10 ms·

Woman Got Cremation Ads in the Mail After Getting Chemotherapy

125 points by cdme 3y ago

mikece 3y ago
Clearly there was data leak somewhere but it makes me wonder, in a government run (or government as single payer) system, what recourse does one have if (for example) Health Canada had a data leak that marketers jumped on?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sybercecurity 3y ago
  It was a while ago, but from the OPM data breach of the US Federal Government, you would get 1 year of credit monitoring (free!). You get a letter too.
- goda90 3y ago
  Seems like we should make laws to make it illegal to use such data for marketing in the first place.
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
I've had the DMV sell my info multiple times. Every time I update my registration I get months of insurance scam calls. I had my landlord's property manager sign me up for a identity theft protection service without my permission. Equifax sells any info about me it can get. Google has a full profile for my public ip it seems and will fill in suggestions across multiple youtube sessions where one is logged in and the other isn't, on separate machines. Is this really all technology has to offer? For every new break through, we have 100s of rent seeking middlemen exposing every aspect of our lives.
- sianemo 3y ago
  The don't-bother-unless-it-hyperscales majority attitude of tech company funding and growth heavily limits the variety of new things that the tech world at large can offer. There are simply not that many types of tech business models that are capable of scaling fast and quickly without massive infusions of cash, but it turns out that data brokering, large dataset analysis, and profile building are a few of those things, and so the market success of these business looms large in the technology space. I had hoped that rising interest rates and a tighter consumer market would change that dynamic somewhat but unfortunately for now it seems to be an incredibly well entrenched status quo that doesn't appear to have a clear path away from
- tester457 3y ago
  What is the usual script of those insurance scam calls?
- adrr 3y ago
  DMV can't sell your information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...
  - staticautomatic 3y ago
    They certainly can under one of the permissible purposes enumerated in the DPPA.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    There is a private toll company operating the 407 highway in Canada. They are capable of sending bills to New York drivers. That can't happen without the NY DMV providing vehicle registration data access to a foreign business or an intermediary.
  - dkn775 3y ago
    Yes they can. Typically you need a business license or a PI credential. I worked for the DMV. One example: https://egov.maryland.gov/mva/ https://egov.maryland.gov/mva/
0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago
Who is happy to see a cremation add? They aren't beer commercials.
- giantg2 3y ago
  They are also much more local compared to most beer commercials. It probably doesn't make sense to have a cremation commercial for most markets.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Sometimes I see funeral homes advertising on Syracuse TV. On the other hand most of the ads are for prescription drugs, invitations to participate in Medicare fraud, personal injury lawyers, etc. About the one thing you see advertising for things you spend you own money on is the occasional ad for a car dealership, if nobody bought cars and drove them on the demolition derby that is I-81 you wouldn't need the personal injury lawyer.
nostromo 3y ago
The implication in the article (that her healthcare provider sold her data to a data broker) is extremely unlikely. Much more likely is that she has been Googling keywords about chemo, and those websites she clicked on sold her data to a data broker.
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  but in the mail? \/ (never had online activity result in mailers unless I bought something and the mail comes from that same vendor)
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Why not? It's a more local service provided by brick and motar stores. Makes sense they'd send a mailer.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    There are now companies which have the business model of correlating a physical address with an e-mail or IP address and then making use of that for marketing purposes.
  - com2kid 3y ago
    Ethos Life insurance sent me a physical mailer after I visited their website, so it does happen!
BoxOfRain 3y ago
This reminds me of the time I had to go to A&E (ER on the other side of the Atlantic) for an allergic reaction to a horsefly bite and they had adverts for funeral directors mixed into the slideshow on the wall. I thought that was quite funny, although obviously that's a very different beast to getting personally targeted with an assumption like that.
kerkeslager 3y ago
Comments so far are focused on how information about her chemo got out to advertisers, but I'm not seeing much criticism of the advertiser. Are we to believe that if a company gets information, they are welcome to do whatever they want with it? Advertising is a blight on society.
- bediger4000 3y ago
  Advertising is a blight. Why? Because it's mostly lying. Once you've signed up to lie, it's a small step into sleazy stuff, a small step into selling info, and after that a small step into distributing malware via your ad network. Along the way, you end up thinking nothing of corrupting the medium your ads support. It's a blight all the way down.
- jobs_throwaway 3y ago
  > Advertising is a blight on society I for one enjoy personalized ads
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kerkeslager 3y ago
    People like tobacco, too, but we generally structure society so that people who like tobacco aren't blowing smoke in the faces of everyone else. If you want to brain damage yourself for corporations that's your prerogative, but you can do that where it isn't harming everyone else.
    - jobs_throwaway 3y ago
      > If you want to brain damage yourself for corporations that's your prerogative Lol, most sane HackerNews commenter
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I would completely support the ability for you and others who enjoy personalized ads to opt into them and the ecosystem required to provide them. What I think is abhorrent is that the rest of us are being forced into that system as well.
mfer 3y ago
There are so many ways the information could have been leaked. For example, 1. Searching for things around chemotherapy, cancer, and death on some site 2. Having an app on your phone that tracks your location and sells it. Many apps do this. It's not too difficult to reverse engineer where people went and who they are with the various datasets that can be bought. 3. Data brokers getting access to medical information. Too many companies play fast and loose with their data. It would not be a surprise. We leak data everywhere. Companies are often poor at following regulations. There are too few regulations in most of US around data about us.
- starkparker 3y ago
  When my late partner went through chemo they also got a lot of targeted funeral and estate planning ads. Probably some combination of location tracking and signing up for a bunch of resources on dealing with cancer, which in turn sold out their contact info. And it was all useless marketing because we'd already done all this when the diagnosis first came through, so it just kept reminding us of what was likely going to happen. I kept getting them for a year after the cremation.
- adrr 3y ago
  It also could be her significant other searching about funeral costs and arrangements. I highly doubt it was chemotherapy because the ROAS would be insanely small especially for mail based marketing($0.50 per touch at least). Person isn't dead and could recover. If the cancer is terminal it still could take years. Sometimes its better not knowing why you received that type of marketing.
xattt 3y ago
Has anyone considered deliberate topics to search in order to game the system and increase your apparent SES to data clearinghouses? Private jet pricing? Maid services? Live-in nannies?
- erehweb 3y ago
  You can easily enough do this by visiting the websites for expensive products, but why? So you get ads for things you can't afford?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I think that the idea is to make the data pool less accurate and so less valuable.
  - xattt 3y ago
    It’s more about tainting your profile to appear as though you’re a “good” potential customer to an entity you’re planning to do business with (who might purchase this data as a background check).
PaulHoule 3y ago
My wife was looking at the Planned Parenthood site and later got followed around by ads for https://www.forhers.com/ https://www.forhers.com/ we found three trackers on the Planned Parenthood site which is kind of shocking in this age where private citizens could sue you in some states over healthcare decisions.
- treyfitty 3y ago
  How does Planned Parenthood relate to hair loss treatment?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Forhers is an online telehealth platform with a reproductive healthcare component. https://www.forhers.com/sexual-health https://www.forhers.com/sexual-health https://www.forhers.com/birth-control https://www.forhers.com/birth-control Planned Parenthood also offers birth control ordering through the mail. adrr says no tracking/retargeting, so could be a coincidence.
- adrr 3y ago
  I just looked at the planned parenthood site and it has a New Relic RUM, and a AB testing beacon. There are no ad/data beacons on the site.
  - specialp 3y ago
    She probably clicked a link from a search engine or other source that could have shared her interest. Even if the service themselves isn't tracking, very few people type an exact URL in. Even if they do it is often being transmitted to Google or others stroke by stroke
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Granted a "normal" web site has more like 30 or 40 trackers these days.
- lupire 3y ago
AlbertCory 3y ago
I could almost work that into my standup comedy routine (if I had one): Woman sorting mail: "Oh, an ad for cremation! This one's for you." (handing it to husband)
- duckman1 3y ago
  Wow that's so funny I almost died. I am at the hospital right now. Please continue telling standup jokes until I cease from existing.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Thank you, sir. Now I only need about five minutes of material that good.
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  I'm trying to decide if that's a cut on the husband (who can't really do much after he dies) or a cut on the wife because that's actually an actionable ad for him if she dies.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Never "explain" a joke. It won't become funnier.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
technofiend 3y ago
Recently purchased a Subaru from a friend and called Subaru to finish registration of the vehicle in their system. I almost immediately got spam from Sirius XM. Who the heck told Subaru it was ok to give my (fortunately throwaway) email to Sirius?? Certainly not me. Considering the only thing I know about Sirius is they got called out by the NY Attorney General for a difficult cancellation process, that's enough to never bother subscribing.
- criddell 3y ago
  Subaru is terrible for this. A couple times a year I get mail from Subaru but when I open it, it’s really from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Also, every time I contact my dealer for just about anything, I get a survey in the mail. I’ve tried everything I could think of to stop them but nothing has worked so far. The last one I gave a very low score on about half the questions and a week later I got a call from somebody at the dealership. When I explained it was because I’m trying to get the surveys to stop he said he would contact somebody in the regional Subaru office to see if there was anything they could do but he didn’t sound hopeful.
  - technofiend 3y ago
    Came home to find Subaru had given my physical address to Sirius as well! Grr.
davidfischer 3y ago
Healthcare providers and insurers in the US are bound by HIPAA privacy rules, but data brokers (mentioned in the article) and the ads industry generally are not. For example, if she used an app in the doctor's waiting room that shared/sold location data to a data broker, they can use her location data for retargeting purposes. There have been many cases in the past where advertisers targeted users based on visiting medical or other sensitive locations. As to how they mailed it to her and got her home address, a data broker who has location data can fairly easily determine a user's home address from that data. Many brokers and networks may also already have an association between a "pseudo-anonymous advertising ID" and real user with name and address. Not saying that location-based retargeting happened this time as the article doesn't give us enough to go off of and other types of retargeting are another possibility. Overall, I think it's unlikely that the provider or insurer shared her data and other alternatives are more likely. Disclosure: I work in the ads industry but on contextual targeting only. Some location-based retargeting is terrifying and will probably eventually be criminal. It's a bit of the wild west right now.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I would assume that a more likely scenario (although yours is also likely!) is someone with cancer will almost certainly search the internet at some point for information about cancer and their treatments. This will immediately be sucked up by the pervasive surveillance economy and used to extract the maximum amount of marginal revenue attainable through any means necessary. You don’t need to know they’re in a doctors waiting room, using the internet for information retrieval will specifically inform everyone interested in paying for it what you are searching for.
  - adrr 3y ago
    All the medical information sites(WebMD,Drugs.com) are filled with ad beacons.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yes, I agree. It's also quite likely that people who know people with cancer will search about cancer, and sadly some of them will later need to purchase cremation services. This means that statistically it's not a bad idea to target people who have searched for cancer with cremations. This seems like the most likely explanation to me. (Edit to add a meta note: Apparently this has to be said on Hacker News because people can't distinguish between someone presenting facts and someone making a defense, but I'm not defending the practice. I think it's abhorrent. But if we can't dispassionately analyze reality to try and understand the motivations, then we've really abandoned reason and lost our way).
throwitaway222 3y ago
We should have a simple law in the US: Advertising may ever only be related to the surrounding content. It's the (traditional) TV model. Saturday morning cartoons shows you cereal commercials. For the web this would translate to seeing funeral ads if you're on a website for cancer. But if this follows you later, then we should simply get the death penalty involved for the company that follows you. From a simple sense, all AI and logic created to track people goes away - ad companies need to simply focus on determining the BEST ads to display on the web pages the ad is pinned to.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  That's not a simple law. To start, it violates the first amendment. Then, after you decide that somehow commerce overrules the first amendment in this situation, you are stuck with the job of setting up a government process that will judge, with legal force, whether an advertisement is sufficiently related to the surrounding content. This institution will have to grapple with, among many questions, "Is an ad for replacing your gutters ever related to its surrounding content?" or "What does it mean for an advertisement to be related to a work of fiction?" Also, do you think Saturday morning cartoons should somehow relate to breakfast cereals? The reason that there haven't been Saturday morning cartoons in a couple of decades is because of a law saying the opposite.
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    You are focusing too much on the content related part. If you want to display gravestone advertisements during saturday morning cartoons, you are free to do so. I'm just referring to the concept of trying to do well in your advertising efforts on that part, as LONG as it is done so without knowing who is witnessing this ad. Yes re-reading my post doesn't state this, I just thought that would be obvious given the story we're discussing.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > it violates the first amendment. Make the spying illegal, not the advertising that relies on it. Then there is zero first amendment issue.
gitfan86 3y ago
Advertisement Campaigns are based on Returns on Investments not on accuracy. For example, lets say a "Pet Insurance" company makes on average $400 profit for each customer they obtain. It makes sense for them to spend $200 to acquire each new customer. You could send out around 300 bulk letters for $200. So it makes sense to cast a wide net including mailing people who just made their first purchase at a pet store. Obviously some of those people only bought a $4 gold fish and will laugh at the pet insurance quote.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
racl101 3y ago
Too soon.
snakeyjake 3y ago
Everyone is building castles in the sky but the reality is almost certainly that: 1. the woman in question is old, 2. the data broker has a list of all old people 3. the data broker sold that list of old people to a cremation firm 4. the cremation firm sent out mailers 5. the chemotherapy was a coincidence.
Macha 3y ago
I'm getting more and more to the feeling that there needs to be stronger penalties for misuse of data than stuff like the GDPR. I get emails to an old, legacy email address of mine. I haven't actively used it in like 15 years, and when I did use it, it was on gaming forums because remember the days where you didn't give your real contact details to every random person with a site on the internet? Anyway, this email has ended up in various people search databases for me which has then resulted in the likes of AWS recruiters, Druid salespeople, etc. emailing me on this address. I can see the path how this came to be: Gravatar Leak tied this email to newer email addresses I actually use -> various data brokers, probably buying off each other -> people search websites -> Amazon recruiting, Druid sales, etc. And now data from an illegal data breach has laundered its way into companies that consider themselves very serious about being law-abiding using that data. Unfortunately, the closer you get to the source, the less upstanding and more transient these companies are. The people search websites are kind of sketchy at times, the data brokers they buy from are more so, etc. So trying to get legal actions against the data brokers is kind of pointless, it feels. And this has real world effects. Recently a company which I was in the hiring process for decided midway to switch to emailing this legacy email address. Not any of the ones listed publicly with my real identity, not the one on linked where they claimed to have contacted me from, not the one we'd been conversing over for months, but one they'd plucked out of whatever people search DB they were using. Luckily I was aware of recruiters less-than-ideal handling of contact details, so I knew to check the ancient inbox when they went weirdly quiet in a way that was odd for that phase of the process. I think the only way to stop this is for there to be financial penalties on the end users of the ill-gotten data. When the druid salesperson emails me on the address obtained from the Gravatar data breach, there should be a fine for misuse of data, no matter how many layers of intermediaries there are between the Gravatar hackers and Imply Data, Inc. and the same story for when Amazon's recruiter does it. It's clear that anything less will not dissuade companies from the dissolution of responsibility for using ill-gotten data.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
Could be worse she could get ads for euthanasia instead. "You aren't useful anymore so why don't you save the government some money."

125 points by cdme 3y ago

Clearly there was data leak somewhere but it makes me wonder, in a government run (or government as single payer) system, what recourse does one have if (for example) Health Canada had a data leak that marketers jumped on?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sybercecurity 3y ago
It was a while ago, but from the OPM data breach of the US Federal Government, you would get 1 year of credit monitoring (free!). You get a letter too.
goda90 3y ago
Seems like we should make laws to make it illegal to use such data for marketing in the first place.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago

I've had the DMV sell my info multiple times. Every time I update my registration I get months of insurance scam calls. I had my landlord's property manager sign me up for a identity theft protection service without my permission. Equifax sells any info about me it can get. Google has a full profile for my public ip it seems and will fill in suggestions across multiple youtube sessions where one is logged in and the other isn't, on separate machines. Is this really all technology has to offer? For every new break through, we have 100s of rent seeking middlemen exposing every aspect of our lives.

sianemo 3y ago
The don't-bother-unless-it-hyperscales majority attitude of tech company funding and growth heavily limits the variety of new things that the tech world at large can offer. There are simply not that many types of tech business models that are capable of scaling fast and quickly without massive infusions of cash, but it turns out that data brokering, large dataset analysis, and profile building are a few of those things, and so the market success of these business looms large in the technology space. I had hoped that rising interest rates and a tighter consumer market would change that dynamic somewhat but unfortunately for now it seems to be an incredibly well entrenched status quo that doesn't appear to have a clear path away from
tester457 3y ago
What is the usual script of those insurance scam calls?
adrr 3y ago
DMV can't sell your information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...
- staticautomatic 3y ago
  They certainly can under one of the permissible purposes enumerated in the DPPA.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  There is a private toll company operating the 407 highway in Canada. They are capable of sending bills to New York drivers. That can't happen without the NY DMV providing vehicle registration data access to a foreign business or an intermediary.
- dkn775 3y ago
  Yes they can. Typically you need a business license or a PI credential. I worked for the DMV. One example: https://egov.maryland.gov/mva/ https://egov.maryland.gov/mva/

0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago

Who is happy to see a cremation add? They aren't beer commercials.

giantg2 3y ago
They are also much more local compared to most beer commercials. It probably doesn't make sense to have a cremation commercial for most markets.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Sometimes I see funeral homes advertising on Syracuse TV. On the other hand most of the ads are for prescription drugs, invitations to participate in Medicare fraud, personal injury lawyers, etc. About the one thing you see advertising for things you spend you own money on is the occasional ad for a car dealership, if nobody bought cars and drove them on the demolition derby that is I-81 you wouldn't need the personal injury lawyer.

nostromo 3y ago

The implication in the article (that her healthcare provider sold her data to a data broker) is extremely unlikely. Much more likely is that she has been Googling keywords about chemo, and those websites she clicked on sold her data to a data broker.

throwitaway222 3y ago
but in the mail? \/ (never had online activity result in mailers unless I bought something and the mail comes from that same vendor)
- giantg2 3y ago
  Why not? It's a more local service provided by brick and motar stores. Makes sense they'd send a mailer.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  There are now companies which have the business model of correlating a physical address with an e-mail or IP address and then making use of that for marketing purposes.
- com2kid 3y ago
  Ethos Life insurance sent me a physical mailer after I visited their website, so it does happen!

BoxOfRain 3y ago

This reminds me of the time I had to go to A&E (ER on the other side of the Atlantic) for an allergic reaction to a horsefly bite and they had adverts for funeral directors mixed into the slideshow on the wall. I thought that was quite funny, although obviously that's a very different beast to getting personally targeted with an assumption like that.

kerkeslager 3y ago

Comments so far are focused on how information about her chemo got out to advertisers, but I'm not seeing much criticism of the advertiser. Are we to believe that if a company gets information, they are welcome to do whatever they want with it? Advertising is a blight on society.

bediger4000 3y ago
Advertising is a blight. Why? Because it's mostly lying. Once you've signed up to lie, it's a small step into sleazy stuff, a small step into selling info, and after that a small step into distributing malware via your ad network. Along the way, you end up thinking nothing of corrupting the medium your ads support. It's a blight all the way down.
jobs_throwaway 3y ago
> Advertising is a blight on society I for one enjoy personalized ads
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  People like tobacco, too, but we generally structure society so that people who like tobacco aren't blowing smoke in the faces of everyone else. If you want to brain damage yourself for corporations that's your prerogative, but you can do that where it isn't harming everyone else.
  - jobs_throwaway 3y ago
    > If you want to brain damage yourself for corporations that's your prerogative Lol, most sane HackerNews commenter
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I would completely support the ability for you and others who enjoy personalized ads to opt into them and the ecosystem required to provide them. What I think is abhorrent is that the rest of us are being forced into that system as well.

mfer 3y ago

There are so many ways the information could have been leaked. For example, 1. Searching for things around chemotherapy, cancer, and death on some site 2. Having an app on your phone that tracks your location and sells it. Many apps do this. It's not too difficult to reverse engineer where people went and who they are with the various datasets that can be bought. 3. Data brokers getting access to medical information. Too many companies play fast and loose with their data. It would not be a surprise. We leak data everywhere. Companies are often poor at following regulations. There are too few regulations in most of US around data about us.

starkparker 3y ago
When my late partner went through chemo they also got a lot of targeted funeral and estate planning ads. Probably some combination of location tracking and signing up for a bunch of resources on dealing with cancer, which in turn sold out their contact info. And it was all useless marketing because we'd already done all this when the diagnosis first came through, so it just kept reminding us of what was likely going to happen. I kept getting them for a year after the cremation.
adrr 3y ago
It also could be her significant other searching about funeral costs and arrangements. I highly doubt it was chemotherapy because the ROAS would be insanely small especially for mail based marketing($0.50 per touch at least). Person isn't dead and could recover. If the cancer is terminal it still could take years. Sometimes its better not knowing why you received that type of marketing.

xattt 3y ago

Has anyone considered deliberate topics to search in order to game the system and increase your apparent SES to data clearinghouses? Private jet pricing? Maid services? Live-in nannies?

erehweb 3y ago
You can easily enough do this by visiting the websites for expensive products, but why? So you get ads for things you can't afford?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think that the idea is to make the data pool less accurate and so less valuable.
- xattt 3y ago
  It’s more about tainting your profile to appear as though you’re a “good” potential customer to an entity you’re planning to do business with (who might purchase this data as a background check).

PaulHoule 3y ago

My wife was looking at the Planned Parenthood site and later got followed around by ads for https://www.forhers.com/ https://www.forhers.com/ we found three trackers on the Planned Parenthood site which is kind of shocking in this age where private citizens could sue you in some states over healthcare decisions.

treyfitty 3y ago
How does Planned Parenthood relate to hair loss treatment?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Forhers is an online telehealth platform with a reproductive healthcare component. https://www.forhers.com/sexual-health https://www.forhers.com/sexual-health https://www.forhers.com/birth-control https://www.forhers.com/birth-control Planned Parenthood also offers birth control ordering through the mail. adrr says no tracking/retargeting, so could be a coincidence.
adrr 3y ago
I just looked at the planned parenthood site and it has a New Relic RUM, and a AB testing beacon. There are no ad/data beacons on the site.
- specialp 3y ago
  She probably clicked a link from a search engine or other source that could have shared her interest. Even if the service themselves isn't tracking, very few people type an exact URL in. Even if they do it is often being transmitted to Google or others stroke by stroke
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Granted a "normal" web site has more like 30 or 40 trackers these days.
lupire 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago

I could almost work that into my standup comedy routine (if I had one): Woman sorting mail: "Oh, an ad for cremation! This one's for you." (handing it to husband)

duckman1 3y ago
Wow that's so funny I almost died. I am at the hospital right now. Please continue telling standup jokes until I cease from existing.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Thank you, sir. Now I only need about five minutes of material that good.
throwitaway222 3y ago
I'm trying to decide if that's a cut on the husband (who can't really do much after he dies) or a cut on the wife because that's actually an actionable ad for him if she dies.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Never "explain" a joke. It won't become funnier.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

technofiend 3y ago

Recently purchased a Subaru from a friend and called Subaru to finish registration of the vehicle in their system. I almost immediately got spam from Sirius XM. Who the heck told Subaru it was ok to give my (fortunately throwaway) email to Sirius?? Certainly not me. Considering the only thing I know about Sirius is they got called out by the NY Attorney General for a difficult cancellation process, that's enough to never bother subscribing.

criddell 3y ago
Subaru is terrible for this. A couple times a year I get mail from Subaru but when I open it, it’s really from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Also, every time I contact my dealer for just about anything, I get a survey in the mail. I’ve tried everything I could think of to stop them but nothing has worked so far. The last one I gave a very low score on about half the questions and a week later I got a call from somebody at the dealership. When I explained it was because I’m trying to get the surveys to stop he said he would contact somebody in the regional Subaru office to see if there was anything they could do but he didn’t sound hopeful.
- technofiend 3y ago
  Came home to find Subaru had given my physical address to Sirius as well! Grr.

davidfischer 3y ago

Healthcare providers and insurers in the US are bound by HIPAA privacy rules, but data brokers (mentioned in the article) and the ads industry generally are not. For example, if she used an app in the doctor's waiting room that shared/sold location data to a data broker, they can use her location data for retargeting purposes. There have been many cases in the past where advertisers targeted users based on visiting medical or other sensitive locations. As to how they mailed it to her and got her home address, a data broker who has location data can fairly easily determine a user's home address from that data. Many brokers and networks may also already have an association between a "pseudo-anonymous advertising ID" and real user with name and address. Not saying that location-based retargeting happened this time as the article doesn't give us enough to go off of and other types of retargeting are another possibility. Overall, I think it's unlikely that the provider or insurer shared her data and other alternatives are more likely. Disclosure: I work in the ads industry but on contextual targeting only. Some location-based retargeting is terrifying and will probably eventually be criminal. It's a bit of the wild west right now.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I would assume that a more likely scenario (although yours is also likely!) is someone with cancer will almost certainly search the internet at some point for information about cancer and their treatments. This will immediately be sucked up by the pervasive surveillance economy and used to extract the maximum amount of marginal revenue attainable through any means necessary. You don’t need to know they’re in a doctors waiting room, using the internet for information retrieval will specifically inform everyone interested in paying for it what you are searching for.
- adrr 3y ago
  All the medical information sites(WebMD,Drugs.com) are filled with ad beacons.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. It's also quite likely that people who know people with cancer will search about cancer, and sadly some of them will later need to purchase cremation services. This means that statistically it's not a bad idea to target people who have searched for cancer with cremations. This seems like the most likely explanation to me. (Edit to add a meta note: Apparently this has to be said on Hacker News because people can't distinguish between someone presenting facts and someone making a defense, but I'm not defending the practice. I think it's abhorrent. But if we can't dispassionately analyze reality to try and understand the motivations, then we've really abandoned reason and lost our way).

throwitaway222 3y ago

We should have a simple law in the US: Advertising may ever only be related to the surrounding content. It's the (traditional) TV model. Saturday morning cartoons shows you cereal commercials. For the web this would translate to seeing funeral ads if you're on a website for cancer. But if this follows you later, then we should simply get the death penalty involved for the company that follows you. From a simple sense, all AI and logic created to track people goes away - ad companies need to simply focus on determining the BEST ads to display on the web pages the ad is pinned to.

pessimizer 3y ago
That's not a simple law. To start, it violates the first amendment. Then, after you decide that somehow commerce overrules the first amendment in this situation, you are stuck with the job of setting up a government process that will judge, with legal force, whether an advertisement is sufficiently related to the surrounding content. This institution will have to grapple with, among many questions, "Is an ad for replacing your gutters ever related to its surrounding content?" or "What does it mean for an advertisement to be related to a work of fiction?" Also, do you think Saturday morning cartoons should somehow relate to breakfast cereals? The reason that there haven't been Saturday morning cartoons in a couple of decades is because of a law saying the opposite.
- throwitaway222 3y ago
  You are focusing too much on the content related part. If you want to display gravestone advertisements during saturday morning cartoons, you are free to do so. I'm just referring to the concept of trying to do well in your advertising efforts on that part, as LONG as it is done so without knowing who is witnessing this ad. Yes re-reading my post doesn't state this, I just thought that would be obvious given the story we're discussing.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > it violates the first amendment. Make the spying illegal, not the advertising that relies on it. Then there is zero first amendment issue.

gitfan86 3y ago

Advertisement Campaigns are based on Returns on Investments not on accuracy. For example, lets say a "Pet Insurance" company makes on average $400 profit for each customer they obtain. It makes sense for them to spend $200 to acquire each new customer. You could send out around 300 bulk letters for $200. So it makes sense to cast a wide net including mailing people who just made their first purchase at a pet store. Obviously some of those people only bought a $4 gold fish and will laugh at the pet insurance quote.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

racl101 3y ago

Too soon.

snakeyjake 3y ago

Everyone is building castles in the sky but the reality is almost certainly that: 1. the woman in question is old, 2. the data broker has a list of all old people 3. the data broker sold that list of old people to a cremation firm 4. the cremation firm sent out mailers 5. the chemotherapy was a coincidence.

Macha 3y ago

I'm getting more and more to the feeling that there needs to be stronger penalties for misuse of data than stuff like the GDPR. I get emails to an old, legacy email address of mine. I haven't actively used it in like 15 years, and when I did use it, it was on gaming forums because remember the days where you didn't give your real contact details to every random person with a site on the internet? Anyway, this email has ended up in various people search databases for me which has then resulted in the likes of AWS recruiters, Druid salespeople, etc. emailing me on this address. I can see the path how this came to be: Gravatar Leak tied this email to newer email addresses I actually use -> various data brokers, probably buying off each other -> people search websites -> Amazon recruiting, Druid sales, etc. And now data from an illegal data breach has laundered its way into companies that consider themselves very serious about being law-abiding using that data. Unfortunately, the closer you get to the source, the less upstanding and more transient these companies are. The people search websites are kind of sketchy at times, the data brokers they buy from are more so, etc. So trying to get legal actions against the data brokers is kind of pointless, it feels. And this has real world effects. Recently a company which I was in the hiring process for decided midway to switch to emailing this legacy email address. Not any of the ones listed publicly with my real identity, not the one on linked where they claimed to have contacted me from, not the one we'd been conversing over for months, but one they'd plucked out of whatever people search DB they were using. Luckily I was aware of recruiters less-than-ideal handling of contact details, so I knew to check the ancient inbox when they went weirdly quiet in a way that was odd for that phase of the process. I think the only way to stop this is for there to be financial penalties on the end users of the ill-gotten data. When the druid salesperson emails me on the address obtained from the Gravatar data breach, there should be a fine for misuse of data, no matter how many layers of intermediaries there are between the Gravatar hackers and Imply Data, Inc. and the same story for when Amazon's recruiter does it. It's clear that anything less will not dissuade companies from the dissolution of responsibility for using ill-gotten data.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago

Could be worse she could get ads for euthanasia instead. "You aren't useful anymore so why don't you save the government some money."