6 ms·

What this person mentions is really just the tip of the iceberg. They link credit cards to phones because GPS coordinates and WiFi networks nail down your addre

by titzer 5y ago

What this person mentions is really just the tip of the iceberg. They link credit cards to phones because GPS coordinates and WiFi networks nail down your address, which they cross-reference with the billing address of credit cards. They know who are you sleeping with, or if you aren't sleeping with anyone. They know your age and all the insecurities you have about your body, not to mention your health problems and every embarrassing fact about you. They know where you've been, where you're planning on going, and your political preferences. They know if you've donated to political parties, attended political rallies, if you voted, where, and when. And they know all your friends. And we just let them do this. As tech people, we built this. And all the along the way we told ourselves it was fine, because it was very lucrative for the entire ad tech/fintech/startup ecosystem, and us personally.

CyberRabbi 5y ago
> And we just let them do this. And by “we” I hope you mean consumers as much as the people who built this. Some may say this is a systemic problem and I don’t necessarily disagree with that but I think that narrative obscures the fact that the average person literally does not care. Maybe privacy-conscious tech nerds on the internet care but normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. The public is well-aware of the lack of privacy of these devices yet their behavior does not change. If you are a tech person who cares about your privacy then buy a Linux phone. Apple and google and government are not going to change this when there is no significant public will to change this.
- titzer 5y ago
  > but normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. These platforms literally do everything possible to obscure what you are actually agreeing to. Google, for instance, has lawyers sign off on privacy design docs that set the verbiage on dialogs that users agree to. The lawyers are there to make sure it is as vague and as broad possible while being up to a hair's breadth of what is legally defensible. Consumers are deliberately kept in the dark. One might say they are naive and trusting. But most would absolutely disapprove if they sat at the "God console" and saw other people's lives the way the vast towers of computing power and machine learning can. It's like a wireframe view of an ant farm, but with people.
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    > But most would absolutely disapprove if they sat at the "God console" and saw other people's lives the way the vast towers of computing power and machine learning can. Sure maybe they would disapprove but they would probably still use their phones even after being horrified by the god console. The fact is that the average person is already aware their phone is spying on them without being told by the manufacturer yet they still use their phones. On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs abstract privacy concerns. For example, a troubling amount of people were seriously paranoid about 5G somehow causing them harm. What percentage of that group do you think will continue to use their 5G phone? I would guess upward of 80%
    - titzer 5y ago
      > What percentage of that group do you think will continue to use their 5G phone? I would guess upward of 80% I know. But people still smoke even after seeing pictures of cancer-ridden lungs. We're all little crack addicts.
      - CyberRabbi 5y ago
        > But people still smoke even after seeing pictures of cancer-ridden lungs. Great point all around. Similar to the smoking problem, I think if we want behavior around privacy to change it will require large amounts of funding and public campaigns. I think it’s unlikely there will be a grassroots effort.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      > On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs abstract privacy concerns. True. Most have been fed the "if you have nothing to hide..." bullshit for too long, so they now think only criminals must have something to hide, which is nonsense, and paves the way to potentially horrific development if taken to the letter.
  - shaftway 5y ago
    I get that it feels like that. I've been on the other side of these discussions and it's painful there too. I've spent hours wordsmithing some text in a dialog that explains exactly what the problem is to people, then watched people blow through the dialog and get angry when they couldn't figure out what's wrong. I think it's important to understand what you're agreeing to in simple, plain terms that aren't a mile long. But the legal system is so tortured with tort cases that you can't have a simple agreement like that and be protected from lawsuits where people are just trying to make a buck off you.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. I think a lot of people care _but have no choice in the matter._
prox 5y ago
From the outset people have enjoyed free services, and free means and ment “paid for by advertisers”, facilitated by Big Tech. We created an economic system that is at times both parasitic and/or symbiotic in nature. We enjoy the free, we enjoy the bargain bin prices of Amazon shopping, we enjoy being nurtured by marketing moguls who will tell us what will Solve All Our Problems.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  As someone who never sees ads on my phone or online, here is how: Ad blocker (uBlock Origin) in the browser. No social media apps on the phone. No other "free" apps on the phone. Location services always disabled unless I'm actively using Maps navigation. Bluetooth always disabled. I pay for YouTube Premium to not see ads. If there is another app that I find useful, I pay for it to not see ads.
  - erhk 5y ago
    Maybe you should pay for a navigation app too
    - rusk 5y ago
      They paid for their phone which comes with Navigation as a feature. Debatable perhaps.
      - Guest42 5y ago
        I’d opt for a clear contractual agreement that could be entered and exited, or a paid alternative priced fairly. Same with the phone, one shouldn’t pay for a phone in cash (or payment plan) and continue to pay indefinitely with personal data. It could be worked out contractually that way a person knows what they are buying at time of purchase.
        nicbou 5y ago
        Don't apps end up using Google Play services anyway?
intricatedetail 5y ago
This is something a modern Hitler would love to have access to. You never know who will be in charge tomorrow and whether you'll make the list of people to go to camp or get a special "vaccine"
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I mean not even the next despot; the people in charge today love to have access to this (and they do).
  - jka 5y ago
    That sounds optimistic, to be honest. I find it difficult to trust that strictly only "people in charge" have access to the datastores and profiles these various adtech companies manage. Is there already an underground market for person-to-person sale of information about individuals for relationship-tailoring purposes, or could there be soon? And would those become commonplace or even socially accepted if so? Those are the kinds of question I have about the territory we're getting into, and I wonder what the implications would be for society.
bradlys 5y ago
You’d think that if they knew so much then they’d know to stop serving me ads for services I’ll literally never use. I am very surprised at how bad the ads I get are and how much they miss the mark and are a complete waste of money. I get that for some people advertisers seem omniscient but man do they miss the mark with me. Getting Trump ads (I may as well carry a bash the fash bat) and advertisements for services that I am completely against. It’s like, “how fucking dumb is the algorithm? Do they really think I want to work in an Amazon warehouse when I make $400K/yr??”
- chihuahua 5y ago
  I have the same experience. The only thing Facebook has figured out about me is that I like bicycling (because I post about nothing but bicycling on Facebook.) Other than that, their ads are complete nonsense.
- nraynaud 5y ago
  They know everything but they are completely unable to use it for advertisement. The only time I had a relevant ad was retargetting (which is also hit or miss since you might have made your purchase). The only people who know how to use it efficiently are the police when they want to arrest people who organize or participate in demonstrations.
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    > They know everything but they are completely unable to use it for advertisement. You're almost right. The data they collect wasn't ever intended to be used for advertising purposes. They do it because they seek to pivot from adtech to the much, much more lucrative and entrenched govtech in the future.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  If an untargeted Trump ad impression costs $.02, targeting is worth no more than $.01 to the ad buyer. Meanwhile, the information might be worth $.10 to the local DNC or $5 to a prospective employer. The information would need to be laundered for the latter use case, but that's quite doable and economically so. One use and price point doesn't necessarily preclude the other but discriminatory pricing is easy to arbitrage in the information market, so in practice it makes sense to ditch the low value applications in order to fully extract revenue from the high value applications. I wish bad ad targeting meant that this wasn't happening, but wishful thinking doesn't make it so :/
nickysielicki 5y ago
Surprised to see you mention fintech. I think you should leave them out of it — all this dystopian shit is made by the evil “don’t be evil” people. It’s ironic. When I was 18 and I heard about people doing HFT I thought it was unethical, siphoning money from Joe Shmoe to evil rich people. The older I get, the more I realize Facebook and Google are the truly evil choice — it’s the people in HFT that can have a clear conscience.
- sfblah 5y ago
  Bingo, and very well put. I have several friends who work at Facebook. I won’t, and this is why. I honestly think part of the reason Facebook pays such a premium for engineers is the ick factor.
- DeltaCoast 5y ago
  While I agree with you on FB and Google. Fintech isn't just trading. Financial data is tracked and sold by these financial tech / services companies just like browsing activity. Even the "privacy first" companies like Plaid, who doesn't sell the data, would have given up their data to Visa had the acquisition gone through. All these companies are incentivized to track everything they can.
- px43 5y ago
  IMO Google and Facebook have their hands remarkably clean relative to the rest of the Adtech industry. I've heard some crazy shit about how much money comes from adtech to fund blackhat data brokers. Adtech buys hacked databases on underground markets, but more than that they fund supply chain attacks to get highly intrusive adware into popular apps. They frequently buy up applications that have a wide install base on phones and browser extensions, and then on the next update, request maximum privileges and use it to loot as much as they can from user systems. It's a symbiotic relationship. Shady ad networks are often used by criminals for narrowly targeted attacks (advertise this crafted phishing site to women aged 25-35 in the greater Dallas Fort Worth area who are recently married). Those criminals use that access to obtain more private data which they sell to adtech companies. It's a pretty gross business. In other news, HFT isn't bad because it's HFT, it's bad because order matching services have a bunch of shady, undocumented order types that are designed to allow HFT firms to specifically extract winnings from retail investors. They are absolutely economic parasites, and no one has any incentive to stop them. https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393351599 https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393... https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp/0307887189 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp...
swiley 5y ago
I must be doing something right because I keep getting ads for tampons in languages I don't speak.
- Tepix 5y ago
  They may be doing this to keep you from freaking out (as mentioned in the Google documents)
  - ranguna 5y ago
    As long as they only show me unrelated ads, I don't care of they do it on purpose.
belter 5y ago
Some of the "tech people" collecting their annual FAANG bonus would be incredibly upset if the 24x7 surveillance they helped build, would suddenly made personal. Most interesting statement I have seen on this is "Surveillance Camera Man": https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg Nobody gets upset with the 24x7 web browsing, video gait tracking, street video and audio recording, face-rec, FBI planes recording 24x7 for post analysis of possible crimes, etc...etc...As long as they do not see it. Put "just another camera" a few meters and suddenly everybody is a ranging lunatic. PS: Before you are going to criticize the ethics of the "human experiment" above....With comments mentioning privacy, consent an all that. Please make sure you do not work for one of the Silicon Valley companies enabling this and much worst :-)

by titzer 5y ago

CyberRabbi 5y ago

> And we just let them do this. And by “we” I hope you mean consumers as much as the people who built this. Some may say this is a systemic problem and I don’t necessarily disagree with that but I think that narrative obscures the fact that the average person literally does not care. Maybe privacy-conscious tech nerds on the internet care but normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. The public is well-aware of the lack of privacy of these devices yet their behavior does not change. If you are a tech person who cares about your privacy then buy a Linux phone. Apple and google and government are not going to change this when there is no significant public will to change this.

titzer 5y ago
> but normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. These platforms literally do everything possible to obscure what you are actually agreeing to. Google, for instance, has lawyers sign off on privacy design docs that set the verbiage on dialogs that users agree to. The lawyers are there to make sure it is as vague and as broad possible while being up to a hair's breadth of what is legally defensible. Consumers are deliberately kept in the dark. One might say they are naive and trusting. But most would absolutely disapprove if they sat at the "God console" and saw other people's lives the way the vast towers of computing power and machine learning can. It's like a wireframe view of an ant farm, but with people.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  > But most would absolutely disapprove if they sat at the "God console" and saw other people's lives the way the vast towers of computing power and machine learning can. Sure maybe they would disapprove but they would probably still use their phones even after being horrified by the god console. The fact is that the average person is already aware their phone is spying on them without being told by the manufacturer yet they still use their phones. On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs abstract privacy concerns. For example, a troubling amount of people were seriously paranoid about 5G somehow causing them harm. What percentage of that group do you think will continue to use their 5G phone? I would guess upward of 80%
  - titzer 5y ago
    > What percentage of that group do you think will continue to use their 5G phone? I would guess upward of 80% I know. But people still smoke even after seeing pictures of cancer-ridden lungs. We're all little crack addicts.
    - CyberRabbi 5y ago
      > But people still smoke even after seeing pictures of cancer-ridden lungs. Great point all around. Similar to the smoking problem, I think if we want behavior around privacy to change it will require large amounts of funding and public campaigns. I think it’s unlikely there will be a grassroots effort.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    > On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs abstract privacy concerns. True. Most have been fed the "if you have nothing to hide..." bullshit for too long, so they now think only criminals must have something to hide, which is nonsense, and paves the way to potentially horrific development if taken to the letter.
- shaftway 5y ago
  I get that it feels like that. I've been on the other side of these discussions and it's painful there too. I've spent hours wordsmithing some text in a dialog that explains exactly what the problem is to people, then watched people blow through the dialog and get angry when they couldn't figure out what's wrong. I think it's important to understand what you're agreeing to in simple, plain terms that aren't a mile long. But the legal system is so tortured with tort cases that you can't have a simple agreement like that and be protected from lawsuits where people are just trying to make a buck off you.
TomSwirly 5y ago
> normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. I think a lot of people care _but have no choice in the matter._

prox 5y ago

From the outset people have enjoyed free services, and free means and ment “paid for by advertisers”, facilitated by Big Tech. We created an economic system that is at times both parasitic and/or symbiotic in nature. We enjoy the free, we enjoy the bargain bin prices of Amazon shopping, we enjoy being nurtured by marketing moguls who will tell us what will Solve All Our Problems.

throwawayboise 5y ago
As someone who never sees ads on my phone or online, here is how: Ad blocker (uBlock Origin) in the browser. No social media apps on the phone. No other "free" apps on the phone. Location services always disabled unless I'm actively using Maps navigation. Bluetooth always disabled. I pay for YouTube Premium to not see ads. If there is another app that I find useful, I pay for it to not see ads.
- erhk 5y ago
  Maybe you should pay for a navigation app too
  - rusk 5y ago
    They paid for their phone which comes with Navigation as a feature. Debatable perhaps.
    - Guest42 5y ago
      I’d opt for a clear contractual agreement that could be entered and exited, or a paid alternative priced fairly. Same with the phone, one shouldn’t pay for a phone in cash (or payment plan) and continue to pay indefinitely with personal data. It could be worked out contractually that way a person knows what they are buying at time of purchase.
      - nicbou 5y ago
        Don't apps end up using Google Play services anyway?

intricatedetail 5y ago

This is something a modern Hitler would love to have access to. You never know who will be in charge tomorrow and whether you'll make the list of people to go to camp or get a special "vaccine"

throwawayboise 5y ago
I mean not even the next despot; the people in charge today love to have access to this (and they do).
- jka 5y ago
  That sounds optimistic, to be honest. I find it difficult to trust that strictly only "people in charge" have access to the datastores and profiles these various adtech companies manage. Is there already an underground market for person-to-person sale of information about individuals for relationship-tailoring purposes, or could there be soon? And would those become commonplace or even socially accepted if so? Those are the kinds of question I have about the territory we're getting into, and I wonder what the implications would be for society.

bradlys 5y ago

You’d think that if they knew so much then they’d know to stop serving me ads for services I’ll literally never use. I am very surprised at how bad the ads I get are and how much they miss the mark and are a complete waste of money. I get that for some people advertisers seem omniscient but man do they miss the mark with me. Getting Trump ads (I may as well carry a bash the fash bat) and advertisements for services that I am completely against. It’s like, “how fucking dumb is the algorithm? Do they really think I want to work in an Amazon warehouse when I make $400K/yr??”

chihuahua 5y ago
I have the same experience. The only thing Facebook has figured out about me is that I like bicycling (because I post about nothing but bicycling on Facebook.) Other than that, their ads are complete nonsense.
nraynaud 5y ago
They know everything but they are completely unable to use it for advertisement. The only time I had a relevant ad was retargetting (which is also hit or miss since you might have made your purchase). The only people who know how to use it efficiently are the police when they want to arrest people who organize or participate in demonstrations.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  > They know everything but they are completely unable to use it for advertisement. You're almost right. The data they collect wasn't ever intended to be used for advertising purposes. They do it because they seek to pivot from adtech to the much, much more lucrative and entrenched govtech in the future.
jjoonathan 5y ago
If an untargeted Trump ad impression costs $.02, targeting is worth no more than $.01 to the ad buyer. Meanwhile, the information might be worth $.10 to the local DNC or $5 to a prospective employer. The information would need to be laundered for the latter use case, but that's quite doable and economically so. One use and price point doesn't necessarily preclude the other but discriminatory pricing is easy to arbitrage in the information market, so in practice it makes sense to ditch the low value applications in order to fully extract revenue from the high value applications. I wish bad ad targeting meant that this wasn't happening, but wishful thinking doesn't make it so :/

nickysielicki 5y ago

Surprised to see you mention fintech. I think you should leave them out of it — all this dystopian shit is made by the evil “don’t be evil” people. It’s ironic. When I was 18 and I heard about people doing HFT I thought it was unethical, siphoning money from Joe Shmoe to evil rich people. The older I get, the more I realize Facebook and Google are the truly evil choice — it’s the people in HFT that can have a clear conscience.

sfblah 5y ago
Bingo, and very well put. I have several friends who work at Facebook. I won’t, and this is why. I honestly think part of the reason Facebook pays such a premium for engineers is the ick factor.
DeltaCoast 5y ago
While I agree with you on FB and Google. Fintech isn't just trading. Financial data is tracked and sold by these financial tech / services companies just like browsing activity. Even the "privacy first" companies like Plaid, who doesn't sell the data, would have given up their data to Visa had the acquisition gone through. All these companies are incentivized to track everything they can.
px43 5y ago
IMO Google and Facebook have their hands remarkably clean relative to the rest of the Adtech industry. I've heard some crazy shit about how much money comes from adtech to fund blackhat data brokers. Adtech buys hacked databases on underground markets, but more than that they fund supply chain attacks to get highly intrusive adware into popular apps. They frequently buy up applications that have a wide install base on phones and browser extensions, and then on the next update, request maximum privileges and use it to loot as much as they can from user systems. It's a symbiotic relationship. Shady ad networks are often used by criminals for narrowly targeted attacks (advertise this crafted phishing site to women aged 25-35 in the greater Dallas Fort Worth area who are recently married). Those criminals use that access to obtain more private data which they sell to adtech companies. It's a pretty gross business. In other news, HFT isn't bad because it's HFT, it's bad because order matching services have a bunch of shady, undocumented order types that are designed to allow HFT firms to specifically extract winnings from retail investors. They are absolutely economic parasites, and no one has any incentive to stop them. https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393351599 https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393... https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp/0307887189 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp...

swiley 5y ago

I must be doing something right because I keep getting ads for tampons in languages I don't speak.

Tepix 5y ago
They may be doing this to keep you from freaking out (as mentioned in the Google documents)
- ranguna 5y ago
  As long as they only show me unrelated ads, I don't care of they do it on purpose.

belter 5y ago

Some of the "tech people" collecting their annual FAANG bonus would be incredibly upset if the 24x7 surveillance they helped build, would suddenly made personal. Most interesting statement I have seen on this is "Surveillance Camera Man": https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg Nobody gets upset with the 24x7 web browsing, video gait tracking, street video and audio recording, face-rec, FBI planes recording 24x7 for post analysis of possible crimes, etc...etc...As long as they do not see it. Put "just another camera" a few meters and suddenly everybody is a ranging lunatic. PS: Before you are going to criticize the ethics of the "human experiment" above....With comments mentioning privacy, consent an all that. Please make sure you do not work for one of the Silicon Valley companies enabling this and much worst :-)