Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

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> and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people.

I strongly disagree, and with all respect, this is a naive view.

This might be true when you're looking at the mapping of individual company to individual person (ex: "You to Facebook" or "You to Google.") But the ecosystem approach to building a profile on you is more comprehensive than you think.

Example: you might get very very good at removing your phone and TV/Movie interests from Facebook, or never having it on there to begin with. But then Media Conglomerate X owns a cell/wireless provider, internet provider, and hell maybe even a cable company. There's a high probability that you pay for >= 1 service from this company, that can be matched back to your Google profile and/or Facebook profile - via a DMP (data management platform) or something similar.

Oh and remember when you used your real phone number to make a reservation at a restaurant? AND they needed a credit card on file, just in case you don't show up? Well those are uploaded and grouped in the same data pools.

And then when enough stores / restaurants / ecommerce sites pool this information, they can build a pretty reasonable shopping profile for you, make (very good) estimates on your demographics, etc. Almost like it's crowd-sourced!

Therefore the "you" that is supposedly a "small, statistically irrelevant piece" is actually part of a group that has an ecosystem of companies and DMPs pooling data to make that group smaller and smaller.

> you might get very very good at removing your phone and TV/Movie interests from Facebook

Also, your Smart TV may simply be spying on you and sending that data back to the manufacturer[1] either by sending a hash of portions of your screen, or in Samsung's case, straight-up sending screenshots.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930

And then, they throw away all that information and give you targeted ads that are so bad that you couldn't make a worse job if your life depended on it.

I guess it is a mixed blessing.

They use all of that info to target you, limit the number of times you’ve seen an ad, and stop sending you ads after you buy the product. Obviously it’s a really hard problem though, because the above list doesn’t always work as intended.

It seems to work more like after you research and buy a lawn mower, they conclude that you are really, really interested in lawn mowers from then on.

Yeah that happens often. I ran these campaigns for two years - you effectively get 200 dials, knobs, and levers to pull all making minor changes to an incredibly complicated adtech ecosystem. My first year I ran 80 of these campaigns, and could spend <20 minutes a week on each.

Missing something like “exclude recent purchasers” was easy to forget, but easier to not even have time to set up. (It might take 10-30 minutes to set that up)

I've noticed a lot of Instagram ads where the advertisers seemed to ignore a regional target, or Instagram does. I get ads for restaurants all over the country, which makes no sense for the advertiser. I'm not about to go eat at some Mexican restaurant 2000 miles away from me in a suburb.

This is because of the vastly different amounts of work involved on either end.

Knowing you browsed a product is as simple as firing a tracking image on the product page from the adtech platform. Knowing you actually bought it means having a connection from the ecommerce system back to your email then back to the id that used used in the adtech and then setup as an exclusion filter in all of the campaigns.

It's also usually not worth it since conversions are low and ads are cheap so better to keep advertising and get net new sales then worry about the people who already bought seeing the same ad.

it would be good for them to work that out because showing me the same ads for lawn mowers for months straight is a waste of their advertising space and their clients' dollars.

I also do things like look up something on Google for someone else, then see ads about it for months. While I understand the simple way of this technology works, they might want to rethink the idea that I need to see ads endlessly for everything I did one search for.

I explained it's not worth it in the last sentence. It's year of work and millions in cost, and now regulation prevents tying PII from your purchase to the anonymous IDs used in adtech. You're going to get new ads anyway, retargeting campaigns rarely last beyond a few weeks from the last product page visit.

Okay, I've generally wavered on this between "assume the online advertising sector is nefarious and evil and perfectly competent" to "assume the standard level of bureaucratic incompetence". Your comments here are moving the needle back towards the former.

So what in your opinion can people do, that are reasonable, actionable steps to take, to avoid being an unwilling part of this ecosystem?

Destroy your cell phone, delete your internet accounts, and only use cash.

You have to be a part of the ecosystem. If you need any connectivity (internet or phone), you really have no choice. Unless you buy prepay cell phones with cash, change the number every few months, only use public WiFi, wipe your computer, change browsing habits, etc.

Even if you Adblock and never give away personal info, like op said, your cable, bank, insurance, dmv, internet, and phone provider will still collect and sell your data.

Your comment and the sibling comment are both saying this is an all-or-nothing situation with no degrees of variation at all. That flies in the face of pretty much all other data science, so I find it hard to believe.

I mean you can have some impact, but at the end of the day the variables you control are relatively minor in the grand scheme. For example, uBlock will prevent your browsing habits from being used.. but browsing habits aren't really a great signal anymore. I only ever used audiences that are based on strong signals like purchases, location visits, verified demographics, etc.

What's your goal exactly?

Yes you can make their ad targetting somewhat less accurate in some circumstances.

> You have to be a part of the ecosystem. If you need any connectivity (internet or phone), you really have no choice.

Which is why we need really tough legislation to put a stop to this abuse. The GDPR and CCPA are good starts, but both of those are much too weak. Here's hoping that such legislation will get better, and more pervasive, over time.

This is completely unreasonable. There is no network for uploading and matching customer phone numbers across businesses. Who owns this company, in your mind? They must have tens of thousands of customers and be making billions in revenue to have the kind of scale and reach you're describing.

It generally takes years for a big company to completely ingest the data of a company that they acquire, and even then everything is siloed in 20 different ways. People only wish that company X buying company Y meant that the two merged all of their databases synergistically. The world definitely does not work this way

Liveramp.

You literally upload any offline data (phone numbers, names, address, whatever you have) and they match it to online profiles. They take the data you give them and use it in their cross-device graph, which is the exact thing you said doesn’t exist. Any business can go license or use that cross device graph in a variety of ways. $RAMP, 2.2B market cap.

Same service is provided by oracle with their cdp and dmp, and a few other companies. If you want to do more research the terms to look for are identity graph, cross device graph, offline matching, and other variants of those. Fb, google, LinkedIn, etc all offer some version of this in their walled garden. In the blog post they talk more about offline conversions, but it’s the same idea.

There are a lot of companies in the cross-device graph space. As I said, they do not have nearly the level of integration described in the great-grand parent comment.

If I'm wrong, sign up with Liveramp and use my phone number to tell me what restaurants I've booked reservations at in the last month. Is that how it works?

So yeah the restaurant or restaurant group doesn't have that great of a profile, it is built by companies like liveramp who get data from tens of thousands of sources and pool it into their own graph + audience data. Then they license it back out to those same companies. FB/Google and Oracle (crosswise) probably have the best identity graphs and are on par with what the original comment was describing. (I used to work at oracle on their audience products)

Liveramp is b2b and definitely won't support anything you want to do with them, but there are some comically bad tools (haven't been updated and are purposefully inaccurate) that let you check what data pools you're currently in.

https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry

Liveramp has been particularly irritating me of late, because they seem to be trying to position themselves as if they were defenders of customer privacy -- when they are, in fact, doing the opposite of that.

If you're going to be bad, at least don't try to pretend that you're good.

Its very easy for adtech vendors to implement legally required or industry-wide standards and call themselves privacy conscious.

Yes, but they're lying when they do so. What's required legally, and the industry-wide standards that are currently in place are both insufficient. Adhering to them is great, but companies doing so cannot reasonably be characterized as being defenders of privacy if that's all they're doing.

From your perspective, yes they are definitely lying. From their perspective they've implemented a pro-privacy feature and advertise it and their company as doing so. I'm not saying either side is 100% correct, but there are two sides. The industry groups call something like the below pro-privacy and adtech/pubs do the same.

Example: https://digitaladvertisingalliance.org/license-pricon

> From their perspective they've implemented a pro-privacy feature and advertise it and their company as doing so.

If that were the specific claim they made, I wouldn't call them lying. But I was talking about Liveramp specifically, and they're making claims well beyond that -- they're claiming that they're actually defenders of privacy. That's a straight-up lie.

I keep a close eye on the adtech/martech world ("know your enemy"), and it's clear that on the whole they've managed to reframe the issue in their own minds in a way that is favorable to them (mostly by doing what Facebook is doing: considering themselves as "pro-privacy" by defending the data they collect against outside attackers and abuse rather than considering their own collection and data use).

I don't think they're lying when they do this, I think they've managed to delude themselves in the way that salespeople often do: by convincing themselves that the lie is actually true. It's not lying, after all, if you believe it.

But Liveramp has elevated this to a level that I believe is intentionally deceptive.

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