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> and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people. I strongly disagree, and with all respect, this i

> and if you make it too hard for them to get data about you, they'll simply collect data about other people. I strongly disagree, and with all respect, this is a naive view. This might be true when you're looking at the mapping of individual company to individual person (ex: "You to Facebook" or "You to Google.") But the ecosystem approach to building a profile on you is more comprehensive than you think. Example: you might get very very good at removing your phone and TV/Movie interests from Facebook, or never having it on there to begin with. But then Media Conglomerate X owns a cell/wireless provider, internet provider, and hell maybe even a cable company. There's a high probability that you pay for >= 1 service from this company, that can be matched back to your Google profile and/or Facebook profile - via a DMP (data management platform) or something similar. Oh and remember when you used your real phone number to make a reservation at a restaurant? AND they needed a credit card on file, just in case you don't show up? Well those are uploaded and grouped in the same data pools. And then when enough stores / restaurants / ecommerce sites pool this information, they can build a pretty reasonable shopping profile for you, make (very good) estimates on your demographics, etc. Almost like it's crowd-sourced! Therefore the "you" that is supposedly a "small, statistically irrelevant piece" is actually part of a group that has an ecosystem of companies and DMPs pooling data to make that group smaller and smaller.

thaumaturgy 7y ago
Okay, I've generally wavered on this between "assume the online advertising sector is nefarious and evil and perfectly competent" to "assume the standard level of bureaucratic incompetence". Your comments here are moving the needle back towards the former. So what in your opinion can people do, that are reasonable, actionable steps to take, to avoid being an unwilling part of this ecosystem?
- jgust 7y ago
  Destroy your cell phone, delete your internet accounts, and only use cash.
- soared 7y ago
  You have to be a part of the ecosystem. If you need any connectivity (internet or phone), you really have no choice. Unless you buy prepay cell phones with cash, change the number every few months, only use public WiFi, wipe your computer, change browsing habits, etc. Even if you Adblock and never give away personal info, like op said, your cable, bank, insurance, dmv, internet, and phone provider will still collect and sell your data.
  - thaumaturgy 7y ago
    Your comment and the sibling comment are both saying this is an all-or-nothing situation with no degrees of variation at all. That flies in the face of pretty much all other data science, so I find it hard to believe.
    - soared 7y ago
      I mean you can have some impact, but at the end of the day the variables you control are relatively minor in the grand scheme. For example, uBlock will prevent your browsing habits from being used.. but browsing habits aren't really a great signal anymore. I only ever used audiences that are based on strong signals like purchases, location visits, verified demographics, etc.
    - nl 7y ago
      What's your goal exactly? Yes you can make their ad targetting somewhat less accurate in some circumstances.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > You have to be a part of the ecosystem. If you need any connectivity (internet or phone), you really have no choice. Which is why we need really tough legislation to put a stop to this abuse. The GDPR and CCPA are good starts, but both of those are much too weak. Here's hoping that such legislation will get better, and more pervasive, over time.
tjoff 7y ago
And then, they throw away all that information and give you targeted ads that are so bad that you couldn't make a worse job if your life depended on it. I guess it is a mixed blessing.
- soared 7y ago
  They use all of that info to target you, limit the number of times you’ve seen an ad, and stop sending you ads after you buy the product. Obviously it’s a really hard problem though, because the above list doesn’t always work as intended.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    It seems to work more like after you research and buy a lawn mower, they conclude that you are really, really interested in lawn mowers from then on.
    - soared 7y ago
      Yeah that happens often. I ran these campaigns for two years - you effectively get 200 dials, knobs, and levers to pull all making minor changes to an incredibly complicated adtech ecosystem. My first year I ran 80 of these campaigns, and could spend <20 minutes a week on each. Missing something like “exclude recent purchasers” was easy to forget, but easier to not even have time to set up. (It might take 10-30 minutes to set that up)
      - code_duck 7y ago
        I've noticed a lot of Instagram ads where the advertisers seemed to ignore a regional target, or Instagram does. I get ads for restaurants all over the country, which makes no sense for the advertiser. I'm not about to go eat at some Mexican restaurant 2000 miles away from me in a suburb.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      This is because of the vastly different amounts of work involved on either end. Knowing you browsed a product is as simple as firing a tracking image on the product page from the adtech platform. Knowing you actually bought it means having a connection from the ecommerce system back to your email then back to the id that used used in the adtech and then setup as an exclusion filter in all of the campaigns. It's also usually not worth it since conversions are low and ads are cheap so better to keep advertising and get net new sales then worry about the people who already bought seeing the same ad.
signal11 7y ago
> you might get very very good at removing your phone and TV/Movie interests from Facebook Also, your Smart TV may simply be spying on you and sending that data back to the manufacturer[1] either by sending a hash of portions of your screen, or in Samsung's case, straight-up sending screenshots. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930
hooande 7y ago
This is completely unreasonable. There is no network for uploading and matching customer phone numbers across businesses. Who owns this company, in your mind? They must have tens of thousands of customers and be making billions in revenue to have the kind of scale and reach you're describing. It generally takes years for a big company to completely ingest the data of a company that they acquire, and even then everything is siloed in 20 different ways. People only wish that company X buying company Y meant that the two merged all of their databases synergistically. The world definitely does not work this way
- soared 7y ago
  Liveramp. You literally upload any offline data (phone numbers, names, address, whatever you have) and they match it to online profiles. They take the data you give them and use it in their cross-device graph, which is the exact thing you said doesn’t exist. Any business can go license or use that cross device graph in a variety of ways. $RAMP, 2.2B market cap. Same service is provided by oracle with their cdp and dmp, and a few other companies. If you want to do more research the terms to look for are identity graph, cross device graph, offline matching, and other variants of those. Fb, google, LinkedIn, etc all offer some version of this in their walled garden. In the blog post they talk more about offline conversions, but it’s the same idea.
  - hooande 7y ago
    There are a lot of companies in the cross-device graph space. As I said, they do not have nearly the level of integration described in the great-grand parent comment. If I'm wrong, sign up with Liveramp and use my phone number to tell me what restaurants I've booked reservations at in the last month. Is that how it works?
    - soared 7y ago
      So yeah the restaurant or restaurant group doesn't have that great of a profile, it is built by companies like liveramp who get data from tens of thousands of sources and pool it into their own graph + audience data. Then they license it back out to those same companies. FB/Google and Oracle (crosswise) probably have the best identity graphs and are on par with what the original comment was describing. (I used to work at oracle on their audience products) Liveramp is b2b and definitely won't support anything you want to do with them, but there are some comically bad tools (haven't been updated and are purposefully inaccurate) that let you check what data pools you're currently in. https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry

thaumaturgy 7y ago

Okay, I've generally wavered on this between "assume the online advertising sector is nefarious and evil and perfectly competent" to "assume the standard level of bureaucratic incompetence". Your comments here are moving the needle back towards the former. So what in your opinion can people do, that are reasonable, actionable steps to take, to avoid being an unwilling part of this ecosystem?

jgust 7y ago
Destroy your cell phone, delete your internet accounts, and only use cash.
soared 7y ago
You have to be a part of the ecosystem. If you need any connectivity (internet or phone), you really have no choice. Unless you buy prepay cell phones with cash, change the number every few months, only use public WiFi, wipe your computer, change browsing habits, etc. Even if you Adblock and never give away personal info, like op said, your cable, bank, insurance, dmv, internet, and phone provider will still collect and sell your data.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  Your comment and the sibling comment are both saying this is an all-or-nothing situation with no degrees of variation at all. That flies in the face of pretty much all other data science, so I find it hard to believe.
  - soared 7y ago
    I mean you can have some impact, but at the end of the day the variables you control are relatively minor in the grand scheme. For example, uBlock will prevent your browsing habits from being used.. but browsing habits aren't really a great signal anymore. I only ever used audiences that are based on strong signals like purchases, location visits, verified demographics, etc.
  - nl 7y ago
    What's your goal exactly? Yes you can make their ad targetting somewhat less accurate in some circumstances.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > You have to be a part of the ecosystem. If you need any connectivity (internet or phone), you really have no choice. Which is why we need really tough legislation to put a stop to this abuse. The GDPR and CCPA are good starts, but both of those are much too weak. Here's hoping that such legislation will get better, and more pervasive, over time.

tjoff 7y ago

And then, they throw away all that information and give you targeted ads that are so bad that you couldn't make a worse job if your life depended on it. I guess it is a mixed blessing.

soared 7y ago
They use all of that info to target you, limit the number of times you’ve seen an ad, and stop sending you ads after you buy the product. Obviously it’s a really hard problem though, because the above list doesn’t always work as intended.
- code_duck 7y ago
  It seems to work more like after you research and buy a lawn mower, they conclude that you are really, really interested in lawn mowers from then on.
  - soared 7y ago
    Yeah that happens often. I ran these campaigns for two years - you effectively get 200 dials, knobs, and levers to pull all making minor changes to an incredibly complicated adtech ecosystem. My first year I ran 80 of these campaigns, and could spend <20 minutes a week on each. Missing something like “exclude recent purchasers” was easy to forget, but easier to not even have time to set up. (It might take 10-30 minutes to set that up)
    - code_duck 7y ago
      I've noticed a lot of Instagram ads where the advertisers seemed to ignore a regional target, or Instagram does. I get ads for restaurants all over the country, which makes no sense for the advertiser. I'm not about to go eat at some Mexican restaurant 2000 miles away from me in a suburb.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    This is because of the vastly different amounts of work involved on either end. Knowing you browsed a product is as simple as firing a tracking image on the product page from the adtech platform. Knowing you actually bought it means having a connection from the ecommerce system back to your email then back to the id that used used in the adtech and then setup as an exclusion filter in all of the campaigns. It's also usually not worth it since conversions are low and ads are cheap so better to keep advertising and get net new sales then worry about the people who already bought seeing the same ad.

signal11 7y ago

> you might get very very good at removing your phone and TV/Movie interests from Facebook Also, your Smart TV may simply be spying on you and sending that data back to the manufacturer[1] either by sending a hash of portions of your screen, or in Samsung's case, straight-up sending screenshots. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930

hooande 7y ago

This is completely unreasonable. There is no network for uploading and matching customer phone numbers across businesses. Who owns this company, in your mind? They must have tens of thousands of customers and be making billions in revenue to have the kind of scale and reach you're describing. It generally takes years for a big company to completely ingest the data of a company that they acquire, and even then everything is siloed in 20 different ways. People only wish that company X buying company Y meant that the two merged all of their databases synergistically. The world definitely does not work this way

soared 7y ago
Liveramp. You literally upload any offline data (phone numbers, names, address, whatever you have) and they match it to online profiles. They take the data you give them and use it in their cross-device graph, which is the exact thing you said doesn’t exist. Any business can go license or use that cross device graph in a variety of ways. $RAMP, 2.2B market cap. Same service is provided by oracle with their cdp and dmp, and a few other companies. If you want to do more research the terms to look for are identity graph, cross device graph, offline matching, and other variants of those. Fb, google, LinkedIn, etc all offer some version of this in their walled garden. In the blog post they talk more about offline conversions, but it’s the same idea.
- hooande 7y ago
  There are a lot of companies in the cross-device graph space. As I said, they do not have nearly the level of integration described in the great-grand parent comment. If I'm wrong, sign up with Liveramp and use my phone number to tell me what restaurants I've booked reservations at in the last month. Is that how it works?
  - soared 7y ago
    So yeah the restaurant or restaurant group doesn't have that great of a profile, it is built by companies like liveramp who get data from tens of thousands of sources and pool it into their own graph + audience data. Then they license it back out to those same companies. FB/Google and Oracle (crosswise) probably have the best identity graphs and are on par with what the original comment was describing. (I used to work at oracle on their audience products) Liveramp is b2b and definitely won't support anything you want to do with them, but there are some comically bad tools (haven't been updated and are purposefully inaccurate) that let you check what data pools you're currently in. https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry