6 ms·

Media companies that also sell personal data

158 points by kjhughes 4y ago

seydor 4y ago
based on their academic services, I wouldn't be too worried because those services are crap. Their academic analytics stuff barely passes the test and is mostly used because nobody wants to make a competitor. Most academic metadata is openly available to anyone who wants to use it, but people know that academia is more about networking, PR, politics etc rather than the exactness of academic analytics. Then elsevier's own websites were pretty crap for the (pre-SciHub) times i used them , sometimes being offline, other times with stupid web design etc. They don't have a technical moat other than being so entrenched in academic politics. I assume something similar is going on in the other spaces. They live in a legacy world that will be replaced with AI overnight.
- impendia 4y ago
  > people know that academia is more about networking, PR, politics etc rather than the exactness of academic analytics This is generally true, but academics (I am one) are at least vaguely worried that analytics will take over. Any good department chair will be prepared, at any time, to give their dean and provost an account of how our department is doing really fantastic work, despite how badly you underfund us, you should really direct more resources to us right away. Since academic work looks so different from discipline to discipline, administrators find it difficult to evaluate who is actually doing good work. And thus swoop in companies like Elsevier, Clarivate, Academic Analytics, etc. with bright shiny dashboards, with tables and bar graphs that purport to measure productivity. Sure, their measurement is shit but the alternative is often simply to take people at their word. As a working academic, I do not wish any of these companies well. But I wouldn't underestimate them.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I think the main harm identified here is summed up in the line; "The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free" It's not what information is or isn't collected. It can be valuable, and great social good can come out of so-called "big data". And we can, as a society, sensibly decide what is allowable in terms of prediction and prejudice (which are essentially the same thing in this context). The problem is utility asymmetry. Having a few for-profit corporations own and trade our data is a societal catastrophe in the making, and can only tend toward fascism.
- zeta0134 4y ago
  It's somewhat ironic that I cannot view the full article; it's paywalled, and I am not a Wired subscriber.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Using wget pretending to be something else will probably see you right. Text based without JavaScript pulls Wired articles nicely.
  - nouryqt 4y ago
    https://archive.ph/pQQV1 https://archive.ph/pQQV1
- hammock 4y ago
  The truth has always been paywalled. Good information comes at a cost, information asymmetry is power. What is different now is that information of all types is being shadowbanned
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > information of all types is being shadowbanned That sounds interesting, please say more.
    - gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
      If we did, that too would shadowbanned. For example, look at how people were pointing to early studies that the mRNA jabs caused heart issues in males 40 and under about 1.5 years ago. Raising such concerns was enough to get account here shadowbanned even when they posted to papers.
      - switchbak 4y ago
        The interesting thing is the truth there was not behind a paywall. It was in the anarchic corners of the internet that allowed such heresy. What was behind the paywalls was pure state serving propaganda. The last few years have been a real lesson to those who are paying attention. Unfortunately I've been really disappointed with how few of my friends have kept an open mind despite the poisoned information landscape.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
I'm not so sure quiet captues the moment. The invasion has been effective due to pointless distraction after pointless distraction - and algorithms tuned to surface those distractions. A monopoly of the collective mind. Few can hear this coming, not because it's quite but because of the excessive volume from excessive noise.
caconym_ 4y ago
"Big Tech" is a distraction. They barely even "sell" data; rather, they use it to power platforms where advertisers can target users without learning who they are. At such a large scale there are obviously exceptions (see: Cambridge Analytica), but directly selling user data is generally not how they make their money. The abuses of the companies you never hear about are orders of magnitude worse. They are plugged into every institution of society you interact with in your daily life, so you essentially can't opt out, and their primary business model is siphoning off sensitive de-anonymized personal data and selling it to anybody willing to pay. It ought to be criminal, and the fact that it isn't just goes to show how captured and neutered our government has become. I assume our legislators' PR focus on "Big Tech" wrt. data privacy is by design. If the American people really understood the true shape of things, there'd be blood in the streets. (I'm not saying "Big Tech" doesn't cause substantial harm, but in my view it's harm of a different sort.)
- drdec 4y ago
  > The abuses of the companies you never hear about are orders of magnitude worse. > They are plugged into every institution of society you interact with in your daily life, so you essentially can't opt out, and their primary business model is siphoning off sensitive de-anonymized personal data and selling it to anybody willing to pay. This would be much more impactful if you named one of these companies and gave some concrete examples of what they are doing.
  - caconym_ 4y ago
    For a start, you should probably read OP's article. I know often HN commenters don't read the article before commenting, and I'm sometimes guilty of this myself, but in this case the linked article offers fairly important context for my comment in the sense that it explicitly names at least one such company and gives concrete examples of what they are doing with your data. For another salient example, check out this article^[1] about cell carriers selling their customers' real-time location data without consent. ^[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist-slap-fines-to-carriers-that-sold-your-phone-location-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist...
c7b 4y ago
Oh wow. Elsevier alone has much more grip on global academia than any one company should have (what the article didn't mention, they also own Overleaf, so they have access to a non-negligible fraction of all STEM research before it is available to anyone but the authors). But I didn't know that it is part of an even larger conglomerate l (LexisNexis alone would make for a formidable Elsevier competitor).
- elashri 4y ago
  I couldn't find this link between Elsevier and overleaf. What I did find is that overleaf is owned by digital science UK which is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. The later owns a lot of publication companies and group. They own Nature and more than 50 share in Springer. Am I missing something?
  - c7b 4y ago
    Hmm, I remember hearing that they purchased Overleaf several years ago - maybe I misremembered, or things have changed again since then.
    - privong 4y ago
      Perhaps you're thinking of the Mendeley reference organization software? Elsevier purchased it in 2013. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley
      - c7b 4y ago
        Yeah, I might have had those mixed up
midislack 4y ago
Isn't RELX basically an operation started by Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? YIKES

158 points by kjhughes 4y ago

based on their academic services, I wouldn't be too worried because those services are crap. Their academic analytics stuff barely passes the test and is mostly used because nobody wants to make a competitor. Most academic metadata is openly available to anyone who wants to use it, but people know that academia is more about networking, PR, politics etc rather than the exactness of academic analytics. Then elsevier's own websites were pretty crap for the (pre-SciHub) times i used them , sometimes being offline, other times with stupid web design etc. They don't have a technical moat other than being so entrenched in academic politics. I assume something similar is going on in the other spaces. They live in a legacy world that will be replaced with AI overnight.

impendia 4y ago
> people know that academia is more about networking, PR, politics etc rather than the exactness of academic analytics This is generally true, but academics (I am one) are at least vaguely worried that analytics will take over. Any good department chair will be prepared, at any time, to give their dean and provost an account of how our department is doing really fantastic work, despite how badly you underfund us, you should really direct more resources to us right away. Since academic work looks so different from discipline to discipline, administrators find it difficult to evaluate who is actually doing good work. And thus swoop in companies like Elsevier, Clarivate, Academic Analytics, etc. with bright shiny dashboards, with tables and bar graphs that purport to measure productivity. Sure, their measurement is shit but the alternative is often simply to take people at their word. As a working academic, I do not wish any of these companies well. But I wouldn't underestimate them.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I think the main harm identified here is summed up in the line; "The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free" It's not what information is or isn't collected. It can be valuable, and great social good can come out of so-called "big data". And we can, as a society, sensibly decide what is allowable in terms of prediction and prejudice (which are essentially the same thing in this context). The problem is utility asymmetry. Having a few for-profit corporations own and trade our data is a societal catastrophe in the making, and can only tend toward fascism.

zeta0134 4y ago
It's somewhat ironic that I cannot view the full article; it's paywalled, and I am not a Wired subscriber.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Using wget pretending to be something else will probably see you right. Text based without JavaScript pulls Wired articles nicely.
- nouryqt 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/pQQV1 https://archive.ph/pQQV1
hammock 4y ago
The truth has always been paywalled. Good information comes at a cost, information asymmetry is power. What is different now is that information of all types is being shadowbanned
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > information of all types is being shadowbanned That sounds interesting, please say more.
  - gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
    If we did, that too would shadowbanned. For example, look at how people were pointing to early studies that the mRNA jabs caused heart issues in males 40 and under about 1.5 years ago. Raising such concerns was enough to get account here shadowbanned even when they posted to papers.
    - switchbak 4y ago
      The interesting thing is the truth there was not behind a paywall. It was in the anarchic corners of the internet that allowed such heresy. What was behind the paywalls was pure state serving propaganda. The last few years have been a real lesson to those who are paying attention. Unfortunately I've been really disappointed with how few of my friends have kept an open mind despite the poisoned information landscape.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

I'm not so sure quiet captues the moment. The invasion has been effective due to pointless distraction after pointless distraction - and algorithms tuned to surface those distractions. A monopoly of the collective mind. Few can hear this coming, not because it's quite but because of the excessive volume from excessive noise.

caconym_ 4y ago

"Big Tech" is a distraction. They barely even "sell" data; rather, they use it to power platforms where advertisers can target users without learning who they are. At such a large scale there are obviously exceptions (see: Cambridge Analytica), but directly selling user data is generally not how they make their money. The abuses of the companies you never hear about are orders of magnitude worse. They are plugged into every institution of society you interact with in your daily life, so you essentially can't opt out, and their primary business model is siphoning off sensitive de-anonymized personal data and selling it to anybody willing to pay. It ought to be criminal, and the fact that it isn't just goes to show how captured and neutered our government has become. I assume our legislators' PR focus on "Big Tech" wrt. data privacy is by design. If the American people really understood the true shape of things, there'd be blood in the streets. (I'm not saying "Big Tech" doesn't cause substantial harm, but in my view it's harm of a different sort.)

drdec 4y ago
> The abuses of the companies you never hear about are orders of magnitude worse. > They are plugged into every institution of society you interact with in your daily life, so you essentially can't opt out, and their primary business model is siphoning off sensitive de-anonymized personal data and selling it to anybody willing to pay. This would be much more impactful if you named one of these companies and gave some concrete examples of what they are doing.
- caconym_ 4y ago
  For a start, you should probably read OP's article. I know often HN commenters don't read the article before commenting, and I'm sometimes guilty of this myself, but in this case the linked article offers fairly important context for my comment in the sense that it explicitly names at least one such company and gives concrete examples of what they are doing with your data. For another salient example, check out this article^[1] about cell carriers selling their customers' real-time location data without consent. ^[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist-slap-fines-to-carriers-that-sold-your-phone-location-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist...

c7b 4y ago

Oh wow. Elsevier alone has much more grip on global academia than any one company should have (what the article didn't mention, they also own Overleaf, so they have access to a non-negligible fraction of all STEM research before it is available to anyone but the authors). But I didn't know that it is part of an even larger conglomerate l (LexisNexis alone would make for a formidable Elsevier competitor).

elashri 4y ago
I couldn't find this link between Elsevier and overleaf. What I did find is that overleaf is owned by digital science UK which is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. The later owns a lot of publication companies and group. They own Nature and more than 50 share in Springer. Am I missing something?
- c7b 4y ago
  Hmm, I remember hearing that they purchased Overleaf several years ago - maybe I misremembered, or things have changed again since then.
  - privong 4y ago
    Perhaps you're thinking of the Mendeley reference organization software? Elsevier purchased it in 2013. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley
    - c7b 4y ago
      Yeah, I might have had those mixed up

midislack 4y ago

Isn't RELX basically an operation started by Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? YIKES