8 ms·

As anyone who is, or has, worked in ad-tech would tell you, this is pretty _tame_ in terms of the "offline conversion problem." When there are $billions$ of do

As anyone who is, or has, worked in ad-tech would tell you, this is pretty _tame_ in terms of the "offline conversion problem." When there are $billions$ of dollars at stake for this type of information, you can guarantee there will be many companies attacking this problem. Therefore, not to be a pessimist, but if you think that 1) using a fake cell number on Facebook is going to help or that 2) there aren't services like Google doing this already, potentially with just as good match rates as Facebook, or 3) that using Firefox + adblock is all you need, then you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat.

dangerface 7y ago
Working in ad-tech I know these problems are ubiquitous but apart from trying to patch these issues when we notice them in whatever in significant ways we can what else can you do?
- numpad0 7y ago
  Spinning it in a way that doing it becomes a threat to business continuity? If they’re deducted $0.15 from income, paid to you, on spot each time they query that information, or if it adds 0.015% to probability of their stock crashing in that quarter quantifiably, then I’d expect it’ll be gone forever before any of their C-class stands up for some coffee next time. The reality is roughly reverse of that.
  - dangero 7y ago
    Interesting point. Can you imagine how the attitude around facebook would change instantly if they started profit sharing with their users?
    - mokus 7y ago
      Paying facebook’s users for facebook’s spy network isn’t quite the right [dis]incentive though. I don’t use Facebook but they still pay others to spy on me. Those others should have to pay me for the spying they do on me.
    - numpad0 7y ago
      Revenue sharing is not my point. Some platforms do and makes no difference. What I am describing is a destructive change to revenue streams for ad companies. That is as nonsense as reversing direction of couple major rivers and I know obvious open question will be how in the world.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  How about stop spying on people, and only collect data from those who have given informed consent?
snarf21 7y ago
You are so right. People forget that the cell companies know who you are and where you are 100% of the time. They also know every site you visit on their network. Things like this remind me of people using TOR and then signing into Instagram or Facebook. You just destroyed your anonymity. These sites would need to allow for anonymous login structures that almost none do.
- rsync 7y ago
  "You are so right. People forget that the cell companies know who you are and where you are 100% of the time." My mobile phone company has no idea who I am. It was trivially easy to purchase an iphone, at the Apple store, with cash and then purchase a Verizon MVNO SIM from US Mobile (which I prefer over StraightTalk because they allow tethering). Neither Apple nor my MVNO nor Verizon knows who I am. I, personally, am not a customer of any mobile provider. Certainly my mobile provider could find out if they dug deeply enough - specifically, they could (somehow) check the Visa card I use for payment and see the corporation that that Visa card was issued to and then look up the corporate records and then ... they would know that somebody at X Corp is their customer. Possibly me. Remember: neither Visa nor Mastercard verifies purchaser name. Only AMEX does this. You can purchase online with your personal or corp Visa/MC and put in "Mickey Mouse" as the name - it will always work unless they are a very, very rare merchant (usually European) that has put the "Verified by Visa" component into their workflow.
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    Or the could: 1. sample the HSS (HLR in old-money) every night to find which phones are camping in which location areas (LAC)s; 2. this given them a phone → area location for every phone in the country, where area is about 200 cells (a few km²); 3. then they could draw out the call detail_record (CDR) of very outgoing call, SMS, and even data session to get the cell identity; 4. this gets the phone → area mapping down to a few hundred m²; 5. then if they are motivated, they will use the location services in the Mobile Application Part (MAP) to silently move every unknown phone into dedicated mode and repeatedly determine its location to within 10m - 50m; 6. if the phone has control plane, GPS, they just ask it that. Many, many phones do; 7. this information is collected all the time and passed to in-house and 'external' GIS teams to cross-reference against all sorts of wonderful data; 8. they know who you are. The good news is they don't care. They just want you to spend more. ARPU is everything. Source: I built this stuff for a living.
londons_explore 7y ago
> you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat. True, but the ad industry isn't like a boat. They don't want to track everything or build a complete profile about everyone. They just want to track most things and build a fairly complete profile about most people. That means every privacy step you make has some incremental gains. Just because a private detective could use the collected data to build a complete profile of you, doesn't mean the ad company will - they'll collect data from the easiest sources, and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people.
- choward 7y ago
  > They don't want to track everything or build a complete profile about everyone Citation needed
  - ssivark 7y ago
    In the sense that they will only put in a finite amount of effort (compatible with profitability), and take everything they can get. Over years, the amount of effort or technological means might increase, but it’s not like they operate with the singular focus of collecting everything about everyone.
    - compiler-guy 7y ago
      Right. They don’t care about having data about “you” in particular, they care about having enough data about enough people to sell ads effectively. Marketing to you doesn’t make them money. Marketing to many, many people roughly like you makes them money. You yourself are only a tiny and statistically irrelevant piece.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        Right up until the exact moment you aren't.
12xo 7y ago
False flags and information is the only way to deal with this stuff... If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminine hygiene products and 3 wheel wheel barrels, you're pretty worthless as a consumer. The future of ad block is disinformation. Makes the entire ecosystem worthless
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" novel has the Friends of Privacy who spew falsehoods into the Network so as to disrupt attempts to track everybody all the time. My first "Agent" contribution when I worked as a researcher was just code which listened in to other conversations and then lied about stuff. If another agent said "X = 4" my agent would state "X is not 4" just to disrupt things. I suspect it's much harder to do this successfully in real life than it is in a novel where it's just an excuse as to why otherwise resourceful intelligence agencies don't know who the central character Rabbit is (Vinge says he's not sure either, to me it seems obvious Rabbit is an AI, surely the whole point of all Vinge novels is that there's a Singularitarian Apocalypse, and in Rainbows End the humans think they've averted that apocalypse but actually the thing that just saved them is the Apocalypse and they ought to be terrified)
- msla 7y ago
  AdNauseam is here: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It's on in the Firefox extensions site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ But not on the Google Chrome site: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_...
  - 12xo 7y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. Looks very interesting but with the fraud filtering in place for most ads, I wonder how effective this can be in the long run. Seems as if it'd be filtered out but maybe, that's the point???
    - 7y ago
anovikov 7y ago
If i don't have a profile on Facebook or on any social network at all, how much does it help?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  It helps some, but not enough. Some of these social networks (such as Facebook) will develop a profile on you whether or not you have an account with them.
dehrmann 7y ago
If you have location history enabled in Google Maps, they tie it to ad impressions and offline credit card transactions they buy from Visa and friends.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
AlexCoventry 7y ago
To escape the marketing-surveillance bear, I just have to run faster than most other people.
hammock 7y ago
You're probably not wrong and can you provide some specifics?

dangerface 7y ago

Working in ad-tech I know these problems are ubiquitous but apart from trying to patch these issues when we notice them in whatever in significant ways we can what else can you do?

numpad0 7y ago
Spinning it in a way that doing it becomes a threat to business continuity? If they’re deducted $0.15 from income, paid to you, on spot each time they query that information, or if it adds 0.015% to probability of their stock crashing in that quarter quantifiably, then I’d expect it’ll be gone forever before any of their C-class stands up for some coffee next time. The reality is roughly reverse of that.
- dangero 7y ago
  Interesting point. Can you imagine how the attitude around facebook would change instantly if they started profit sharing with their users?
  - mokus 7y ago
    Paying facebook’s users for facebook’s spy network isn’t quite the right [dis]incentive though. I don’t use Facebook but they still pay others to spy on me. Those others should have to pay me for the spying they do on me.
  - numpad0 7y ago
    Revenue sharing is not my point. Some platforms do and makes no difference. What I am describing is a destructive change to revenue streams for ad companies. That is as nonsense as reversing direction of couple major rivers and I know obvious open question will be how in the world.
JohnFen 7y ago
How about stop spying on people, and only collect data from those who have given informed consent?

snarf21 7y ago

You are so right. People forget that the cell companies know who you are and where you are 100% of the time. They also know every site you visit on their network. Things like this remind me of people using TOR and then signing into Instagram or Facebook. You just destroyed your anonymity. These sites would need to allow for anonymous login structures that almost none do.

rsync 7y ago
"You are so right. People forget that the cell companies know who you are and where you are 100% of the time." My mobile phone company has no idea who I am. It was trivially easy to purchase an iphone, at the Apple store, with cash and then purchase a Verizon MVNO SIM from US Mobile (which I prefer over StraightTalk because they allow tethering). Neither Apple nor my MVNO nor Verizon knows who I am. I, personally, am not a customer of any mobile provider. Certainly my mobile provider could find out if they dug deeply enough - specifically, they could (somehow) check the Visa card I use for payment and see the corporation that that Visa card was issued to and then look up the corporate records and then ... they would know that somebody at X Corp is their customer. Possibly me. Remember: neither Visa nor Mastercard verifies purchaser name. Only AMEX does this. You can purchase online with your personal or corp Visa/MC and put in "Mickey Mouse" as the name - it will always work unless they are a very, very rare merchant (usually European) that has put the "Verified by Visa" component into their workflow.
- pinkfoot 7y ago
  Or the could: 1. sample the HSS (HLR in old-money) every night to find which phones are camping in which location areas (LAC)s; 2. this given them a phone → area location for every phone in the country, where area is about 200 cells (a few km²); 3. then they could draw out the call detail_record (CDR) of very outgoing call, SMS, and even data session to get the cell identity; 4. this gets the phone → area mapping down to a few hundred m²; 5. then if they are motivated, they will use the location services in the Mobile Application Part (MAP) to silently move every unknown phone into dedicated mode and repeatedly determine its location to within 10m - 50m; 6. if the phone has control plane, GPS, they just ask it that. Many, many phones do; 7. this information is collected all the time and passed to in-house and 'external' GIS teams to cross-reference against all sorts of wonderful data; 8. they know who you are. The good news is they don't care. They just want you to spend more. ARPU is everything. Source: I built this stuff for a living.

londons_explore 7y ago

> you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat. True, but the ad industry isn't like a boat. They don't want to track everything or build a complete profile about everyone. They just want to track most things and build a fairly complete profile about most people. That means every privacy step you make has some incremental gains. Just because a private detective could use the collected data to build a complete profile of you, doesn't mean the ad company will - they'll collect data from the easiest sources, and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people.

choward 7y ago
> They don't want to track everything or build a complete profile about everyone Citation needed
- ssivark 7y ago
  In the sense that they will only put in a finite amount of effort (compatible with profitability), and take everything they can get. Over years, the amount of effort or technological means might increase, but it’s not like they operate with the singular focus of collecting everything about everyone.
  - compiler-guy 7y ago
    Right. They don’t care about having data about “you” in particular, they care about having enough data about enough people to sell ads effectively. Marketing to you doesn’t make them money. Marketing to many, many people roughly like you makes them money. You yourself are only a tiny and statistically irrelevant piece.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Right up until the exact moment you aren't.

12xo 7y ago

False flags and information is the only way to deal with this stuff... If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminine hygiene products and 3 wheel wheel barrels, you're pretty worthless as a consumer. The future of ad block is disinformation. Makes the entire ecosystem worthless

tialaramex 7y ago
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" novel has the Friends of Privacy who spew falsehoods into the Network so as to disrupt attempts to track everybody all the time. My first "Agent" contribution when I worked as a researcher was just code which listened in to other conversations and then lied about stuff. If another agent said "X = 4" my agent would state "X is not 4" just to disrupt things. I suspect it's much harder to do this successfully in real life than it is in a novel where it's just an excuse as to why otherwise resourceful intelligence agencies don't know who the central character Rabbit is (Vinge says he's not sure either, to me it seems obvious Rabbit is an AI, surely the whole point of all Vinge novels is that there's a Singularitarian Apocalypse, and in Rainbows End the humans think they've averted that apocalypse but actually the thing that just saved them is the Apocalypse and they ought to be terrified)
msla 7y ago
AdNauseam is here: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It's on in the Firefox extensions site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ But not on the Google Chrome site: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_...
- 12xo 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. Looks very interesting but with the fraud filtering in place for most ads, I wonder how effective this can be in the long run. Seems as if it'd be filtered out but maybe, that's the point???
  - 7y ago

anovikov 7y ago

If i don't have a profile on Facebook or on any social network at all, how much does it help?

JohnFen 7y ago
It helps some, but not enough. Some of these social networks (such as Facebook) will develop a profile on you whether or not you have an account with them.

dehrmann 7y ago

If you have location history enabled in Google Maps, they tie it to ad impressions and offline credit card transactions they buy from Visa and friends.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

AlexCoventry 7y ago

To escape the marketing-surveillance bear, I just have to run faster than most other people.

hammock 7y ago

You're probably not wrong and can you provide some specifics?