Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway (2019)
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"Privacy," though isn't about Google shovelling reaction videos into my feed in order to keep me on the site.
It's more about every site requiring authentication and more information than they need about my identity, which in turn, gets sold to third-parties or gets stolen in a breach. And then can be used to impersonate me, craft scams targeting me, etc.
Agree though that recommendation algos are bad and over-used. They're designed to give the illusion that the system is curating content that you would like. An algorithm can't recommend something you would like. It hasn't sat down with you over countless dinners and nights out and got to know you; nor has it been off and read it's own books and seen movies on its own time. It's not going to drop off a worn copy of Wide Sargasso Sea because that's what you need to read right now. Recommendation algorithms are designed for retention and retention-only. They throw away almost all data about you except what you've clicked on recently.
I hope they never stop telling me about them.
That's how humans convince themselves that they know somebody to satisfy their own need to be able to trust somebody and to be trusted.
Statistical analysis is how you gain actual information. Information that's relevant to understand - so as to be able to manipulate - fears, desires, and opinions on the population level.
And yeah, you're gonna serve some ads to people in the process. Gotta make it look legit somehow.
Analysing oceans of telemetry is not just hard, it's exponential-volume * permutating-international-linguistic-complexity hard.
The business model is therefore not to anything truly useful with useful data, the business model is fake it hard by hoarding the data to make money. If enough people believe that MAANG have real capability beyond non-semantic content correlation at scale, the money will (and does) accrue.
Say "A.I." breathlessly.
> chances are good that your pet ML application is an expensive replacement for a dumb heuristic
The probability approaches 1.
If the mere fact of holding data were put to a rigorous test, we would discover what everybody knows. [0]
> See, the problem is there's almost no way to know if you're right.
The dystopian truth is that it doesn't matter if the advertising empire is right or good or helpful. And the result is the grotesque coupling of what would otherwise be unequivocally brilliant technological advances: powerful mobile communication at scale and shared, connected, cultivated information.
- - -
[0] _ https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-everybody-knows-lyrics _ "Everybody knows the scene is dead, but there's going to be a meter on your bed that will expose... what everybody knows." -- L. Cohen, S. Robinson
For them, admitting it's not the case and "Google/Meta/... knows more about you than you do" is a myth/meme is committing suicide.
These ads are good in theory (and great when they work), but I find that, most of the time, they just result in me searching for one product and the first result being an ad for a competing product.
> There's another kind of ad that works well on me. I play video games sometimes, and I use Steam, and sometimes I browse through games on Steam and star the ones I'm considering buying. Later, when those games go on sale, Steam emails me to tell me they are on sale, and sometimes then I buy them. Again, everybody wins: I got a game I wanted (at a discount!), the game maker gets paid, and Steam gets paid for connecting us. And I can disable the emails if I want, but I don't want, because they are good ads.
This I totally agree with (though I might be biased, as a gamedev). These ads are awesome because I told Steam that I want these games and that I want ads about these games.
I would only like this "feature" if I explicitly opt-in by clicking an "email me if this product goes on sale" button. Starring / adding to favourites etc. is not consent to send me an out of the blue notification. For all they know I've already bought the game somewhere else, or my interests have changed, or I don't play games anymore.
I'm tired of technology trying to guess what I want. When they get it right it's creepy. When they get it wrong it's annoying. I also really hate "out of the blue" emails or notifications. My "aspergery" personality has a hard enough time dealing with texts from my family members.
I'm in the habit of turning off all notifications off for everything. It just bothers me how often the defaults are "everything on."
Yes, this is how it works (which the article doesn't make especially clear). You add something to your 'steam wishlist' and steam e-mails you next time it goes on sale. As far as I'm aware, the wishlist has no other function.
Of course, part of the reason this works is that a lot of sales are like 70% off - you'll get e-mailed when that $25 game on your wishlist is available for $7.50. There would be much less benefit to the consumer if they insisted on e-mailing me to tell me that $25 game had been discounted to $23.
And isn't that most of the point of adding to the wishlist?
> Of course, part of the reason this works is that a lot of sales are like 70% off - you'll get e-mailed when that $25 game on your wishlist is available for $7.50. There would be much less benefit to the consumer if they insisted on e-mailing me to tell me that $25 game had been discounted to $23.
Eh, that is true from what I gather for old games, but you can wishlist unreleased games so they send an email for the launch with 10% discount too or 25% a few months later (guessing with those numbers).
It's also visible to accounts you've friended, for gift-giving purposes.
Youtube is the worst. I get the same 2 ads every few minutes, for weeks, generally for things not applicable to me.
The ad networks serve you whatever ads they happen to have laying around, and generally that's a 1 size fits all dumb generic thing. All those metrics exist not because they work, but so the marketeers can convince themselves and their bosses they are doing their job by shoving ads around. Nobody even has to look as long as the illusion someone is looking still holds.
> so the marketeers can convince themselves and their bosses they are doing their job by shoving ads around
That's highly plausible. Plausible deniability needs to be plausible.
We would expect market forces to rout out advertising companies that need to charge extra to run a useless surveillance network that doesn't actually increase conversion rates.
I have no problem believing advertisers lie to their bosses, they do it to everyone else and assuming they don't do it when their interests are served best of all is not an extra excuse.
I have also no problem believing todays intelligences see a lovely buildup of information, and decide they want that pile to grow and they want access.
Surely rich corporations see dollar signs selling access to this info, and every possible use of it must be looked at at every angle by teams of spindoctors andthink tanks.
In fact, I can belizve Google and Facebook accidentally found out they sat on a mountain of info. While not the initial plan, they decided to use and grow it because why not.
Undoubtly there are 100's more of these small stories. The world just goes on, and the human brain finds meaning in the complex random patterns that appear, self reinforce, and disappear again. The biggest illusion of all is there is a story to it. Some of us might be more powerfull than others, but no person or group is that influential on its own.
So obviously I agree, except for the subliminal message that just because the NSA doesn't have absolute power and doesn't get its way every single time, we should just ignore it, don't worry and just go home.
Like I know it's not so common on the US but here if you pop across to France for a week you get ads for everything in French. Despite my best* efforts I still speak abysmal French. You're not going to sell me shit in French (or indeed anything anyway).
I literally just crossed a border, I didn't become French, please.
This despite me being pretty lazy and generally letting my data get slurped left, right and center.
Perfect market efficiency strikes again...
*Citation needed
If the Gmail UI is in Japanese I can probably muddle through. If train lines and street names are in kanji I'm probably effed.
(Maps has since improved language detection.)
I don't use an ad blocker, I'm okay with generic, untargeted ads. I do block a lot of advertising cookies and I am isolating them from each other in a cat and mouse game. Intentional misinformation is a fun part of that, too.
I can only really speak to Amazon and Facebook (via the web) because my uBlock configuration nips almost everything else, completely[0], and most advertising from those sites, as well.
But when an advertisement does slip through, it is frequently for a service I already subscribe to or a product I already purchased. In the latter case, I've had times where I've purchased something on Amazon and had the same product show up within a few minutes of the purchase as an advertisement on Facebook. So ... that was wasted marketing spend.
On the flip side of that, I'm certain Amazon knows who my girlfriend is and correlates our searches. There have been a handful of times when I was discussing gift ideas and she'll pull up a product and hand me her phone[1]. Sure, they pick it up when she sends me a link from the app or does some other action that can be correlated (i.e. we're both on the same WiFi, our phones are both reporting the same location[2]) but it's happened enough that I've started paying attention. On one occasion, she handed me her phone, we had no other digital back/forth and my phone was charging in the car (off, because I let the battery die). Later that evening, I'm on my laptop and that product was on the home page. There are other explanations, sure, but it'd be pretty easy to see that we frequently share one of two IP addresses when visiting their sites and start tracking those accounts as affiliated in some way for gift-giving purposes.
[0] I see product recommendations on Amazon and for some reason more than a few sponsored posts and the like on Facebook -- I don't use their mobile apps.
[1] I really, really hate using mobile apps.
[2] I don't actually know if the Amazon app tracks location ... I don't have it.
// FWIW: I really did laugh out loud at "Statistical Astrology" and I'm positive I'll be using that statement in the future.
Your phone does not have to be on anymore for you to see stuff your girlfriend looks at. Once they've made a statistical connection (and your phones keep regularly reporting from same IP for the foreseeable future) you will get the ads she looks at if they seem relevant to target to you as possible gifts/things-to-buy.
I sat through a corporate "ads data pipeline" info-session from Google for my company. You do not want to know the level of architecture pumping away in the background that collects and correlates disparate data about you together. It's actually shocking how robust and complex it is. Trust me, I've seen it, they know almost everything about you consumption/location/device wise.
I do, and I suspect many others would like to know as well - please share!
I absolutely do want to know. Specifically, I want to know which countermeasures to employ to deny them as much information as possible or, failing that, to feed them fake data that reduces the value they get out of me.
If you want to have a standard iPhone/Samsung device, like using Google Maps, or use social media in any form on your devices, you've lost. They know everything about you and attempting to keep your data secure from them is a moot point.
That being said, I still use things like ad blockers, private email (non-Gmail), and prefer iPhone over Android, but I'm just picking my poison really. It's game over, these ad people largely already won.
You can make it a little bit harder for them to generate a model of you, but it will still eventually happen even if you have zero contact since all your friends/family will give them enough info to reconstruct you into their system.
Heck, even your credit card is snitching on you. Taking your kids for ice cream and leaving your phone at home does nothing, they still know where you went.
I totally disagree with this point. I went "dim." A few years ago (turned off all of Google except gmail), don't use any social media, route my (and any visitors on my home networks) traffic through Cloudflare, etc...but almost nothing worked. There wasn't a CAPTCHA that I could get through, because every HTTP request seemed to be coming from a different source.
I've been slowly and cautiously turning the lights back on, and the experience has been great. YouTube only recommends shit I actually want because it mostly knows only the things I've explicitly saved into my playlists (history is turned off...I don't have privacy there or with what I'm watching, but the experience is dramatically improved, even if I do occasionally fall for some clickbait).
I can highly recommend going dim. You can objectively say that you don't actually have privacy, but you can be dark enough that the capital surveillance network just doesn't bother with you.
I also meant to direct my comments more to a general crowd. The majority of people out there are not going to do anything remotely close to what you are doing to avoid unwanted advertising and tracking.
I applaud what you're doing, good on you, but I don't think it's really reasonable for even most tech-folks I know who "just want an iPhone with apps that work". It's unfortunate there isn't an easy option to go "dim" as you say without lots of effort and setup.
They gather data from all kinds of sources outside of their direct realm. Credit card companies, DMV records, etc.
To counter it, you have to stop leaving an electronic trail with anyone. Pay only cash. Don't register a vehicle, etc. In other words, you can't escape it without disengaging from society entirely.
But even if you can't eliminate the data flow to these companies entirely, it's absolutely worth reducing it as much as your tolerance for inconvenience allows.
I also know the truth of this, and it makes it all the more remarkable that they're so bad at targeting ads regardless.
> Outliers are bad for business.
That's pretty much the takeaway here. Art (or anything really) that inspires, or is even more than about one sigma out, is not profitable. Sure, it's what you want, and you want to be erudite and trying to fill that final level on Maslow's hierarchy, but that doesn't guarantee quarter after quarter ROI for shareholders.
If that is better than your logged in feed then it suggests you have lowest common denominator YouTube tastes; with all the open mouth thumbnails, pranks, $$$$$$$$ and pointless content houses.
It gets really bad with politics and news for instance, where I can watch one video on some topic and then suddenly YouTube decides to give me everyone and their mothers opinion.
If that makes you a snob, then I am too. Similar with /r/popular versus my subscribed feed on Reddit. Both it and logged out YouTube are dumpster fires in my eyes.
The logged in version of YouTube isn't much better, though - "oh, you clicked on this talk from the Strange Loop conference? Here's a video on introductory programming in Python!"
"There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate."
As for ad-tech, if I'm getting ads for washer-dryers after a recent purchase, then they're counterproductive.
Granted, as the article also mentioned (if I recall correctly), some recommender systems are actually quite good. For me, finding new music to listen from a particular genre fits into this category.
Advertising is the root of all this evil.
That reminds me of something I'm not sure is the same, but maybe it is. Anyone also feels that a few years ago the Steam "related games" section switched from being not necessarily mainstream games that were actually similar to what you're looking at to being mostly whatever the most popular games that share any genre at all with the game on the page you're at?
The sad part is, this is exactly why I left broadcast radio and TV and movie theaters behind. With some heuristics and filters in place, this sort of thing was solvable online, but nope, the market beckons, pulling everyone ever forward into its gaping maw . . .
This was the most interesting point for me. I found it surprising that changing the cost of delivering a movie could so dramatically shift company-wide priorities.
I mean, not to yell at clouds, but this is kind of how technology and our use of it progresses - things get faster/cheaper, and pretty soon you don't have to give a shit about pushing to EAX but instead just mapreduce across your cluster.
We're inherently lazy.
Maybe I should not be so surprised. If some core service used in software becomes 1000x cheaper, it does tend to produce not just shifts in quantity but shifts in the kind of thing you do with it. For instance, if a language's garbage collector goes from annoyingly slow to basically invisible, it wouldn't be surprising for the preferred paradigm to change.
Funny you give that as an example - I recall attending a talk round the turn of the century about using Java in real-time systems, and a big stickler at the time was the GC. I haven't kept up with Java (or real-time systems), but given the inroads the JDK VM has made in the embedded space, I wouldn't be surprised at all if something changed enough to make the GC not an issue for (some) real-time systems any more.
Many DARPA projects from the 1990s were "cancelled" and then mysteriously showed up fifteen years later.
Either Netflix is lying about throwing it away, or we are supposed to believe a company that is fanatical about making money, to the degree of churning out 'sastificing' films and guiding users to them, is somehow also mr. butterfingers when it come to letting research grants slip through it's fingers and discarding the sucessful results..
Something smells fishy about this article. At what point do we admit tech companies don't operate for money and have their own private purposes?
I have no reason to doubt it, either. To companies the size of Netflix, $1 million is a lot of money -- but not that much money.