
While articles will point out how small groups of anonymous information can positively identify someone, these programs are likely to be more fragile on a large scale basis. Don't make it easy, and more than likely, at least some of the tracking and the benefit they get from it will fail.
I never got how Google having my data as part of a larger picture ever affected either of those in my daily life. They use it for power in mass, not over individuals. It's an important political conversation, but it's doing everything but affecting me specifically/individually in my daily life (in negative ways at least)
Edit: Just wanted to say I appreciated the comment. As far as too big to fail goes, I don't think Facebook is yet - they are fighting hard to become that right now though. You can easily function without Facebook - right now it's basically only serving as an address book and messaging service for me, and I have good alternatives for both of those. Google's integration into everything is what makes them too big to fail. I've given up on fighting Google, but I'm still careful to some extent with Facebook.
I've had the settings off for some time.
i can't control google and i don't care about trying to influence them. i do my own thing and i make a lot of my own stuff. i like it that way. i like the independence.
What else do they own?
It's already becoming in vogue to move away from facebook/google and are actively looking to move towards other systems but there aren't a lot of quality options out there at the moment.
If I could quickly spin up a remote server that had baked in panels for email, blog, and hooked up to mastadon, and a distributed reddit, I would probably go a step further. Further than that? Not sure what else I could do.
Open to suggestions.
what else is there? I don't want Apple.
There's absolutely no chance for me to do that. I don't work at Google, I'm not rich nor influential. I have as much influence on what Google does as I have influence on the orbit of the planets.
Voice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty) doesn't work. The only other option is Exit, and while it's shitty, it's not as utterly futile as Voice is.
Actually I have posted the reasons for such considerations before on my blog:
https://paradite.com/2016/02/18/stay-independent-problems-wi...
You are the product.
By using these services, your beliefs, habits, work, and by extension you yourself, are slowly being turned into a product for consumption by, at best, profiteering business executives, and at worst, totalitarian regimes.
Does facebook want you to find and actually spend time with people? No, they want you hooked on their website endlessly posting cat pictures and looking at cat pictures from your "friends". By doing this, they make you lonely and isolate you from actual social contact; there's an entire generation of kids who think socialization is facebook. Facebook is loneliness and isolation and when they have you there, on facebook, isolated, they own you.
Integrate your Facebook with Spotify? Someone pays spottily to run subversive, politically motivated songs. Who do you talk about that for reference? To know if the politics or history you are being sold are factual.
Integrate your Facebook with Uber? Uber now knows your approximate income and how gullible you are, and will charge you a consummate rate.
Integrate your Facebook with your New york times subscription? All of the MSM outlets use parametric targeting of readers to display articles to them think they will identify with. If someone pays them advertise to passionate democrats in order to get them to donate, chances are, you will see a never-ending news "feed" (Love how they call this a feed, like a cattle feed) of tabloid news which provides you with all kinds of "calls to action" in order to donate. You'll see stories on how chocolate cures cancer, then an ad from nestle. The more information they have on you, the more precise and intense the targeting.
And you won't know, you can't know, because engaging in that degree of paranoia is crazy.
What do you get by opting out completely?
Advertising works by making you unhappy, by manipulating you to be unhappy, by whispering terrible and horrible things in your ear and hoping you buy a lifetime subscription of unhappiness. It tells young, beautiful women they need makeup in order to be beautiful. It tells ingenious IT geeks they aren't good enough without knowing framework X or having product Y. It tells fat people to buy dieting products that never work, that can't work, because if they were to cure the problem, they couldn't ever be sold another approach. Go search google for weight loss right now; How useful is ANY of that information to someone who wants to lose weight? The observation being, google is providing you with nothing, absolutely nothing, because you_are_the_product.
While you are ingesting advertising, you will never be content. You will never be fulfilled. And worse, the more time you spend in the bubble, the more of what and who you are will be configured to be that unhappy, totally messed up amalgamation people the big businesses wanted you to be, and the longer it will take to de-consumerize.
This is what psychological warfare has become; what the studies and sciences of psychographics, psychovisuals, psychoaudio, public relations, communication and marketing has become.
If you opt out, you retain your freedom to think for yourself, act for yourself, and be yourself. You retain your ability to be content and happy. You get to have real friends. You no longer exist in the 7th circle of hell.
From a business perspective, yes.
The rest of this is a lot of nonsense.
I don't want to dismiss it as completely paranoid, because I know it isn't fully. Many of these things could be or are happening (I would likely say fewer are in existence now than you I'm sure). The difference is that I don't really mind that much.
Your view of advertising is quite terrible. It doesn't work that perfectly. I've never had a Coke in my life, but I know their brand because of their effective advertising. My happiness has never once been affected by it. If you are able to parse advertising language, the messages are clear, and the bad messages just become laughable.
Of course companies have motives all centered around profit - welcome to capitalism, for better or worse.
> "If you opt out, you retain your freedom to think for yourself, act for yourself, and be yourself. You retain your ability to be content and happy. You get to have real friends. You no longer exist in the 7th circle of hell."
You can also be "in" and still be able to think, act, and be yourself. You just need to be aware that you're in. I'd be a lot more affected by trying to opt out rather than the mental filtering that anyone who's aware trains themselves with. Not to mention that this has nothing to do with real friendships.
By closing the curtains in your bedroom when you're about to get busy with your partner, what do you actually gain? Likely, nothing at all.
I place a not-inconsiderable weight on not feeling like I'm being watched and recorded every second of the day and night. By controlling which data I give companies like Google and Facebook, I significantly reduce this creepy feeling and so gain a significant amount of peace of mind.
I'm still using an old Nexus 4 but I can't be bothered to replace it. Nothing on that market excites me anymore.
This is an obscene exaggeration.
You are seriously overestimating how much significance Google has, and how irreplaceable they are in people's lives.
If you've never seriously bothered looking into leaving the Google ecosystem though, I could see how you might think that way.
The hardest part about transitioning away from Google for me personally, was the time it took to switch all my accounts from one email address (GMail) to others (Kolab, Posteo).
It was still no more than a few hours of one day. After that, no more Google. I've been free of any Google accounts or services for around 4 years now and despite an initial headache, I don't feel like I'm missing any irreplaceable conveniences.
* Abine
* Final https://getfinal.com/
* Privacy Inc. https://privacy.com/
Also, many pre-paid cards require the user to identify themselves before the card is activated
That's why it's such a big deal when companies sell your info. Merging silos dramatically increases the amount that can be inferred from each piece of information.
It's not "incredibly smart people" you need; it's "highly ethical people".
Got to make those yearly objectives/appraisals count though.
It strikes me that data censored through transaction modality and then used to make marketing decisions may result in poor results.
Cash will be around for a fair time yet, but you have a point for any form of regular or recurrent expenditure. As the above pdf explains 'hoarding' of notes as a store of value seems strangely popular...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...
We'll see how that goes. I have a feeling most users will just opt in without much care.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/26/google-de...
Why would it have to be secret if it's supposed to make people trust Google's AI more? And what are they hiding? Is President Duterte or a Saudi prince on that ethics panel? (serious question - we just don't know right now)
The one thing that stands out to me is this line: "Privacy.com does not disclose personal data to third parties for direct marketing purposes."
I am suspicious that the addition of the word 'direct' in that sentence might be significant. I'd love to hear of other similar services.
As if Google wasn't already a target already?!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkRJqnQ2T8&19m05s
[1] https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal...
[2] https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/23/google-track-shopping-tr...
[3] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0222-privacy-choices-y...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Aisles-Have-Eyes-Retailers-Shopping/d...
They started to recommend some items related with books I have never bought online, just after I got them at local bookstore by credit card.
The next version of that experience will be researching a purchase and where to get it, then seeing ads on the way that are customized to (a) the product you're buying and (b) your preferences.
If you're 55 you'll get michael jordan advising you to buy nikes. If you're 35 it will be Noel Gallagher (air noels?), and if you're 10 it will be the ninja turtles.
The good news is at a certain point the competition for eyeballs will become so fierce that the ads become honest & informative.
Adblockers is no new thing.
How exactly would that transition work? If anything, the trend has been going the other way for the past century.
And a sale from a lie is also cheaper to achieve than a sale from the truth. So even if your ads are always 100% honest, if your competitor starts lying, you're forced to either do the same, or risk going out of business. This is how the market optimizes human values away as inefficiencies.
I guess it is the same thin line you have between tax evasion and tax optimization and Google has a nearly unlimited budget to try to move this line in their favor.
I know that I sound dramatic, but all of these kind of things that we have let Google do would be considered HIGHLY illegal if instead of a company it was a single, private individual.
Powerful entities should not be above the law but in practice they are, no point denying that. I'm sure everyone has an explanation according to taste how come double standards can be the normal.
Report warns computers may threaten constitutional rights (1982)
I worked at a big online advertising agency from 2013-2014 and we had a lot of fortune 500 companies as clients. Google began offering this tracking functionality as a beta in 2014 to a small number of very large companies.
Here's the thing - Google is basically telling advertisers "just trust us to report on our own performance." They are saying buy traffic from us and we will use our secret algorithms to tell you how much revenue we drove and you will have no way to verify the totals.
As you can imagine this is not an attractive proposition.
I don't get it, does VISA, MASTERCARD or AMEX just gives google the transactions? That got to be illegal, right?
In Europe it would be opt-in in all likelihood.
[1] https://www.devrant.io/rants/605665/hello-gordons-pizza-no-s...
Even if your location services, wifi and bt are off, they occasionally turns on to get your location. In Lineage OS there is an additional setting to not use wifi (when it is off) for location services.
May be you can look into developer options to disable this setting (Please note that even if wifi is off, your phone searches for wifi hotspots to find itself where it is).
And if your wifi/bt is on, your location is (almost) always available to Google. You know it, right?
Isn't that just advertising?
Basically if you go to some restaurant for example and sit there for 10+ minutes google already knows that you are there as a customer and it saves the location.
As to the topic, let's be clear credit card data mining has been going on since before the web was born. I've explained this to people for decades, that and "customer loyalty" programs are amazing sources of data while being very scary at the same time.
What google is doing here is not any different than 100's of other vendors and companies in advertising technology. Their advantage is the retention of all your search data, clicks when it's a google ad etc. Facebook has comparable data as do many companies. Both these companies enjoy a duopoly that is massive and in some markets, they capture more than 70% of all advertising spend. Those resources combined with offline techniques creates a white-hot spot light that ignites a dialog that most likely should have happened before the web was born.
Advertisers want to know the money they spend is effective and works. We can all debate for eons about the effectiveness of advertising, but let me tell you de facto that it works. These types of systems are designed to help them optimize the spend.
Sadly, meanwhile you have perfectly good outlets like this newspaper where that optimization has led to downward pressure combined with user habit changes. They are desperate to stay in business and allow their digital offerings to be turned into graffiti pages in hopes to make up for lost revenues in the physical business. This leads to turning users off (157 trackers now as I write this) and they stop coming to the site. The leads to a vicious cycle where the users stop coming, the advertisers notice and stop spending or start discounting the money they're willing to pay. Digital death is horrific, rapid and all automated.
I don't know the answer to all these things, what I do know is people do want to have intelligent dialogs with other people who are offering something of interest. But advertising has always in the past been about injecting itself into people's lives in unwanted ways, from the kid screaming on the street corner "Come and get it, hot off the press" to a page on latimes.com with now 158 trackers and more ad space than content.
I dream of a world where I can have intelligent dialogs with people offering things that could enhance my life in some way. I spend every day of my life thinking about how to do this, and I'm building technology and products to address this idea. I would love nothing better than a single ad on a site like this, the right one, the one you wouldn't mind hearing from and one that pays the site owner 20x what they get now with their graffiti strategy. I can tell you advertisers also want this, they don’t want to be on a page with 158 trackers, and a graffiti layout where their message is diluted by all the noise.
It’s a real problem, it will get much worse before it gets better, but those who say advertising is evil are missing the point. Effective advertising is about communication, and should be person to person. The most powerful advertisement is a friend telling another friend about something new and exciting they discovered. However, to have that dialog you must have the first experience, the discovery, the friend of a friend had to learn about this amazing new product and advertising sets out to do that.