4 ms·

Well, I think it's easy to overestimate the damage "hideous monstrosities ... left flopping on its muddy bottom" will do if and when money leaves adtech. Sure,

Well, I think it's easy to overestimate the damage "hideous monstrosities ... left flopping on its muddy bottom" will do if and when money leaves adtech. Sure, they've been surveilling me. But what damage can they really do? They probably roughly know where I live, roughly where I work, and when I move between A and B. They know my age, race, gender. They may know a sizable chunk of my social network. Maybe the porn I like. It seems possible, but unlikely, that they'd know my bank, ISP, or actual home address. So they sell my info. What will the purchaser do with it? Send me more, better spam? So what - I'll block it and move on.

Margh 11y ago
The number of answers there are to that question is phenomenal. Here's one I just thought up: You stop going between A and B (home and work) for 6 months. You're now either unemployed or working from home; the latter can probably be inferred by any changes in shopping habits. Sell that information to recruiters and they'll know how hard to gouge you in your desperation for a new job.
- lsc 11y ago
  Eh, I think recruiters already usually have a pretty good idea of how long you've been unemployed, and they already use that information against you; the big problem isn't so much that they low-ball you (it's easy enough to get another job once you have one) but that usually they won't give you a chance at all if you've been unemployed for too long.
lsc 11y ago
The fear is that they'll use it to blackmail you. "Give us $X or we will send your wife all the texts you sent to person Z." or perhaps more realistic, "Give us $X or we will publish that embarrassingly bad love letter you sent to person Z" or even "Give us $x and we will reveal your alternate handle" The first bit of comfort is that the details you would want if you were to blackmail someone are not the details that advertisers want when trying to get you to click on an ad, so the people who end up with this private data might find it less useful for blackmail than we think. They probably don't have my embarrassingly bad poetry. but... they probably do have all my alternate handles, and that's embarrassing enough. I think one of the major saving graces here is the unreliability of the data; especially once it has been sold a few times, it's gonna have a lot of mistakes. Because for advertising? a few mistakes don't really matter. This is gonna make the "deny everything" defense a lot stronger. Of course, the big thing about blackmail is that it mostly only makes sense when going after the big fish; there is a lot of hard to automate work in finding the victim's weak spot, and then actually extracting the money (or whatever) Most of us probably don't have to worry about being blackmailed unless we get rich or someone rich wants something from us... but it's still pretty bad for us if a giant cache of data that can be used for blackmail ends up in desperate hands.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > The fear is that they'll use it to blackmail you. "Give us $X or we will send your wife all the texts you sent to person Z." or perhaps more realistic, "Give us $X or we will publish that embarrassingly bad love letter you sent to person Z" or even "Give us $x and we will reveal your alternate handle" As a rule that is information advertising companies do not have or have access to.
  - lsc 11y ago
    as I point out later in my comment, they probably don't have the love letter... they probably do have my alternate handles, as I sign on from the same devices.

Margh 11y ago

The number of answers there are to that question is phenomenal. Here's one I just thought up: You stop going between A and B (home and work) for 6 months. You're now either unemployed or working from home; the latter can probably be inferred by any changes in shopping habits. Sell that information to recruiters and they'll know how hard to gouge you in your desperation for a new job.

lsc 11y ago
Eh, I think recruiters already usually have a pretty good idea of how long you've been unemployed, and they already use that information against you; the big problem isn't so much that they low-ball you (it's easy enough to get another job once you have one) but that usually they won't give you a chance at all if you've been unemployed for too long.

lsc 11y ago

The fear is that they'll use it to blackmail you. "Give us $X or we will send your wife all the texts you sent to person Z." or perhaps more realistic, "Give us $X or we will publish that embarrassingly bad love letter you sent to person Z" or even "Give us $x and we will reveal your alternate handle" The first bit of comfort is that the details you would want if you were to blackmail someone are not the details that advertisers want when trying to get you to click on an ad, so the people who end up with this private data might find it less useful for blackmail than we think. They probably don't have my embarrassingly bad poetry. but... they probably do have all my alternate handles, and that's embarrassing enough. I think one of the major saving graces here is the unreliability of the data; especially once it has been sold a few times, it's gonna have a lot of mistakes. Because for advertising? a few mistakes don't really matter. This is gonna make the "deny everything" defense a lot stronger. Of course, the big thing about blackmail is that it mostly only makes sense when going after the big fish; there is a lot of hard to automate work in finding the victim's weak spot, and then actually extracting the money (or whatever) Most of us probably don't have to worry about being blackmailed unless we get rich or someone rich wants something from us... but it's still pretty bad for us if a giant cache of data that can be used for blackmail ends up in desperate hands.

jacquesm 11y ago
> The fear is that they'll use it to blackmail you. "Give us $X or we will send your wife all the texts you sent to person Z." or perhaps more realistic, "Give us $X or we will publish that embarrassingly bad love letter you sent to person Z" or even "Give us $x and we will reveal your alternate handle" As a rule that is information advertising companies do not have or have access to.
- lsc 11y ago
  as I point out later in my comment, they probably don't have the love letter... they probably do have my alternate handles, as I sign on from the same devices.