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> A decade ago, when I was a senior in high school, “Jimmy,” a jilted ex-patient of my dad’s, began stalking our family. Over a period of months, verbal harassm
by marstomorrow 7y ago
> A decade ago, when I was a senior in high school, “Jimmy,” a jilted ex-patient of my dad’s, began stalking our family. Over a period of months, verbal harassment escalated to threats of violence and we soon found ourselves accompanied by police escorts for the better part of a week
> ....
> In Jimmy’s case, though, I simply cannot fathom how Instagram made this connection, despite quite a bit of legwork on my part to do so. He is not (and has never been) in my contacts, nor, after searching my email accounts, have I ever typed his name or even been forwarded an email about him. The more elaborate explanations I’ve entertained are nakedly conspiratorial, and so I’ve written Jimmy’s case off as a mystery that will remain unsolved, like a ship sunk in deepest waters.
The author described in sufficiently meticulous detail that Jimmy's location and presence felt through verbal harassment etc were frequently in close proximity to the author's entire family. I can think of at least a dozen clearly non-conspiratorial ways that Instagram has made the connection.
I think the author is living in the same bubble that much of the Internet is in: that the tech companies don't care to track us in the 'real world' and that most of it is still done with tracking pixels or smart-advertisements.
Instagram/Facebook openly use location and photographs to identify subjects and track them. This is no secret. If there is any remote possibility of a person having been anywhere near you for the last 10 years it should be assumed Instagram / Facebook already know about it. Any assumption less than that sounds conspiratorial to me ("don't worry nobody cares to watch you" etc).
- mfatica 7y ago> after searching my email accounts here's a possibility right here - google sells a list of potential names a given user searched for, and facebook / instagram use that as a way to try to find connections
- skybrian 7y agoGoogle sells ads (and ad targeting) but I haven't seen any evidence that they sell data. There are lots of less well-known companies that will happily sell you lists, though, cobbled up from who knows where.
- jacquesm 7y ago> but I haven't seen any evidence that they sell data It's worse than that, they give it away. RTB (real time bidding) on advertising works by presenting the bidder with a whole pile of info on the ad slot they are bidding on. So even if you don't bid or you lose the bid you still get all that juicy data.
- skybrian 7y agoInteresting. Do you know a good place to read about the details?
- jacquesm 7y agoOpenRTB specification? https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project/ https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project...
- skybrian 7y agoThere seem to be three kinds of parties here, the advertisers, the exchanges, and the websites. An advertiser places targeted ads with exchanges. The websites send bids, potentially with user info, to the exchanges. I'm finding web pages at Google showing that they run their own ad exchange, and they integrate with other people's ad exchanges. I don't know how to find out if Google makes bids using any exchanges other their own, or whether the information from Google's bids could otherwise leak to advertisers.
- derriz 7y ago> In Jimmy’s case, though, I simply cannot fathom how Instagram made this connection... and so I’ve written Jimmy’s case off as a mystery that will remain unsolved Is it really that mysterious? The connection could have been made in the other direction. For example, Jimmy could have had the author's email address in his contact list and allowed access to his contact list to some web site? Jimmy could have searched for the authors name on Instagram (not sure - I'm not a user) at some point?