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Money.
Your data can help sell you stuff. If they know you’re into MILFs, they can sell advertising to the MILF companies. Then you see a bunch of MILF ads. The more they know, the more they can target you. Eventually we’ll have ads in our dreams like in Futurama.
Jokes on you, he probably already has MILF dreams!
Upgrade those MILFs to GILFs with this one weird trick!
You know, knowing advertising algorithms, expect a lot of mistakes like that in your dreams, thanks to the users-like-you-also-like thing they do. "Thirsty GILF scatporn near you!"-- the future is bleak.
Why are tech companies* so interested
They are interested in your data because you are human and you do human things, the more they understand you and your activities the better they can gather knowledge for economical decisions such as Ads, Trends etc.
Most commonly they use this information to manipulate you into using their services or changing your preferences by marketing and Ads. The more they understand you the more effective it is.
The more they claim they know about you the more they can charge for ads. I have recently realized that Google, Facebook and such are not only powerful because they aggregate data, but rather because they can sell their product (=your attention) to other companies very, very well. People often claim companies would not pay for advertisements had they didn't work — I claim otherwise; they pay for advertisements because Google falsely claims how effective they are and that's why they need to collect your data and be able to show that to their customers to boost their (Google's) sales. In other words they don't do that to sell the customers product well (the one that has been advertised) but rather sell their own product, which is ad space.
Exactly this.
Proving who has bigger balls
I've heard this a few times. It's certainly compelling to me, I guess it's obviously a hard thing to know given it will be heavily debated by those companies and it's always going to be obscured by them to maintain a mystique, whether it works or doesn't since in both cases it helps to keep everyone a little bit in the dark.
Part of this idea that the surveillance economy is not nearly as effective at controlling consumer behavior as claimed makes me wonder if I'm being unnecessarily paranoid when I jealously guard my privacy since it seems it could be that my data is taken potentially in service of nothing. Nevertheless I instinctively just don't want to take the risk that hooverig up all that data really does work for manipulation and control.
I don't think it's paranoid. Best case scenario, they really are using your data ineffectively, which imo is still bad because you are not getting any benefit from it. But worst case scenario is a government coming into power that abuses this data to extents we can't possible fathom today.
Because digital advertising dollars has been in a bubble since click-through ads and for some reason nobody has noticed.
A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.
Wall of text, I know, but I had trouble sleeping so... Yeah... Here goes;
Knowledge is power.
Here in Sweden there's a service that has been pouring money on marketing the last two years. The service is called House ID and they let you store all important documents about your house for free.... Free... Free?
So what will they make money on?
Well, let's jump 10 years into the future and just imagine the possibilities.
Criminals can easily check what house owners have upgraded their locks or purchased home alarm systems. They could even purchase data about all the houses in an area that has a specific lock type with a known flaw.
Your phone is, with all its sensors, a fantastic surveillance device and people happily take it with them wherever they go.
In the 90's, when I worked for IBM, the buzzword was "Data mining". Ordinary people never understood what it was and I was often asked about it. Extremely simplified: look at the data you have and try to read between the lines to generate data that you originally didn't have.
The biggest chain of convenient stores in Sweden launched banking services and a pay card around this time. If you used the card for grocery shopping you'd get a monthly bonus and great offers and discounts. So I gave an innocent example of what your purchase data could be used for. They could see that a woman purchased pads on fairly the same time each month or quarter. Now, when cross checking this with purchase history from other women they could see that a lot of those women also purchased chocolate at the same time they purchase pads. Something something with a lot of women getting cravings of chocolate around the same time each month. Yes, it's a generalization but still a real life example in this case. So they sent out coupons for chocolate, matching the time around when the customer normally purchased pads, and what do you know? The sale of chocolate increased. Significantly.
Now, pads isn't a very sensitive subject of you're older than 15... But think what data Tinder registers. They can't know for sure if you're liberal, conservative or even a communist... or can they? By looking at your behavior in their app, what you did, where (Tinder uses GPS, remember?) you did it and when you did it, they can draw conclusions about a lot of things that you never intended to share with them.
Today there are sensors placed strategically in shopping malls that registers what store windows you stopped to look at. They actually know, with a pretty high certainty, exactly what product in the window that caught your attention. How they can be so accurate you say? Because you have Bluetooth activated and the mall app installed. They just triangulate your exact position.
All of this is data about you that is correct. You did all of that and it was registered.
But what if corrupted data was registered? What if that data was the basis for you getting a loan for your dream house? How do you correct a conclusion that is obviously wrong when the bank just tells you that what data they purchase, from who and how they process it is a business secret and they refuse to share any details.
Now, all sorts of data has always been collected but in the old time it was stored on paper and cross comparison/compiling data was an expensive and tedious task. Today it is not. Today your phone could store and process data that would take months to process in the old times.
That slowness/inertia acted as a law of nature, protecting us and our life from being mapped.
It's not just that data is collected or what data is collected... It's what it might be used for that should bother you. Not only what is used for today but also what it could be used for tomorrow.
Because the data is worth quite a bit of money - more than people realise, otherwise these companies would be paying us for it.
It is not about having your particular data. Is about the aggregated data of a population. On a shallow level that information can be used to engineer ads to appeal to a greater audience. On a deeper level, population dynamics can be used for nefarious purposes such as driving them to an agreement that wasn't in their best interest. Brexit and the Trump election are two examples of this being possible thanks to data from Cambridge Analytica. See voting paradoxes and Asimov's psychohistory that each day is getting farther from fictional.
Not to dispute your general points, but Cambridge Analytica’s actual effectiveness was shown to have been way overblown (as was RussiaGate in general).
Oh, so evil shit.
It's just sureal to me. Since they know I was up till 2:00am on a Wednesday wrenching my hog like there was a million dollars hidden inside Donald Trump was elected president.
okay wrenching my hog is a new one lmao
Yep, I only knew wrestle the chicken yet.
Absolute poetry.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The simple answer: the more they know about you the more money they can make by selling it.
this article has some insights on the value topic.
this Reddit post also has some good information regarding this subject.
Lastly, this scandal
I hope this helps, please feel to correct me if I’ve misunderstood something.
Yeah, it’s advertising. They want to be able to sell you clothes you’ll probably actually wear, video games you’ll actually play, etc. They probably don’t care about your google spell checks as much as they care about what posts you’re liking on your Instagram reels.
On one hand, it sucks to not really have that privacy. On the other hand, people act like if you don’t use a VPN for every single online service today that in 5 years data brokers will sell your exact address to the Islamic Jihad for ten dollars.
The Google spell checks are probably pretty big too because it gives them info on what you're thinking/writing about in that moment.
Well, true for some words. OP checking out how to spell “consistently” and me trying to figure out effect/affect for a specific case…. Probably less so.
Actually, both of those are indicative of educational attainment, social philosophy, probably political leaning….
It all comes down to targeted advertising. They'll cluster you and other people with similar interests in groups, determine statistic likelihoods of buying/using/subscribing to certain products or services, and then blow up every channel with stuff you might like.
Maybe a MILF hunter with mild dyslexia is exactly the right audience for cat food and entry level red wine?
The important part being that other companies are very willing to spend a lot of money on targeted advertising, enough to make up for all of the costs of the aggregated data plus a tidy amount of profit for the companies that collect the data.
Pick up habits, profiling so they can know what you are interested in and the areas you frequent to target you more efficiently. More likely for directed advertising but can also be for influencing.
The influencing aspect here is almost certainly tied into the drop of search engine efficacy recently. Big tech finally collected enough data from you and everyone you know to now be able to alter what answer you find for the question you asked. Wildly, this same question now generates different results depending on the profile they've assigned you. MullVads Total Surveillance paper published last October highlights this explicitly. This is why data collection matters, not due to ads, but the ability of Big Tech to change how you view the world. Your data impacts the search results you see, as well as everyone similar to you...
Edit: Here's the link to the MullVad paper https://mullvad.net/pdfs/Total_surveillance.pdf
Couldn't they just like, ask?
No. You'll tell them what you like, but you might not tell them what you can't look away from.
The latter is more useful for manipulating you into buying stuff or just spending more time on their platforms.
@Daft_ish Why go through the trouble of asking you when they can ask your browser who will tell them everything instantly and also knows you better than you ever will?
Pretty much this. Nothing is really holding them back from collecting data so its easier for them to do this in bulk. They do buy data as well from information brokers. Bigger companies usually have wider reachers to collect more. They have pretty much free range when we agree to use their products, forced or otherwise.
I assume because they have to pay for that shit
@Daft_ish If they are the ones who supplied your browser, they don't have to pay shit.
Some one has to pay. Facebook ain't making money selling me facebook.
@Daft_ish Facebook's making money selling *you* on Facebook. You are the raw material.
But like I'm saying. If you're buying me on Facebook you're going to be way disappointed.
Yea, it's a matter of statistics. Users are interested in different things and some are vastly more valuable than others. Do you impulse buy and have a trust fund that let's you burn tens of thousands of dollars a day? Well, much like a whale in Genshin Impact you're the one they're trying to hook... the rest of us just get swept up in case one of our niche interests is worth monetizing. When someone builds a Mage The Ascension video game with a script written by Terry Pratchett I will throw my wallet at them. Until that day I'm just an unprofitable data point.