5 ms·
You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole serv
by soared 10y ago
You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole service my roommate's company does is match your customer with data about them from countless other sources.
If you want a peek into a small section of this type of data, go build a facebook ad. You can see all the targeting options. You can upload a list of email and build a "look a like" audience of people who are similar to your customers.
A company called cartalytics will let a brand purchase lists of people who have bought a specific product in the past 6 months and show them ads. Ex. If you've bought a big mac (with a credit or debit card) in the last month, I can show you McDonalds ads.. but they are super expensive.
- confounded 10y agoTangential question: Do you know if it's possible to identify financial institutions which don't sell this kind of data? Credit unions?
- polyomino 10y agoUp until a few years ago, credit card networks had divisions that were trading on transaction data, but they've had to shut those down. So now they sell the anonymized data to prop trading firms and advertisers. I think cash is your best bet.
- confounded 10y agoHah, I actually did a small project on some of this data for one of those companies. Pretty amazing what you can get out of 50 char descriptions at scale. Do you happen to know the law that caused them to stop trading PII? Is it only the networks, as opposed to the issuers who trade information?
- soared 10y agoSmall credit unions would be your best bet, but I'm not aware of any specifics unfortunately.
- rhinojosa 10y agoThe problem is small credit unions still use co-branded cards with Visa/MC, etc who sell your data. I believe AMEX is your best bet for privacy, because you are already paying a premium to them, or good ol' cash money.
- pdkl95 10y ago> match your customer with data about them from countless other sources With so many data sources, it should be easy to find proxies for protected classes (race, sex, etc). Indirect discrimination was (and still is[2]) used to enforce racial segregation ("redlining"[1]). Facebook was recently caught[3] enabling direct discrimination. I wonder if your roommate cares that his company is probably doing the same thing indirectly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [2] https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releases_media_advisories/2015/HUDNo_15-064b https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas... [3] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...
- soared 10y agoWe both discuss how our jobs will step over moral lines on occasion. It is something I don't like, but not something strong enough to make me quit. If I were in charge I wouldn't be supporting some of these types of advertising.
- mathattack 10y agoI think you mean Cardalytics. The amazing thing is that hedge funds trade on aggregate credit card purchase data.
- maglavaitss 10y ago"Everyone is doing it" sounds wrong on so many levels.
- Chronic2h 10y agoGo ahead and take the moral high ground here. No one is stopping you. But you'll be broke as hell if you do (or run out of funding).
- maglavaitss 10y agoAs someone who's been bootstrapping his own startup for the past ... 6 years and refused VC money (not for moral reasons), I have to take it. I still refuse to implement Google Analytics and integrate FB/Dropbox/Google in any of the projects I'm involved with. Moralist? No, I'm just not into feeding the monster.
- dabockster 10y agoGot a link to your startup?
- wheelerwj 10y agomaybe that's not the worst thing.
- confounded 10y agoTotal rubbish. Targeted advertising is not the economy.
- moonshinefe 10y agoFatalism.
- ForrestN 10y agoApple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they do not do this...
- nilved 10y agoThey do.
- Rmilb 10y agoSource?
- spodek 10y agoSource that they don't? I'd presume that they do absent a credible source they don't.
- hueving 10y agoThey don't offer any services that would benefit from it.
- esert 10y agoThey have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/
- username223 10y agoSearch advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.
- esert 10y ago
- leesalminen 10y agoMy first time creating an ad on FB was startling. I didn't know all those targeting options existed. But, they've worked extremely well for my niche SaaS. We currently focus 60% of our ad budget on FB.
- sixothree 10y agoWith it being so rampant, why is it so difficult to discover what people know about you. And what are the barriers to changing this?
- confounded 10y agoRegulation. Consider EFF membership. https://eff.org https://eff.org