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It's worse. Google and friends don't sell your data either. They just assign you to various buckets and then aggregate the information in those buckets to sell

• EduardoBautista 4y ago
  How is this worse? I'd much rather companies do this instead of selling the actual data. In fact, I don't think this is much of a privacy issue at all.
  • aaomidi 4y ago
    It definitely is still a privacy issue. You only need a few data points to fully identify a person. But no it's not as bad as just selling the raw data.
  • pedro2 4y ago
    My point is, unless you are a lawyer, you can't trust anything they write about how they use your data -- they don't speak the same language as us.
    • johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
      The irony is what you wrote is categorically false. Selling user personal data to a third party, which users have no idea how that data will be used, is not better than companies showing users targeted ads. Not everything on earth has to be a hot take.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        > Selling user personal data to a third party, which users have no idea how that data will be used, is not better than companies showing users targeted ads. This isn't what was said. What was being said is that the people who claim that they don't sell your data have such complex ways of still selling your data while being literally truthful that there's no way to confidently evaluate risks no matter what they say. edit: I mean, do you know for certain that a determined attacker can't bulk unmask Google or Facebook users through skillful monitoring of ad auctions and specific ad placements?
        • lesuorac 4y ago
          I think you've missed the fundamental difference. If I purchase your location data I can use that to hire a hitman and whack you at home. If I purchase an ad for everybody that lives in NYC they get to see an ad. --- Regarding if somebody can accumulate ads to derive user data. I mean anything is technically possible but an ad provider doesn't want user data to leak because it lowers the value proposition of their ad exchange
          • abeyer 4y ago
            > Regarding if somebody can accumulate ads to derive user data. I mean anything is technically possible but an ad provider doesn't want user data to leak because it lowers the value proposition of their ad exchange Is that true? Being able to deanonymize targeted individuals or small groups doesn't really cut into a platform business, it's only a concern if you can do it at scale to meaningfully reconstruct their dataset. Sure, they'll work prevent the latter, but does it justify the costs of ensuring the former can't be done? Better targeting sells ads, privacy/security is a cost center.
            • lesuorac 4y ago
              Who is doing the deanomymization? I'm also not sure how you're going to develop a process to deanonymize an individual that can't just be generalized to create large groups. Like just buy a dataset on people in the US and then run your process using all of them and you can make a large group then. There doesn't seem to be much information out there though but there are efforts to prevent the site from learning what ad is being displayed and the ad buyer from learning where and who is watching. I think most of this is just done via the iframe that an ad is displayed within. I would say the ad exchanges could just double dip and serve ads and sell user data if it wasn't an issue but FB did that and ended up with a big hassle from it. So it may be a marketing advantage for Google & Apple to be able to claim they don't sell user data.
• raxxorraxor 4y ago
  They just argue that it is their data and they tend to reinforce that point pretty strongly and pretend they are not lying.