16 ms·

Trackers

• tux3 11y ago
  It's funny how much more relatable the whole privacy debate becomes when transposed to the physical world. Some will disagree, but I think the comparison was spot on.
  • raldu 11y ago
    Exactly. I am using the same analogy to explain non-technical people about tracking, ads, surveillance etc. so that they can relate. Otherwise the abstract technical concepts seem like coming out of a science fiction story to them.
• S4M 11y ago
  Thank you Jacques for writing how something that would be completely unacceptable in the physical world is deemed perfectly fine online. It has always bothered me. Take for example how the FBI wants to have automatic access to the data in all iphones through a backdoor. Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist? Of course that would cause an uproar, but the general public being so uneducated with technology, I guess they don't see how the two are related.
  • JorgeGT 11y ago
    > Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key Didn't TSA do exactly this, only to have CAD designs of the master keys reverse-engineered from a photo and posted in GitHub? https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys
  • timr 11y ago
    "Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?" I don't know. But I know that it would be absolutely normal to pick your lock and/or knock down your door if they had a warrant. It would even be OK for them to ask the lock company, door company, and landlord to help them do that. For that matter, the landlord could even be compelled to surrender his master key for the entire apartment complex. All of those things could happen out here in the big blue room, and nobody would blink an eye. Funny how these metaphors to the physical world clear things up, isn't it?
    • mschulze 11y ago
      But when the FBI gets the key or picks the lock it does not make any other door more insecure, or enables other parties to get into other doors. What if the FBI would ask all landlords to install a special door to every apartment, but only the FBI has the key to this special door? What if someone successfully copies that key? Now they have access to all apartments.
      • timr 11y ago
        Obviously, "making all locks insecure" is a different situation than bypassing a single door. Which is why we don't do the former, but (currently) do the latter, judiciously. But hey: what if the lock company makes a standard lock, with a plain ol', low-security, five-pin key, and attaches it to a bomb that destroys the apartment when it's picked incorrectly? Does the lock company now get to beg off when the police come looking for help opening a single door? "Oh, we'd love to help you, officer, but you see...if we help you open this particular lock, then all criminals will know that you can disable the bomb, and that would make all of our locks less secure!"
        • geekamongus 11y ago
          This makes no sense whatsoever.
          • deleted 11y ago
            [deleted]
        • burkaman 11y ago
          Yes, I think they do.
      • andreyf 11y ago
        First off, this already happens: every major corporation uses multi-party disk encryption, usually branded as "recovery options" or some such. They keep their private keys secure. Second off, the FBI is not asking for a special door to every apartment. They are asking a lock manufacturer to create a key and use it to unlock a single lock that is brought to them, after the lock manufacturer explicitly designed their locks to make the creation of such a key possible, so that this legal case would exist. There is an interesting debate to be had here, but this rhetoric using overly simplified analogies is not it.
  • makeitsuckless 11y ago
    It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing. However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.
    • icebraining 11y ago
      I agree that there is plenty of whining by American companies about EU privacy protection laws, but the cookie law was still worthy of ridicule, even for an European like me who quite appreciates the Data Protection Directive. The intention was good, but the implementation was flawed, and predictably so.
      • jacquesm 11y ago
        Yes, indeed it was. They focused on the technical implementation rather than the activity.
  • watty 11y ago
    It's already possible, any physical lock or home or safe can be opened with a warrant. The fact that we're almost at a point where we can hide something from the government (even with a warrant) is groundbreaking.
    • S4M 11y ago
      It's perfectly fine that the FBI or the police can open a physical lock with a warrant. The warrant is supposed to be delivered by someone representing the Justice department, which is (theoretically) independent from the police. What would be unacceptable is that they could just bypass that authority and enter to anybody's home on a whim. Which is what they are trying to achieve when they asked Apple to put a backdoor in their Iphones.
      • timr 11y ago
        "The warrant is supposed to be delivered by someone representing the Justice department, which is (theoretically) independent from the police." I hate to break it to you, but the FBI is part of the Department of Justice. I think you mean that a warrant needs to be issued by the judiciary, which (as far as I know) is a truism. Courts issue warrants, there is a warrant in the Apple case, and it in no way involves a "backdoor" being placed in all Apple phones. You really might want to look up some of the facts about this case. It's not nearly as general as you think it is.
      • kelseydh 11y ago
        Warrants are really only a defence against mass, dragnet style surveillance since with enough will, anybody can become subject of a warrant if those who are investigating them have enough will to get one.
  • cm2187 11y ago
    and all communications being recorded is like having every phone line tapped by default. And USPS / Royal Mail opening everyone's mail.
• austinjp 11y ago
  Add the part where one of the bouncers starts their own targeting company and does deals with some of the other targeters.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    Good one, will do.
• pjuu 11y ago
  WOW! This is a great way to put it. Well done.
• t0mislav 11y ago
  I didn't quite understand bouncers. Those are some tools for private browsing?
  • glward 11y ago
    Ad/tracker blockers, I assume.
• raverbashing 11y ago
  I think that better than an ad-blocking solution would be to feed all those trackers with fake information Oh you want location data here it is, this morning I've been all over the planet. Want to know all the websites I'm visiting, sure, here's a million of them. Just based on the fact that they keep trying to sell you the thermometer after you already don't care kind of points out that they're being had, and I'm all for helping it happen
  • forgetsusername 11y ago
    >feed all those trackers with fake information If you're going to war, sure. But that's a lot of wasted resources. One would hope that we can find a peaceful solution. But war is always an option.
    • chinathrow 11y ago
      It's already a war - not only according to the article.
  • zelos 11y ago
    Would that be feasible to automate as a browser extension? Something like Ghostery, except that tracking scripts are run in a sandbox that returns random but feasible data for API calls?
  • Kenji 11y ago
    Wow, that is genius. If there was such a thing, something like uMatrix, but that automatically feeds trackers with complete garbage, I'd install it in a heartbeat. The problem is that you will always reveal your real IP when you establish a TCP connection, unless you are using a proxy.
  • Kristine1975 11y ago
    I think (but I'm far from an expert) that it would be easy to filter out this fake information. Especially if it's obviously fake like "I've been all over the planet." A bit like spam vs "real" emails.
  • 11y ago
• atirip 11y ago
  I have blocked as much trackers as i can. Having said that, i know why they exists. See, when John produces shampoo, he needs to sell it. The only way is to advertise, one way or another, because without advertising, public knowledge, the shampoo does not sell. Now John does want to spend as less to ads as possible, that makes sense, since we, the customers, end up paying about that too. To spend less, John needs to show ads only to core group of buyers, for that he needs to know, who you are. Tracker does that. Shampoo costs 5 bucks. How much you agree to pay for that with advertising costs included? 6? 16? Really, are you ready to eat up 200% advertising markup? I have no idea, frankly.
• buro9 11y ago
  Really well put. I've been operating browser separation (Google in Chrome, social in Chrome incognito, and everything else in a locked-down privacy mode only Firefox - all with uBlock) for a while, and also use anonymising VPNs for anything I really don't trust, and my own VPN with streisand and Dnsmasq (with a hosts very similar to https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/ https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/ ). On my mobile every link I click in any app I open in Dolphin Zero (still on that DNS blocking VPN - which blocks all trackers in apps too), and I only keep apps I actually use and trust the publishers of on my device. It feels like a chore (manually copying links from one browser to another depending on trust level), I wonder whether it's worth it sometimes... but then I occasionally get to see someone else's experience of the web and it's so incredibly and perniciously been invaded by advertisers that I am glad I do all of this. It's become so bad that I even had to change my uBlock origin rules for my online bank ( https://banking.smile.co.uk/SmileWeb/start.do https://banking.smile.co.uk/SmileWeb/start.do ) to block even first-party scripts... because they use Adobe, Omniture and Tealium tools to measure stuff and for A/B testing of their online banking features. I now block absolutely everything and tell others to do so too, but unfortunately there is collateral damage. The very sites I care about may not require advertising revenue, but do value tracking data that helps them spot errors, debug things, find out what screen resolutions they should cater for. Their analytics, client-side debugging, this is all now rendered useless to them. PS: If you happen to work on Firefox for Android, please enable browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to be configured via about:config. I would love to default enable private browsing in a UA capable of running uBlock on my mobile.
  • phillc73 11y ago
    I don't know enough about how uBlock works, but I'm mostly concerned about blocking trackers, and dislike invasive advertising. I use Ghostery with everything blocked. I also bank with smile. I've just confirmed that Ghostery is blocking Adobe, Omniture and Tealium trackers, but I was able to log into my account no problem. I also transferred some funds to a linked account. What aren't you able to do with smile? And is it something specifically with the way uBlock blocks?
    • buro9 11y ago
• Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
  Believe it or not, some stores sympathise with you. They might actually be run by people like you, people who read your story. They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy. But that's as far as it goes. They don't follow you out the store, let alone into your bedroom. They don't match anything with third-party data, let alone your mobile phone number. The store just wants to know where to put the eggs. Unfortunately, your bouncers have simply been told to "hurt them if you have to, I’ve really had enough of it". So last time they came in, they smashed the CCTV cameras. The store-owner remonstrated with them a bit but the whole debate around bouncers has become so polarised that there was really no point arguing. --- And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    > They don't follow you out the store This is actually factually incorrect. Some hints here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_face_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac... And it goes even deeper than that.
    • Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
      Self-hosted, same-domain Piwik doesn't track you on other sites, and doesn't pull in any external data sources.
      • jacquesm 11y ago
        Yes, I got you, I was just pointing out to you that if in-real-life stores are capable of following you out of the store using their CCTV systems there is absolutely no reason to assume that you can't use a website's analytics suite to couple that with other databases at your disposal. The major reason why companies will self host analytics services is not because they are trying to protect the privacy of their visitors, it is because they don't want to give out business critical information to third parties.
• jalk 11y ago
  Are there any publicly know examples of hackers that have used tracking data for malicious stuff. As nasty as it is to have a large amount of your web history stored in a profile, I don't see a clear path to crime (perhaps extortion). Or didn't I get the burglar metaphor?
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    Burglar => malware or phishing through ad networks. Sorry for being unclear, I'll see if I can tidy that up.
• blfr 11y ago
  I'm all for blocking ads, tracking or non-tracking, analytics, etc. and wish swift bankruptcy on the propaganda-advertising industrial complex but this is silly. The analogy between physical world and the Internet is not valid or insightful, just like it isn't in case of piracy/stealing. Collecting info on what you read online is nothing like breaking into your house.
  • xuhu 11y ago
    Picture your insurer scrolling through your browser history when you're renewing your health plan.
• akerro 11y ago
  Did you start visiting shops and places you didn't like just to mislead them? So you have more and more of them tracking you until they run out energy and money because their targeting is just wrong? http://adnauseam.io http://adnauseam.io https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/adnauseam https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/adnauseam https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/trackmenot https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/trackmenot
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    That takes the confrontation to a wholly different level and I'm definitely not yet so far that I'd do this but I can see why some would and who knows, maybe one of these days I'll join the ranks. For now, I think that simply blocking what I don't want and being strict in what I send out is my best bet at reaching some kind of stable long term solution. Retaliation is - for now - for me one step too far.
  • deanclatworthy 11y ago
    Fascinating. Is there anything similar for other browsers?
• karmacondon 11y ago
  Where this analogy breaks down is that the people sent to track you are invisible and can't be seen without the aid of special technology. So what you end up telling people is that they are being followed everywhere by invisible ghosts, who's only desire is to change what ads appear in their newspaper. And it appears that the reaction of most people is about what you'd expect. If a store has policy of "If you come into our store, we'll have employees follow you home" and you don't like that policy, then don't go to that store. That simple. It doesn't make sense to go into the store and have your goons beat up their employees. That might mean that you can't go to the stores you want to go to, but that's how it goes. It seems as clear online as it does in the physical world. (tldr without the analogy: The overwhelming majority of people don't care about being tracked online because there are no obvious ill effects. The problem with ad blockers is that it makes more sense to just avoid sites that show ads, but most people don't want to do this because it would exclude their favorite sites.)
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    If that's all you got from it then I should really do my best to write better. One of the key parts - to me - is that the data silos start trading your data as if it is theirs to whoever pays for it, and that goes a lot further than a real time bidding on ad space, even if that was the initial drive to collect that data.
    • WA 11y ago
      The sad part is: It doesn't even matter what I do about privacy. I'm obviously in someone's address book. That someone wants to play some stupid game that asks for all contacts. Maybe that someone used an app like Cobook, which pulls data from their social network sites (and I'm friends with them there). In the end, they get my data, along with a picture and whatnot and I personally wasn't even involved. Heck, I could even use a dumb phone and my phone number would be all over the place. Recently, Facebook asked me once again to add a phone number "to protect my account". One time, my real phone number was prefilled in the box! They pretend that they don't have it, but since some of my friends use messenger, they surely have it somewhere in my shadow profile (a download of "all my data" obviously didn't contain it).
• wouterinho 11y ago
  It is funny how things change when you use the physical world metaphor. There was a campaign recently by the Dutch regulatory agency that made people aware of the implications of allowing permissions in "free" apps. They made an (anecdotal) video by promising a free cup of coffee in exchange for your contact list on your phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYXM56YJWSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYXM56YJWSo (Dutch unfortunately)
  • WA 11y ago
    Nice video. My wife has an Android phone, I have an iPhone. Recently, I wanted to install some app on her phone and it is still beyond my understanding, why Google still doesn't allow to deny certain permissions. It's all or nothing. And no, a fucking video editor shouldn't require access to my contacts, my browsing history and the accounts on my phone. Android imho is unusable until they let me deny certain permissions, because often, the "best" apps ask for basically everything.
    • mike-cardwell 11y ago
      Install Cyanogenmod, or buy a phone with it pre-installed like a OnePlus, then you get "Privacy Guard" in the settings which lets you specify exactly what data apps can access. Android isn't the problem. Google is the problem. [edit] As in, you can restrict access to things like location, contacts, calendar etc.
    • WillKirkby 11y ago
      As of 6.0 Marshmallow, you can disable any permission you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZqDdvhTZj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZqDdvhTZj0
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    That video is brilliant. Thank you. 'Please plug in your phone here, we need to get some data from it' 'Huh?'
    • Borating 11y ago
• return0 11y ago
  The solution would be a decentralization. Tracking is a real threat when we only have 1 search engine, 2 social networks, 1 retailer and a single ad network. The web has created global-scale monopolies faster than before , and it seems like the centralization of VC capital and IT talent is permanent. Tracking becomes less of a problem when they are unable to follow you everywhere.
• cm2187 11y ago
  One can make a very long list of things that would look really really creepy in the physical world. For instance I can draw a little cat in my agenda to remind myself to call a particular friend that day. The police will tell me: "what? you have not written that in plain english? You must tell me what it means and if you don't you will go to prison". (In the UK one can go to jail for refusing to decrypt one's own data) I go buy the Telegraph at my local newsstand and the guy will tell me: "can I see your papers please?" "But I just want to buy a newspaper" "yes but I must report to the police every day who reads what, by the way I must also know which pages you intend to read" (the UK is passing a law that would force all ISP to record what websites their customers view) Etc etc
• kp25 11y ago
  For the first few seconds, i thought you're talking about real people who're tracking you. Later i realized.. Great writeup. So, true.
• hoopsho 11y ago
  I got tired of seeing a drill show up on a bunch of sites after I just searched for it on Home Depot... I block ads on my workstation, but with tablets I just could not find an easy way to block trackers for my whole family. So Metiix Blockade was born out of this frustration... Now I have "bouncers" protecting my whole network for every one of my devices. I hate when a web page decides what ads and trackers it wants to pull down from the Internet. With Blockade, I have taken back control of that process and I get to dictate when and where I want to provide my information. I love feeling like I have the real internet back. No more of these ads and trackers taking over every place I go.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    Added a link at the end of the article, it looks like your project is free and clean as far as I can see.
    • Borating 11y ago
      Also consider pi-hole [1], notrack [2], uMatrix [3], dnsgate [4] and hostsblock [5] [1] https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ [2] https://github.com/quidsup/notrack https://github.com/quidsup/notrack [3] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix [4] https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate [5] https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/ https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/
      • jacquesm 11y ago
        All added, thank you.
• brlewis 11y ago
  I just disabled third-party cookies on my phone and computer. I'll see if it causes me any problems. I already have adblock plus on my computer.
• harryf 11y ago
  This reminds me of the surveillance camera man - http://youtu.be/jzysxHGZCAU http://youtu.be/jzysxHGZCAU
• rasslen 11y ago
  Jjjjjkkkkklkkllllllll
• ap22213 11y ago
  Reminds me of Surveillance Camera Man: https://www.youtube.com/user/SurveillantCameraMan https://www.youtube.com/user/SurveillantCameraMan
• 9248 11y ago
  I find it infuriating how much traction this whole anti ad/tracking war is getting. People mention there's no choice anymore. Wrong! It's still there, just like it was 10 or 15 years ago. Stop sharing your personal information online and the whole tracking thing doesn't matter anymore. This analogy seems completely flawed imho. Nobody can get inside my home, or force my door or any of that nonsense, unless I specifically allow them when they ask! I fail to understand how all these trackers can read my browsing history without me installing <popular plugin> and allowing it access to my browser? Or how are they going to read my contact list from my Android phone, or the one from my Thunderbird? Through thin air? Nobody took the choice from us, we just happened to open wide our front and back doors, and then complain that random people come in and look through our stuff.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    That you don't understand how it works even in the abstract is maybe an explanation for why you think it is infuriating that others are more concerned than you. Being online is no longer optional, giving merchants and authorities your information is in many cases also no longer optional. If you stop sharing your personal information online you will not be able to participate in a very large chunk of society's functions, some of which are mandatory. Heck I can't even the local tax office website without receiving a bunch of stuff that tracks me.
• terryf 11y ago
  I find it interesting that for most people the problem with ads is the tracking part. For me it's the ads themselves - I don't like seeing them, because I don't really want to buy stuff and think that a large part of the first world's problems (obesity, depression) are caused in part by ads. In the world of ads, I'm constantly reminded that I don't have the perfect body and that my blender does not look as good as the latest model - I really don't want that, because my blender works fine and looks ok. So yeah, I block ads and I don't really see why I should feel bad about that, the non-tracking feature is a nice bonus. So the web will go back to sites that either require payment to enter or are run by people who post stuff out of enthusiasm. Sounds like a nice place to me.
  • flycaliguy 11y ago
    Your nice place will probably never happen. There are alternatives. On the internet, you are actually better off allowing sites to make money with these old fashioned banner style ads. The alternative on the web is baking this predatory persuasion into the content itself. By blocking ads, you are pushing your enemy deeper into the medium. Deeper into the story selection process, deeper into the layout decisions, deeper into an app's data harvesting, deeper into the entire editorial philosophy of a publication.
    • terryf 11y ago
      Sure, but that has already happened. It is ridiculously easy to get almost any newspaper to print a commercial article and already now it is hard to tell the difference between for-pay articles and genuine ones. If you have a instagram account with ~30k or so followers, you start getting offers to promote products for example. If you have less, you can still get deals, but then you have to hunt for them. But this will happen regardless of ad blocking, because it is profitable. I certainly don't know how to avoid it, except to generally assume that all content is commercial content in for-profit sites. And also on some others.
• superuser2 11y ago
  In small towns and pre-industrialization, stores had a tracking regime that puts Silicon Valley to shame: the shopkeepers knew you. They didn't need credit cards or scores because they could identify your store credit account by your face, and your creditworthiness by your family's reputation. If you were buying something out of the ordinary, you better believe your parents/spouse/church/friends/entire town would hear about it from the shopkeeper, who knew them all as well as he knew you. A juicy conversation on a party line telephone shared with neighbors, interesting metadata on the postal mail also handled by people who know you and your business, a sighting in public with someone not your spouse, a visitor at an odd time of night, a strange car in your driveway - all these things could quickly become a public affair. Technology is not bringing us a particularly new invasion, but it is helping at least that side of the "tight-knit communities" of old scale to modern population size and density. I think this is a horrific development, and it's certainly quantitatively unprecedented, but not qualitatively.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    A large enough degree of quantity difference has it's own qualitative difference. This has been observed many times in other fields.
• elorant 11y ago
  Once upon a time I used to work for a multinational company that did retail audit. They had developed a program which adjusted the ads a selected group of people were watching on their TVs. Then they provided them with special debit cards and monitored the relevance between viewed ads and purchases of goods in super markets. All that around 1999. And that was just once of a multitude of technologies they used. They also had a technology where a camera was tracing face movement to identify which items on the shelves attracted more attention by gender and age. I can’t even fathom what they’ll be using these days. Profiling is the holy grail of the marketing world. At least online we have the option of ad blocking. Offline we’re helpless.
• esaym 11y ago
  This might help getting rid of those that follow you: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate
• urbushey 11y ago
  What's the analogue for "clearing your cookies"?
  • imglorp 11y ago
    Go to every business you've ever visited, go to their filing cabinet, and remove every record that you've been there. Go to every library and bookstore and remove every record of things you've read and bought. Etc. That's not the same as cancelling all your accounts and credit cards; you'd still have them, just not your visit data. The most extreme thing you could do in the real world is delete your identity and start over from birth.
• theshadowmonkey 11y ago
  What you probably missed is if I am a big enough retailer, I can pay off your bouncers to still follow you from a distance and still show up on your newspaper on one side since I have more than you and can pay off your bouncers to work for me while they still pretend they are protecting you. Just an example: https://adblockplus.org/about https://adblockplus.org/about
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    No, that's in there (near the end).
    • theshadowmonkey 11y ago
      Cool. But, do you think a paid model for consuming content would work given the number of content sources and the frequency with which a user visits a single source? Don't content creators depend on some form of revenue and trackers are used to optimize the revenue.
      • jacquesm 11y ago
        I don't think advertising and tracking need to go hand-in-hand the way they do right now.
• shostack 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I do digital media and online marketing for a living. I used to help lead the paid search group at a top search agency and had a real birds-eye view of where things were moving in that role. Everything is moving towards audiences. While keywords and search queries are signals that highlight intent, ultimately the audience piece is what the advertiser cares about--that's just one component of it. This is why FB, Google and everyone else under the sun wants companies to upload their CRM data, and then they use that for retargeting (1st party, or 1P data), or building lookalikes. Then you have Adobe and other companies trying to get companies to sell this data on a marketplace as 2nd party (2P) audience data for retargeting. There are also companies like LiveRamp and others that try to get companies with login data to provide cookie matches against hashed email addresses to keep cookies fresh and prevent them from just being deleted once and forever. I've been approached by these companies, and always turned them down because it just felt dirty. That said, this thread seems to draw the usual crowd of everyone who hates anything related to advertising. I'm not going to try to change your opinions because I know that is not going to happen. However the reason all of this data gets shared is because it allows better targeting which leads to more relevant ads, which leads to more purchases. Think about that for a second. People are purchasing more when the content is more relevant to them. Nobody is holding a gun to their head making them take out their wallets and hit "Purchase." They are saying "this product/service is relevant to me and I want to buy it." In that manner, advertising is helping people who want to purchase said thing. The issue comes in with the fact that because targeting isn't perfect (and I doubt anyone wants the level of tracking needed to make it so), and because a lot of advertising is building awareness (not simply retargeting and reminding you to buy something you initially displayed interest in), it becomes intrusive in a manner people dislike. Unfortunately, because of the data available, there's still plenty of people who say "hmmm, I didn't know about this, but it seems interesting, I'll check it out" and then they purchase. So from an advertiser's standpoint looking at a spreadsheet of data they see "this audience segment had a conversion rate of X and an ROI of Y" and they keep doing it if it is profitable because that is what they are optimizing for. I actually enjoyed Jacques piece, and I do think that there is some very questionable stuff going on in the ad space. The example of a random app tracking and selling data totally unrelated to said app is a great example. Companies are finding that they can monetize their data without visibly degrading the user experience by showing ads, and still get paid on a CPM rate for it, so expect to see more of that. At the end of the day, I say all of this to highlight the fact that often is left out of pieces like this, which is that things are the way they are now because it works. Advertisers wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work, which means consumers are voting with their wallets in large enough numbers to keep fueling this behavior. In Jacques restaurant example, he was put off by the restaurant special promoted on his phone. I'd probably behave the same way because I've developed an aversion to the more invasive aspects of my industry and I'm overly sensitive to it now. But Joe Consumer? They see a relevant deal that will save them money and say "hmm, I like what they are offering, and it is a fair price, I guess that just made my decision easier" and they go eat at the restaurant. So the restaurant sees that of all the Jacques that see the ad and keep walking, for the pittance they pay they get enough Joe's in the door to make it profitable, and they keep doing it. The positive feedback loop created by more targeting leading to higher profits means that it is working and we'll see more of it until the feedback loop is broken. Ad blockers are one avenue towards attempting to break it, and legislation is another. The question is whether pulling on those two levers will be enough to reduce the efficacy of the feedback loop to the point where advertisers stop doing this. And a final note to those who might respond to my post. Please note that I'm not trying to paint an overly rosy picture of what advertising does or in any way trying to defend some overreaching aspects of it. I think people should own their data and be entitled to controlling how it is used. That is not the reality of the world we live in though, and so I'm simply making observations about how it impacts the various parties involved beyond just the protagonist of Jacques' story. I think there are more "clean" ways of doing advertising, that rely on a strong creative message, etc. Or viral ads that get shared because they are creating great content. But at the end of the day the media person's job is to take that ad/content and get it in front of the audience they are targeting.