How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services

http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/03/how-your-data-is-collected-and.html

by matthewwarren • 10 years ago

217 65 10 years ago

hodwik5• 10 years ago

He's on the right track, but absolutely wrong about where the bulk of this data comes from.

It's not shady "Take a free trip!" websites.

It's your Dominoes Pizza order, it's your trip to Target, it's everything you do. (A sales person for one of the big companies listed those specific groups, but said it was basically everyone.)

The big companies in the industry (LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters' CLEAR) buy everyone's data. Anything they can get their hands on.

As far as I can tell, everyone in the country's data is being stored; everywhere you have ever lived, all of your phone numbers, voting records, debts, legal history, marriages, past names and aliases, email addresses, everything.

It's all in a handful of huge private systems. Systems that were originally marketed to law enforcement agencies, but are now being shopped to private companies as well. Insant CheckMate is just a tiny tiny fraction of what is actually captured by these data brokers.

Source: You'll have to take my word for it.

Interesting tidbit -- They have alerts setup in the system; E.g. if you search for the wrong person you'll get a call from headquarters asking why you're pulling up Kanye West's home phone number, etc.

shostack• 10 years ago

There's a lot more (Axciom, Neustar, etc.). Just check out one of these Lumascapes--the data companies are slightly off to the right near the top in the DB Marketing, DMP and Marketing Data sections [1].

Advertisers and publishers can also sell this data directly on exchanges (a relatively new thing) like Adobe's Audience Marketplace [2].

[1] http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/marketing-technology-...

[2] https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/source-...

losteric• 10 years ago

If it's legal to sell, it's for sale. Credit cards definitely sell your info.

People also forget about "public data". Student organizations (sport tournaments, student bands, chess club, etc) and middle school/high school/college graduation lists are big ones for targeting young consumers. Facebook/Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg. Hyper-targeting is very real and companies know way more about you than you think.

Pay cash and be mindful of what data gets online.

* On a more positive note, I'm excited to see how digital personal assistants integrate this kind of data for personalization.

fweespee_ch3• 10 years ago

Source: You'll have to take my word for it.

Fwiw, I agree with you. ;)

Source: Someone tried to sell me this sort of thing once as part of an age verification service.

daodedickinson2• 10 years ago

Haha so why not sell this to dudebros worried about getting brought up on statutory rape charges? Or is there already an app for that?

state2• 10 years ago

OK, I'll take your word for it.

Everything I do is being tracked, recorded and passed around by companies big and small. Yep, got it.

Anyone care to speculate on how we actually change this situation? Or is it that there's really not much utility in privacy for most people, so we can just forget about it permanently. I realize that the paths to change are either regulatory or technical (and I find the latter more likely), but seriously: paint the picture.

Should we just accept this as the norm?

(edit: grammar)

bduerst7• 10 years ago

This isn't a popular question, but is there really a problem?

I've heard the big-brother nightmare scenario type answers before, but I'm curious to see how they are more likely to negatively affect me than a car accident or slipping in the shower.

Even with government agencies (NSA/FBI) overstepping or trying to overstep their limits, isn't the root problem with policy makers keeping them in line?

teaneedz• 10 years ago

Find an alternative to ad-supported business models maybe. Isn't much of this data used by/for the advertising industry?

9248• 10 years ago

Not accept, but adapt and learn to live with it.

I'm saying this because I don't see any solution. Our data can be sold. Our data can be 'shared' by our less educated friends,etc. Our data can be 'leaked' through all kinds of breaches/hacks/etc from both private companies or even governmental(incompetence, old software).

Treat our public records as public, as an interface to the outer word. Why do we think that our names, emails, phone numbers or addresses are private? What's the point of them being private?

p4wnc6• 10 years ago

It's not a dichotomy between being able to do something about it vs. not getting utility from privacy.

Privacy is extremely important. We get lots of utility from privacy and in fact require it to reach states of adequate mental and physical health.

But people with guns and money can prevent us from having it, despite how much utility it is, despite that it is considered a basic right, and regardless of whether we want to change it.

bigiain2• 10 years ago

Pay cash.

Use anonymous prepaid credit/gift cards (bought with cash) online.

Delete your cookies,

Browse in incognito.

Disable Javascript.

Block ads.

Don't install the social media app (and if you do, definitely don't give LinkedIn/Facebook/whoever unfettered access to your contact lists and email accounts!). Use the mobile website (in mobile Chrome, in incognito. Yeah, you'll have to log in more often...)

"Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art." - Hakim Bey, "Poetic Terrorism", T.A.Z, 1991

bsilvereagle• 10 years ago

everywhere you have ever lived, all of your phone numbers, voting records, debts, legal history, marriages, past names and aliases, email addresses, everything.

A lot of these things are publicly available from government entities. Voter records (available from sites like voterfind.com) include your address, and phone number in some locales. Marriage licenses are public record. If a debt goes to court, it becomes a public record. Any and all legal incidents are public record. Property taxes are public record.

majewsky4• 10 years ago

Depends on the law. Most or all of these examples are not public record in Germany.

hodwik5• 10 years ago

Yes, technically. In the US your SSN, your mother's maiden name, and all of your school records are public data under many circumstances.

That doesn't mean they get used or treated as such.

arafa• 10 years ago

A lot of how personal data is collected and sold is detailed in Bruce Schneier's "Data and Goliath" (http://www.amazon.com/Data-Goliath-Battles-Collect-Control/d...) and confirms what you're saying.

choosername2• 10 years ago

link to amazon

kinda ironic

webbore• 10 years ago

I saw a (I believe) 60 minutes story about WalMart a while ago and they stated they stored everything at line-item resolution for 2 years of sales. With their volume it's an amazing amount of data. UPDATE - did some quick googling and that was 10 years ago. I have no idea how big their DW is now (was 583 TB then)

hammock• 10 years ago

The one thing about Walmart though, and many of the largest retailers like Kroger, is that that market basket data is far too valuable to allow it into the hands of anyone else - and they won't/don't sell it.

Other smaller retailers, including Target and hundreds of others, will pool their transaction data into blind coops like Abacus, or syndicate it via companies like dunnhumby.

bigiain2• 10 years ago

That's true about "the bulk of the data ( … that is collected and comoditized by "free" websites … )" sense, but Troy's article is talking about a specific breach he'd been given and his investigation of it's providence. _This_ bunch of data had, with a fairly high degree of certainty, come from shady "Take a free trip!" websites. (Admittedly, the headline is misleading there, but that's typical of headlines...)

Gustomaximus• 10 years ago

I'd wouldn't say the bulk comes from large stores vs. 'win-a-trip' type sites. Its both. I buy these leads on a regular basis (many millions a year) and I'd say where the most comes from depends on country primarily. Also businesses like Dominoes typically dont sell identifiable customer data, they will often present your company as an offer either via EDM, newsletter or ever increasingly post-transaction via lead aggregators.

When Dominoes/Target type organisations do sell data it's typically done in a non-PII (personally identifiable information) format, for legal, ethical and brand reasons. This way companies can utilise the data do things like understand purchase personalities/habits by postcode type thing but they dont directly know who you are. There is another subset of companies that claim they can take this non-PII data and re-match it to people but I'm skeptical about how accurate this is.

Another an area not mentioned of personal darta storage that is every growing is programmatic media. In this ad servers attempt to identify you and call on stored information which is then used in a stock market like real-time environment to bid for ad views. Like when ads follow you around the internet, but for every sophisticated information/algorithmic rationale on who you are. Nothing nefarious but marketers want to show ads that are likely to be interesting and result in a sale (or other company goal).

jsonne• 10 years ago

This is pretty spot on. It's also good to note that marketers like me don't get your name and everything about you. We get anonymous and aggregated data. Eg. I have no idea if you John Doe personally buy dominos. I'm target 50k people that like dominos, also like cars, and live in the Bay Area.

hodwik5• 10 years ago

I disagree. From what I've seen, Dominoes and Target sell your PII to companies who make systems primarily marketed to law enforcement, but are also available to private companies.

stephengillie• 10 years ago

If you play games with Steam, someone is recording your play sessions. It's not actually much different from graphing when your Facebook friends are asleep[1].

Valve, being an NIH shop, use a UDP call instead of an API like most groups[2]. At a minimum, you can get the Steam name of every player on any server.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11130688

[2] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Server_queries

wiradikusuma• 10 years ago

Honest questions: How do you explain to your potential buyers (or govt agencies) when they ask you where you get the data from? "Various sources"?

I mean, sure, you can collect data however you want, but I don't think any legitimate business want it unless you collected it legitimately. Or am I wrong?

TheCartographer• 10 years ago

He says it in the article but it walkways bears repeating: if you aren't the customer, you're the product.

guelo• 10 years ago

No, even if you are the customer, say at a supermarket, they're still going to take your purchase data and sell it. Supermarkets are especially sneaky, they'll charge you extra if you refuse to be tracked via a "loyalty" card, and then they market that extortion as savings!

ross-life• 10 years ago

Ha, I don't use loyalty cards because of the tracking but I never thought of the price difference that way, it makes sense.

pravda• 10 years ago

Supermarkets will give you as many 'loyalty' cards as you want. And you can put false info on them.

I assume they can still track your purchases by credit card #.

textaural• 10 years ago

I have found https://donottrack-doc.com [made by the NFB] to be helpful in thinking about data collection. If I have time at the end of this semester I'll be taking my first-year students through the first episode.

mirimir2• 10 years ago

Just disappear. Gradually, a little at a time. Diversify identities. Take your friends with you. Make it a game. Many games. What's left public is just the boring stuff. Make it as normal and unremarkable as possible.

bgar• 10 years ago

I've toyed with the idea of vanishing completely, but nowadays employers often want to see a web presence.... if it weren't for that, and the convenience of Facebook Messenger, I might have disappeared already.

I was just thinking about how since one usually uses the same identity for many different accounts and interests online, it would be very easy to find someone by looking for people that match those specific sets of interests. You would have to make separate identities for every sort of interest, and never mention the other from a different profile.

mirimir2• 10 years ago

Well, most people on Facebook just share links. So it's not hard to look normal. Maybe a little more boring than most, but hey, you work hard and all ;)

If you're going to use multiple identities, they shouldn't have overlapping interests, or common friends, accounts, etc, etc. And they shouldn't ever refer to each other. However, it's fine to have a bunch of identities that break all of those rules, just for the fun of it. You have unassociated clouds of associated identities.

Dig into Mirimir, if you're interested. There are several more-or-less associated identities. Some of them are obvious. Some would take a little work to find. But then, Mirimir is just a relatively superficial pseudonym.

gcb0• 10 years ago

most other countries listed have laws that completely drop the "we can sell your data" clause on the site.

If you can find a presence of the company in such countries (and for most you have to provide some sort of tax id to buy national domain sulfix) then you can enter unique data there, and call a lawyer. profit.

How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services

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