I left the ad industry because of data tracking

https://www.fastcompany.com/90359992/an-ad-tech-pioneer-on-where-our-data-economy-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it

by Ygg2 • 7 years ago

342 233 7 years ago

dvfjsdhgfv• 7 years ago

There are many reasonable proposals in the article but they are only wishful thinking: there is no way the USA passes a law similar to GDPR, no matter what people want and how many similar articles appear.

scarejunba• 7 years ago

Well, we'll see what CCPA looks like by the end. If someone else makes a different law then a federal law will come so as to harmonize the requirements. If no one else makes a different law, CCPA will become a de facto federal law because you ignore California to your own detriment.

luckylion7• 7 years ago

As for GDPR: at least in Germany it's problematic. Our system typically relies on competitors to enforce law abidance in companies (so called "Abmahnungen" based on the "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb", UWG for short, a set of laws regarding unlawful competition). One court recently ruled that GDPR violations don't fall under those laws (https://www.datenschutzbeauftragter-info.de/landgericht-stut...).

That leaves us with: - reporting violations to the officials. They are chronically understaffed, have little technical expertise and it takes months to years for them to act. They are very hesitant to hand out fines, but theoretically can. - individual citizens suing a company to force them to abide by the law. This is rare because the citizen will have to cough up the money to go to court, and even if he wins, the company will only be forced to abide by the laws regarding this citizen, not in general. - publicly shaming companies into compliance.

A higher court might have different opinions, and I very much hope they will, because GDPR quickly becomes meaningless without enforcement.

Edit: I have literally no idea why this is downvoted. Unless it's just because you personally don't like me, please leave a comment explaining what is incorrect.

icebraining2• 7 years ago

Unless the site is only available to German users, you should be able to file a complain with any of EU member state regulators, and not all are so timid as that.

NOYB, the non-profit org founded by Max Schrems, has already been filing complaints with the French, Austrian, Belgian and German authorities: https://noyb.eu/

Vagantem• 7 years ago

Had a similar experience - worked in a big ad agency who hired a new web-developer for one of our clients. As they are one of the biggest website providers, they could identify most of the people that visited a client's site - it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.

user178436• 7 years ago

it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.

Please share more information.

Did that require the user to be logged into FB?

zed88• 7 years ago

Here is a hint

https://docs.fullcontact.com/#enrich-api

everdrive6• 7 years ago

Another very frustrating article about advertising. I don't doubt any of his conclusions, or his moral claims. But, I do want more details. What are the various tracking and correlation mechanisms, what do they look like practically? Does anyone actually really use canvas the way we all fear, or are smartphone apps and Android itself doing all the heavy lifting? Would a user's privacy settings in their phones mitigated any of this? Why or why not?

I appreciate that we know in general what the answers to some of these questions might be, but I'd really like if more of these articles got into specifics.

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

That the ad industry tries to justify its data harboring with questionable consent is certainly a factor.

Ads mostly suck, that is why people have blockers and why those are so successful.

If I do not want to get tracked or targeted by ads, I have to jump through many hoops that are not manageable by average users. This is why I plainly hate this industry.

I don't really care about your models, while they might provide interesting data, I do not want to be part of it.

Oh, and the ad industry is currently in the process of sanitizing the larger platforms, because you do not want to be associated with losers. It is the great ad industry we are talking about. I don't like them because of that too.

These are the larger issues that prevent useful discussion about specific tracking mechanisms.

mobjack• 7 years ago

Tracking still mainly relies on unique identifiers on cookies and mobile apps.

The main thing I see fingerprinting used for is tracking users between mobile apps and websites. That mainly relies on IP addresses.

The best way to track users is just to ask for information. Ask for a users email address to log in and you have a simple means to track a user across devices.

ohitsdom• 7 years ago

Does anyone actually really use canvas the way we all fear

I think I missed something, what do you mean by this? Are there some data leaking privacy concerns with HTML canvas elements?

everdrive6• 7 years ago

My understanding is that websites use Canvas to generate a unique or semi-unique fingerprint of your browser, whether or not a cookie has been set. It's absolutely true that this is technically possible. Most people don't have your exact resolution/cpu speed/fonts installed/etc, so you are somewhat unique even if you have the same browser and OS as other people. If you block Canvas, you can actually see some websites request it as you log in. Amazon produces a popup asking permission to do canvas-y things during the login progress on my computer, for instance.

I think the tone of most of the conversations around Canvas I've seen are a bit more catastrophic. Their argument usually goes something like: "Most websites are making UUIDs of your Canvas profile and tracking you everywhere, and therefore your cookie blocking and VPN are useless!" Bear in mind, I don't mean to strawman here, that's just a version of the argument I see most often.

What I personally suspect is that Canvas fingerprinting is used to supplement other tracking or verification. For example, I have a valid amazon account, an Amazon cookie is properly set, and Amazon also checks my Canvas information to make sure nothing looks too out place. ie, my cookie was probably not replayed since my Canvas, IP address, and credentials check out. Presumably, my Canvas information cannot generate a true UUID, but it is something like 1 in 10,000. Enough to use it for additional verification.

Now, is any of this correct? Are folks' most paranoid fears accurate? Is my belief that Canvas is supplementary fraud detection accurate? Whatever answer is correct, it's unlikely to be broadly uniform across all websites. But, the point is, I'd really like to hear from an engineer about how Canvas is used.

zeristor• 7 years ago

The Pwned website shows you which websites your account details have been leaked for.

Is there one to show you what the ad industry has on you, and perhaps how it can by it?

If people had insight to this for how much longer would this be a problem?

I imagine there’s a website that does this which was launched five years ago.

user178436• 7 years ago

the thing is, in theory all of this data is pseudonymous, or even anonymous, as the industry creates all of these profiles and does not attach real names to it.

A2017U1• 7 years ago

Even government departments trying their very best to anonymise data tend to mess it up, what makes you think an advertising company has any interest in doing the same? Their entire existence is built upon deanonymising and monetising that data.

scottlocklin• 7 years ago

Depends who it is; there was definitely a "my real name" interplay between ebay, facebook and amazon, leaked by facebook. I don't even use a "smart phone."

I mean, even without originating an actual ID, how many bits do you think it takes to uniquely identify you in your geo? It wouldn't take much in the way of resources to track everyone in the US who uses the internet; a few trackers on popular websites, localization services: I'd be shocked if there weren't things like this in existence already for bail bondsmen/private investigator types.

geocar3• 7 years ago

This is not true.

Many many companies in this industry attach real names and email addresses to this data, and even the ones that aim for pseudonymity do it typically in a very weak way (such as an unsalted md5 hash).

user178436• 7 years ago

I have yet to see a real whistleblower report by someone deep into the ad industry revealing whats really going on there. There are almost no details about what's really happening on a technical level (beyond the little things we already know), and whether large data sets are abused in the sense that they get routinely de-anonymised.

otabdeveloper34• 7 years ago

There's nothing to whistleblow.

Advertising is applied sociology. As such, advertisers want to aggregate large data sets into large segments that are easy to manipulate statistically. (Where the central limit theorem starts working.)

There is no demand for personal data or de-anonymization because that stuff doesn't sell.

The personal data collection is done by Google, Facebook at al not for advertising purposes. They're collecting it because they view it as a resource and a currency in the future de-anonymized world. (Think China's "social capital" except on a larger scale.)

Source: I've worked in the ad industry for over 15 years.

everdrive6• 7 years ago

I think in some circles the meaning of the term "whistle-blowing" has drifted enough that people use it interchangeably with "reveal."

Given your 15 years of experience, what resources do you recommend to HN so that we can learn more? Can you give us a "life of an advertising bit," eg: A person visits a website on their phone, that information is accompanied by x data on their phone, goes to the initial ad server, this information is compiled against data from sources a,b,c, etc ...

user178436• 7 years ago

My question to someone from the ad-industry would be if there are known "intersections" between these anonymised data sets ad-tech is using to sell as much as possible, and companies who buy these data-sets to connect them to real identities.

Especially because the web is full of Privacy notices people agree to, and I guess in some of those people actually agree to have their anonymous browsing data connected to their real identities.

cik2e2• 7 years ago

There is no demand for personal data or de-anonymization because that stuff doesn't sell.

Say what?? I’ve also worked in the ad industry and deanonymized personal data is shared and sold routinely. You speak of statistics and large segments but every advertiser I’ve interacted with is either doing individual-level targeting or striving towards it.

ramraj07• 7 years ago

This comes from discussions and lectures from people working on engineering in some ad aggregstors - at least one said that in the end, they have a table with 300 million IDs for each person in the country and they key all the data they can link to that person with this id. In principle this data is annonymized. But does that make a difference? At least in health care people worry about hipaa and do audits to minimize reidentification risk but I'm not sure if adtech companies do anything like that. So yes, a good data scientist can find any person they want from the data but even otherwise I think these companies can work on a fairly meaningless definition of annonymization to get away with all this crap.

adrianN• 7 years ago

It's basically impossible to anonymize data. There a numerous papers about how little data is enough to uniquely identify people. Things like the zipcode where you start your commute and the zipcode where your commute ends are enough to identify the vast majority of people.

geocar3• 7 years ago

What the author is referring to is usually branded, so it's difficult for people on the sales side to give details without revealing who it is unless you're in the weeds (technically), and I'm sure you can appreciate why they might not want to, so here's the gist:

- Companies collect a number of "records" keyed to an email address. How they do this varies from running microsites/forms that collect data directly from people, to scraping linkedIn and resumes.

- Data vendors will share this data with each other by hashing the email address. Almost always with md5, and rarely salted.

This means you can enrich data both anonymously (by relying on the fact the email address is unsalted) or in an identifying way (because one of the parties has the real email address). In both cases, it's just a LEFT JOIN.

username4443• 7 years ago

It's much worse than that.

I've been approached by a company that trades e-commerce transaction data, for personal data tied to IPs.

As in, you give me your customer data, and I'll tell you who visited your site based solely on the IP address.

We declined, but it's tempting.

tomrod3• 7 years ago

I worked some in marketing and targeting modeling within retail finance.

From what I saw, the data privacy rules and client contracts are followed scrupulously, and infractions are noted and remediated. Encryption slowed us down at least 10X,and bureaucracy another 10X.

While frustrating at times, I appreciated that most if not all actually wanted to stay well within the legal guardrails.

Of course, this is one person's experience, and obviously can't apply to every company. Genie and cork, toothpaste, and all that.

titzer3• 7 years ago

legal guardrails

What many companies do is they sprinkle some magic "anonymous" pixie dust on their data and then tons of laws no longer apply, even if the data is trivially identifiable stuff. And location data is often of that nature.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

I have yet to see a real whistleblower report by someone deep into the ad industry revealing whats really going on there.

Its because nobody cares until Congress starts hauling in software developers and "data scientists" from tech startups, everyone is content watching Zuckerberg be the face of society's discontent.

As long as they keep asking the wrong people the wrong questions there is no need for everyone else to acknowledge their role in the problem.

mrhappyunhappy• 7 years ago

Any company that offers “lead enrichment “ data has already crossed the privacy line. Google that term to see the companies involved if you care to know.

titzer3• 7 years ago

We need to stand up and demand that all devices capable of surveillance run only open source software. Period.

jefftk2• 7 years ago

Open source doesn't fix much. Most ad tracking today happens via well understood open technology, and then adtech companies build profiles server side. Here's something very simple and fully opensourceable that would still provide lots of tracking capability:

* Get lots of sites to put an img tag that references your site, perhaps by paying them a tiny amount per visitor

* When you get a request, assign a cookie if there isn't one. Log the cookie and the referrer.

* Sort your logs by cookie. Each cookie represents someone's browsing history, and the more complete your distribution of pixels is the more complete your view is.

You can opt out of this client side by blocking the requests (adblocker) or by using a browser that blocks 3rd party cookies (ex: Safari) but open source doesn't do much here.

thedevilslawyer• 7 years ago

In the parent post's defense, open source would actually allow for looking at exactly what data is sent how. And hold the companies accountable. This would be dead easy, without the need for whistle-blowing, or reverse engineering

titzer3• 7 years ago

At the basic level, you have no idea what the system software is gathering from sensors, like the accelerometer, barometer, GPS, wifi signals, etc, how it is processed, and how often it is sent, and to whom. After you find out how that works, then the next logical step is to ask just what the heck the other side is doing with it.

datenhorst• 7 years ago

As a citizen of the EU, I really want to find out what the advertising industry has on me. I once filed a GDPR Art. 5 request with Quantcast but forgot about it - they give you a link to S3 with a promise that there will be a ZIP containing data within 30 days.

What other hidden players are out there? I know next to nothing about the ad industry

kasey_junk3• 7 years ago

IAB Europe is the industry group representing ad tech in Europe. Their member list will give you tons of organizations that makeup the internet ad ecosystem. Note these are not “hidden” they are the above board members. Shady operators likely have no interest in joining industry groups but if they want to be able to credibly sell to big advertisers they will be.

https://www.iabeurope.eu/membership/member-directory/

DoctorMckay• 7 years ago

Any tips for a fellow curious European who wants to fill one of those with his ISP? Like, how do I start?

jccalhoun4• 7 years ago

What are they doing with all this data tracking because it sure isn't giving me relevant ads. In addition to the often noted situation where you buy something online and then get ads for that thing you already bought, I routinely see totally irrelevant ads and recommendations.

I've been on Facebook since around 2003. I've had an Amazon account for even longer. Their ads and recommendations for me are terrible.

Two recent examples from facebook: they recommended I join a group for progressive christian asian-americans. I am not christian or of asian descent. More recently they gave me an ad for maximizing tax right offs for nannies. I have no children and make way too little to even consider hiring a nanny.

Facebook has my picture. They know my relationship status. They have the text of all my posts where I have never mentioned children. They even know my occupation. Whatever they are doing with this data isn't working.

DougBTX• 7 years ago

I wonder how much of this is a scam on the advertisers too, sure the platform might have great detail for targeting ads, but if someone comes along and outbids on generic terms it isn’t going to do you much good as an advertiser either.

nerdponx6• 7 years ago

Judging from some of the comments I've seen here, quite a lot.

DailyHN3• 7 years ago

Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops.

Source: I setup Google Analytics event tracking to trigger on every page click.

Edit: change 10% to 5%. And it's actually only 2.5% over the past 14 days.

Edit2: and that was from ~200 clicks over 14 days.

kgwxd• 7 years ago

Relevant ads were never the goal, it's just the least creepy sounding excuse for spying.

rfrey• 7 years ago

What is the goal then, for profit seeking advertising companies like Google and Facebook?

drdeadringer2• 7 years ago

Relevant ads were never the goal

That, then, is "targeted advertising" against this non-goal?

vmurthy2• 7 years ago

I am curious given that I have an Ad-blocker for most websites and am not on FB. How do you even see ads? Have FB et al found a workaround for ad-blockers?

Jackim2• 7 years ago

I have uBlock origin and I still occasionally see ads in Facebook feeds.

Scoundreller2• 7 years ago

Mobile? Hard to block in-app ads without a pi-hole.

I avoid apps where I can, but it’s not always avoidable/practical.

Or at work if you’re forbidden from installing “unapproved” software.

jccalhoun4• 7 years ago

Facebook spends a lot of time making it hard to block ads on their site. I have turned off adblocking for the site because it is often ineffective for me and sometimes breaks things on the site.

Scoundreller2• 7 years ago

online and then get ads for that thing you already bought

Try getting ads for the thing you just sold and needed to copy the specs into an ad.

pixelrevision• 7 years ago

No but if you spend a bit of time you can finesse a system. I’ve been not using Facebook for a while but a few years ago I noticed they had “likes” and “see more of this” so I liked as much Cthulhu related ads as I could find and my ads pretty quickly looked like they were being served from carcosa.

I suspect that we will not ever see all this information actually give us better ads. The people in charge of this sort of stuff typically just want to get more clients so they are happy to inflate. The problem I see is that there is a whole lot of personal data being sent around all over the place to fly by night companies with no incentive to protect it.

xfitm32• 7 years ago

Ad targeting is intentionally fuzzy to avoid creeping you out. Companies like Acxiom have an incredible amount of data on you.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

pessimizer• 7 years ago

A friend of mine worked for Acxiom, and when they looked themselves up they found 6-7 different profiles, all fantastically wrong, some clearly mixed with information from other people.

Admittedly it's a very private person that I'm talking about who deliberately obscures themselves by leaving incorrect or misspelled information when forced to give any information, and who moves, switches jobs often, has an odd name, and changed that odd name through marriage. But I think that a lot of us are falling for the marketing of these intelligence companies, rather than judging them by predictive effectiveness because we don't have any access to that.

There's no real theory of mind behind all of this stuff; it seems to be that it will only ultimately be effective for creating black/whitelists where you don't care about a lot of false positives.

drdeadringer2• 7 years ago

to avoid creeping you out

I assume in terms of "how did they know this about me?" a la Tom Cruise being advertised a particular brand of alcohol based on an automatic eye-scan whilst walking through a public space ["Minority Report"].

I used to be "creeped out" about this about 10 years ago. Now-a-days I am not.

To be honest, a part of me wants this type of thing. I'm all for exploring knew products and "discovery" and so forth. However, if the "Check out this product you just bought" problem could be solved, I'd be chips in for "Hi User, check out this neighbouring product" should that actually be relevant; Amazon is almost OK for example, but that's an "almost ok".

Extreme Example: If I don't drive and have less than zero interest in sports cars, why would or should I get ads for a Ferrari? Today, I have no doubt I'd receive such an ad for somebody's giggles on the penny. Tomorrow, I dream not to.

stareatgoats• 7 years ago

Facebook doesn't send you the ads, advertisers do. And they are (usually) terrible at segmenting.

mihaifm• 7 years ago

Watched some Youtube yesterday, it kept showing me the same freaking ad for like 20 times in a row. Sometimes I get the same 2-3 ads for weeks at a time. Not sure what's the idea, if you're going to show ads at least make it a barable experience, it's almost as if they're trying to trigger some breaking point.

jccalhoun4• 7 years ago

If I see an add for Good Omens while trying to watch something on twitch on my tv I am going to flip a table.

parliament323• 7 years ago

Same experience, it's not clear if it's just one advertiser blowing a lot of cash at once, or Google deciding I really need whatever product, but man oh man when I hit one of those ad loops it puts me off of that product forever.

The most recent was Grammarly, for about a month straight 80% of the video ads Youtube showed me were the same two Grammarly ads going back and forth. I'm not sure why Google decided that I really need to fix my grammar... but I know sure as shit I'll never have anything to do with Grammarly, ever.

PaulHoule• 7 years ago

It amazes me that this story doesn't get more press.

The press thinks that Outbrain and Tabooleh are such geniuses, but they show the same ads they've shown for five years that everyone I know has learned not to click on. (e.g. if you do click on one promising to see some kind of images the one image you won't see when you click is what is promised.)

username4443• 7 years ago

Facebook isn't targeting you. The advetisers are.

Facebook's real sin is a garbage UI meant to confuse advertisers into spending money on audiences that don't align with the advertiser. Google is much, much worse with this.

The bid system means that the Christian Asians didn't do a good targeting job, and nobody else found you valuable enough to bid on, so the Christian Asians won the bid. You got served a penny ad because nobody else wanted to show you one.

rrrx32• 7 years ago

I work in Ad Tech. This is on target.

The user was lumped into a poorly-constructed lookalike audience because of some stretched interest similarities.

What you're experiencing is the confluence of two distinct issues:

1. The CTRs on digital advertising are dropping YoY. People DO NOT click on ads, even if they are saliently targeted. There are enough trash ads out there, there's so much malware and malfeasance in the ecosystem, that it's worthwhile for users to at best _ignore_ and at worst (for advertisers) _to block ads totally_.

2. The desire to target people that match specific criteria is rising because of misguided notions throughout the advertising and marketing industry. This has driven the entire industry to push machine learned modeling to find each and every set of eyeballs out there to try and justify spend, instead of offering worthwhile and valuable offers that compel consumers to interact. You have entire systems constructed on the notion that the more people you get an ad in front of, the more valuable it is, and agencies and trading desk operators that are looking at this as the sole KPI to focus on, to the detriment of everyone involved.

55555• 7 years ago

Facebook makes the data available to advertisers who are then responsible for targeting you well based on that data. If the advertiser makes terrible targeting decisions but offers a high bid for a click, then despite your low CTR and low conversion rate, you'll see the ad. Facebook is not choosing which ads you see. (The recommendations, sure.)

Theodores• 7 years ago

I think the technical term for these ads that stalk you after you have bought the product is 'remarketing'.

Amazon should know what they are doing but they do the ads of what you have just bought, even though they have good information. No idea what their excuse is for fluffing it.

However, with small companies, e.g. a clothes shop, they don't do the website necessarily themselves, getting an agency to do it. When they get to a certain size they bring this work on house, but the principles of cock up are the same, in the agency or in house.

The agency doing the website have extra add on services for SEO, remarketing and other marketing snake oil. The people in these jobs are not the sort that can do database joins. They use products that have been marketed at them and generally work on second hand hearsay to determine what works, even though they do use graphs and data.

They are not necessarily going to know the products and even though they buy adverts they do not see themselves as in the advertising game, more in the marketing field.

The internet has raised everyone's boats over the last few years so these people can have some legit upward pointing graphs, what is less clear is whether it is demand, price or product that has got their clients online sales up. However, they can claim it is all their work and that the campaigns they have put on have changed something assumed to be static.

On this snake oil they can attract new clients to bring them marketing spend. They try their hardest but they are not data power users. I know that is tarring a whole industry with the same brush, but the people in this industry will be 'power Excel users' rather think to become 'novice SQL users'.

To be honest logging in to some of these Facebook account screens is quite hard work, going through the right channels to get the login details from the client can take all day. Uploading data probably needs help from a developer on a different team, plus you have to go home at 5.30 on the dot.

People that are good at selling product believe in customer service, word of mouth, product and a multitude of things that are a million miles away from remarketing. So the industry of online ad sales invariably has hit and miss results because the people in the business are unlikely to be that smart.

the_watcher• 7 years ago

Just curious, did you go to Harvard with Zuck? That's the only way you could have been on Facebook that long, as he only created the earliest version in fall 2003.

jccalhoun4• 7 years ago

I just checked. It looks like my earliest post was in October of 2007. Sorry!

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

It seems like a fundamentally difficult problem to know when you've already bought something.

Obviously, it's solvable in simple cases, like when you browse and buy from the same vendor. But in other cases, it's not, like if you browse around multiple places and buy from one, or if you look around online and buy in person.

Basically, the information that you're interested in buying is going to spread around to certain places, and the information that you've bought is also going to spread around, but there is nothing to guarantee that it will percolate to all the same places.

You also have to consider the trade-off an advertiser faces. They'd probably rather show an irrelevant (already bought) ad than miss a chance to show a relevant one to someone who is still actively shopping. So they'd probably choose to err on that side.

newsoul2019• 7 years ago

Amazon knows. Google knows too, if your Amazon emails went to your Gmail account. Your credit card company has a good idea of who you bought from, but not what.

m4632• 7 years ago

On relevant ads.

You see ads from companies with the most to gain from getting to your eyeballs.

These companies are not the ones you are interested in, who will probably get your business anyway.

nerdponx6• 7 years ago

Good, as software engineers, machine learning researchers, etc. we have the real power here. Just stop working for these companies. There are jobs and good incomes to be had in other industries. Tell recruiters you are not interested in ad industry.

luckylion7• 7 years ago

Somebody else will work for them though. While I'm not saying "so it might as well be you" (unless you're going undercover), "not doing it" might not be enough. Actively undermining their efforts may be necessary.

britch• 7 years ago

Actively undermining is good! Specifically fighting for new regulations and laws around this issue.

I think people in tech have an obligation around this. We understand it better than most people. It's our responsibility to explain it in ordinary terms and champion reigning it in.

nerdponx6• 7 years ago

This is literally what collective action is for.

2Ccltvcm2• 7 years ago

Hedge funds and intelligence agencies are fingerprinting all groups within our society by monitoring the responses of various target audiences to engineered stimuli. This comes in the form of observing the response to selective dissemination of content with a known effect on observers (you). A few years ago we heard about some outrage nobody did anything about when it became clear Facebook was manipulating reader emotional depression by showing some groups engineered posts. This has become a higher dimensional problem since then. It is no longer just "Facebook is making some groups of people sad." Now these orgs are reinforcing complex concepts in our minds subconsciously. One that comes to mind is a motif you will see in advertisements once you are more aware of it: strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male. The whole point is to exploit fracture points in society and shift the overton window. Being able to establish behavioral patterns triggered by engineered information dissemination helps them control groups of people for their own benefit. It's a psychological intelligence operation on an unprecedented scale. Hedge funds stay ahead of new trends to invest in to maximize ROI. Intelligence agencies similarly identify threats to their power structures and steer the minds of the consumers of social media to further their agenda and steer the beliefs of any group in a controlled direction.

nycdatasci• 7 years ago

Your post is also an attempt to “reinforce complex concepts in our minds subconsciously” isn’t it? The entire field of marketing is an attempt to influence people to engage in a particular behavior. Why single out hedge funds and intelligence agencies?

2Ccltvcm2• 7 years ago

The difference is those have the power to make dissidents vanish and make it seem like everything is perfect.

overthemoon3• 7 years ago

This is paranoid. I remember the story about Facebook doing emotional manipulation through the feed, but you go from there to hyper rich hedge funds and shadowy intelligence agencies at the reins of public life shaping the course of history through social media black magic. I don't doubt there are bad actors trying to do bad things via advertising and social media, but this is quite the claim. The rich and powerful are bad enough without adding internet/advertising mediated mind control to the mix.

It's weird that the story you picked was a black man saving a white woman to describe the shift of the Overton Window. Where is the window moving to, and from where?

somatic5• 7 years ago

I don’t know about you, but the Snowden Revelations dramatically shifted my baseline of “paranoid schizo”. Before, I thought the prospect utterly bananas that “the government” was tapping every phone call, strong-arming ISPs, and intercepting mail en route to its destination.

Then I found myself in a rabbit hole of Tuskegee experiments, Operation Northwoodses, MKULTRAs, human-animal hybrids, and so on.

Now, the question I ask is, “is this technologically possible?”

YUMad8• 7 years ago

It is weird that he comments on that, and not that it's become the most advertised interracial coupling even tho IRL it's the 2nd least common interracial coupling?

Or are you just trying to ad-hominem him?

MisterBastahrd• 7 years ago

When I was a developer for a publisher, I could choose the race, gender, interests, location, and career of people to target my ads with. As long as my ads didn't explicitly break their TOSes, I was good to go. You don't have to be rich and powerful to gain influence over people. A modest budget will give you this access, because the rich and powerful will sell the access to you. They aren't even necessarily interested in using it directly, because there's more money to be made and less regulatory pressure if they're middlemen.

colordrops• 7 years ago

this is paranoid

Please don't label a paragraph of text with a trite insult. Just address the argument.

orbat• 7 years ago

"strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male."

Yeah, that… really doesn't sound as common a theme as you imply

Simon_says• 7 years ago

It must be common in 2Ccltvcm's feed. Maybe the algorithm knows him a little too well.

YUMad8• 7 years ago

It is not common IRL, black male + white female is the 2nd least common interracial coupling.

However, without going into who's pushing it, it is significantly more common in media than IRL.

trophycase2• 7 years ago

Maybe not the black male part. But the "competent woman" and "bumbling helpless male" is an extremely common TV commercial trope once you're paying attention.

low_poly_shiba• 7 years ago

Did a double take when I got to the white supremacist anxiety part

0x262d• 7 years ago

lol yep! what's sad about this is that I totally believe that fb is doing pretty manipulative things - they have the biggest incentive in the world to get people to buy things - and that it is probably adjacent to the level of manipulation this person is talking about. but then instead of realizing that for-profit companies are bad, some alienated people start thinking "maybe race mixing is the problem" instead, project that onto ads, and that's how you get white nationalism.

ikeyany2• 7 years ago

One that comes to mind is a motif you will see in advertisements once you are more aware of it: strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male.

Ads are generally tailored to the user's preferences.

trophycase2• 7 years ago

Good joke but I think this applies mostly to TV advertising

Frondo• 7 years ago

HN Admins: it's a bad look to leave a bit of white supremacist angst in one of the top comments of a thread on the front page.

"strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male"

I've already flagged the comment, but hopefully others will do so too; this kind of stuff really sticks out on a "hackers" forum.

grzm• 7 years ago

If you want to bring something to the attention of the mods, it's most expedient to email them using the Contact link in the footer.

Paradigma11• 7 years ago

I would start taking these kind of arguments more seriously if Amazon stopped sending me washing machine ads AFTER i already bought one on Amazon. No, i am not becoming a washing mashine aficianado.

You choose to believe the advertisments of advertising companies about their own power and efficacy. That these are dystopian to you is not relevant.

Hermitian909• 7 years ago

I see the line of "they showed me an ad for X after I bought one on their site!" thrown around a lot as a sign of incompetence, but the fact you made the purchase recently actually makes you a good target demographic.

You wanted some good and paid money for it. There's is now a real chance that the good you bought did not meet your needs, it broke it sucks, etc. If so, you're a prime target for these ads. If it broke you're probably looking for a new brand, or maybe it just isn't that great and you're considering returning the item and making a new purchase. While you may not need one you're part of a demographic that responds well to these ads relative the rest of the population.

sj3k• 7 years ago

strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male.

just why? every damn thread on this site these days has some racist bs.Youre projecting real hard.

jiveturkey2• 7 years ago

i think you are severely underestimating the advertising "craft". it's insidious in ways exactly like this.

hmhrex4• 7 years ago

Me and a few other people have been pushing for ethical advertising. It doesn't have to be this way.

We meet monthly to give each other advice and help each other out. It's hard, it can take more time, but it's been a great experience, and I hope that this starts to become the norm over time.

Here's the group:

- Eric Berry with CodeFund (https://codefund.io)

- David Fischer with ReadTheDocs (https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/advertising/ethical-ad...)

- Roberto Galoppini with Filezilla (https://filezilla-project.org/ethical_ads.php)

- Harley Hicks (Me) with RoutineHub (https://routinehub.co/ads)

AllegedAlec• 7 years ago

- Harley Hicks (Me) with RoutineHub (https://routinehub.co/ads)

Heads up: in Firefox Quantum 67, when I attempt to open your page in a new tab, it instantly closes again.

hmhrex4• 7 years ago

I use Firefox as my main driver and just tested this, and it does exactly as you're saying. Thanks, I'll take a look.

taormina2• 7 years ago

I absolutely love this. Have y'all been collecting your advice? I'd love to learn what has and hasn't worked so far for your projects.

hmhrex4• 7 years ago

I've been trying to do a monthly report on the RH blog, but I'm behind by a couple months. I've actually been thinking more about how to get more info about this. If you have any specific questions, I can try and answer them for you or bring them back to the others.

fumar2• 7 years ago

The whole thing is an ad for a new service.

headsoup• 7 years ago

Seems so. I also find it interesting that people have sudden moral realisations working in industries designed not to be morally respectful.

Ad industry is about convincing people to buy things they don't want using any trick available, the result here is entirely predictable and inevitable.

rchaud• 7 years ago

These days I expect nothing less from these "mea culpa" type of articles.

TimMurnaghan• 7 years ago

This became obvious a few years ago. I went to a startup pitch event (actually to get pointers on how to write my own) and was genuinely horrified at what all of the ad-tech guys were up to. There is no reason to assume any moderation or morals here. The naked greed of surveillance capitalism is such that all of the precautions that might have looked like the province of tinfoil hat wearers are now justified.

jstewartmobile• 7 years ago

This whole "article" is a slimy, PR-firm-injected ad. Hell would freeze over before I touched this guy's "privacy" "filter" with a 10-foot pole.

throwayEngineer4• 7 years ago

Edit, remember not to shoot the people asking questions

I'm not sure why that data is so horrifying. I work a job that I willing put on Facebook, and I live in a house i am a registered voter at.

You can probably guess my route to work.

I'm unsure why this is bad, it sounds more useless than anything.

majewsky3• 7 years ago

Ah, the old "I have nothing to hide". Just one of many obvious rebuttals: We need to be a large anonymous crowd to protect those among us most in need of anonymity: whistleblowers, activists, stalking victims, to name a few.

throwayEngineer4• 7 years ago

Hmm a stalking victim could not use Android / Google maps.

This sounds like potential for profit.

Interesting.

I'm assuming this already exists but 95% of people don't need it?

michaelt2• 7 years ago

Location data tells me how often you go to the gun shop and the shooting range, when your house is empty, which political protests you go to, how often you visit the pharmacy/doctor, what prostitutes you visit, what gay bars you visit, how often you break the speed limit, how much sleep you get, when you visit your lawyer or your STD clinic, whether you've kept up going to Alcoholics Anonymous, what restaurants you go to and how often, how often you're late for work, and how often you visit your grandma.

I'm not an Iranian gay gun owner, but I still have a problem with an advertising company assembling a database of Iranian gay gun owners.

throwayEngineer4• 7 years ago

Why?

Don't you want to hear your different lawyer options, STD check options, gun options, alcohol help, etc?

Or rather, would you rather have useful advertisement or spammy advertisement?

I still could not relate that those would be bad. The only thing I can imagine is blackmail. Which is cultural and not moral.

SPGWhistler2• 7 years ago

This is fear mongering. I work in the ad industry as well - and I can promise you - 99% of the companies in the ad industry are NOT leading the way when it comes to tracking you and your data. They are incompetent and can barely do their jobs. Just take a look at any display advertising for belly fat ads and you know for sure they aren't targeting you. The 1% however (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) ARE tracking you and are damn good at it. Google and Apple being the main offenders here, due to their cell phones. And when you browse around the web you WILL see those ads following you. But as much as it sounds terrifying - there just isn't much of a market for geo tracking individuals. Targeted ads aren't the enemy here anyway - its governments using this data in ways the infringe on our freedoms that is the issue. (Like freedom of press, for example....) And THIS is what we should be worried about.

To be clear: It is not the ad industry we have an issue with here. It is the data collectors - Google - Apple - Facebook. They are the irresponsible parties at fault.

enraged_camel• 7 years ago

> 99% of the companies in the ad industry are NOT leading the way when it comes to tracking you... The 1% however (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook)

This representation by percentages is a bit disingenuous. Yes, numbers-wise you may be correct, but if you consider the companies' enormous resources and amount of influence and impact, Google et al make up the 90+%.

SPGWhistler2• 7 years ago

My point was that most ad tech companies are not the issue. It is the big boys which is the issue. And, that ad tech wasn't the issue. Ads using targeting data is a symptom of the problem, not the problem it self. The collecting of the data (by the 1%) is the problem.

jhookham• 7 years ago

This sounds a little too far in the other direction to me. From working with a handful of advertising platforms interested in the web property that I've worked with for the past 8 years, I agree with your point re: incompetence. However, I disagree that it's _only_ the big boys who are gathering large portfolios of data on individuals that span multiple web properties, apps and spheres of data. It seems to me that your data is part of the marketplace and anyone can play.

Regulations would be nice. A technological solution that fundamentally obfuscates an individual so that they can buy their groceries without being big-brothered would nicer.

jiveturkey2• 7 years ago

Agree with you 100% until the end:

It is the data collectors - Google - Apple - Facebook. They are the irresponsible parties at fault.

Like you say, targeted ads (revenue generative purposes) are not the problem. They are in fact neutral-to-beneficial. It's government surveillance that is the problem.

To say that FAG are the problem is wrong. FAG are motivated by revenue, and operate in first-world (corrupt, but only economically corrupt [for our purpose]) regimes. They will absolutely protect their data from misuse. When they misstep, they get backlash and take corrective action. When the make mistakes, they actually learn from them. Not because of the slow but heavy hand of government, but because of highly reactive market pressure.

So we don't have to worry about them, they are not irresponsible. Google and Apple, eg, does not sell your data to the bad guy, not directly. They sell access to demographics that they only know and they have strong internal controls. Google is f'ing crazy the way they protect data, and I mean from internal abuse. Even in the face of GDPR, does your startup do anything to protect PII from internal abuse? No. Yes, FB has sold direct access to "you" but they have learned and will continue to learn and be subject to public/market pressure.

Who we have to worry about are the people that are not on our radar as first-world elite HN readers: governments. Snowden was revelatory that even our own [US] government is dangerous, to a degree that dwarfs anything FAG does.

throwaway94856• 7 years ago

I also work for an ad tech supplier. And yes, there is lots of incompetence and inefficiencies going around. But they sure are trying anyway.

I recently saw the Minority Report targeted advertising scene[0] as an aspirational video in an internal document outlining business goals.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ

dontbenebby• 7 years ago

Google and Apple being the main offenders here, due to their cell phones.

I didn't realize Apple had a behavioral advertising division. Can you share more about Apple's tracking, maybe some links or whitepapers?

tguedes• 7 years ago

I would provide links for several of the claims you make because they just seem not true. You have a very biased perspective, of course you're going to blame the giant platforms if you work in the ad industry.

stunt• 7 years ago

It becomes scary when you realize this is just the beginning of it. They will go too far with it in the next ten years.

jorams• 7 years ago

At some point companies like Fast Company have to accept that they are a significant part of the problem, and just writing articles about it is not enough. This page contains a ridiculous number of trackers. The site pulls in content from the following 3rd-party domains:

s.skimresources.com, sb.scorecardresearch.com, secure-cdn.mplxtms.com, z.moatads.com, ml314.com, secure-us.imrworldwide.com, www.googletagservices.com, www.google-analytics.com, www.dianomi.com, d1z2jf7jlzjs58.cloudfront.net, static.chartbeat.com, assets.adobetm.com, platform.twitter.com, www.queryly.com, cdn.polyfill.io, www.lightboxcdn.com, content.jwplatform.com, platform.instagram.com, www.inc.com, images.fastcompany.net, connect.facebook.com, cdn.conversant.mgr.consensu.org, cdnjs.cloudflare.com.

images.fastcompany.net is probably just used to serve static content from a cookieless domain and some of the others are CDNs for libraries, but the rest are all there for tracking purposes.

If you don't like what the ad industry is doing with people's personal data, please don't keep giving them ways to get to it.

godshatter• 7 years ago

They also have the distinction of being the first page I've ever run across where temporarily enabling javascript on their domain causes the page not to load, whereas leaving it off does make it load. Makes "forbid fastcompany.com" an easy choice.

mixmastamyk• 7 years ago

Many of the "disable your ad blocker" dialogs are implemented in JavaScript, which is why this happens. Silly, but that's where we are.

ahje• 7 years ago

This is surprisingly common. They keep the content on the page in order to make it available for crawlers, and then use JS to hide the content until it's determined you don't have an ad-blocker, or you've accepted some draconian terms, or whatnot.

Better to leave JS off if the site works without it. :)

oarabbus_• 7 years ago

Yikes. What's the word for this? It's not exactly "hypocritical", but it is in that realm.

parliament323• 7 years ago

Nah, hypocritical is exactly the right word.

oarsinsync• 7 years ago

This point was made recently about the NY Times having an editorial about advertising / tracking being invasive, while also having advertising / tracking on their own page.

The justification / defence given was that you want separation between editorial and business decisions. If the two are aligned, the freedom of the editorial team to write what they want will diminish, and the business will ultimately dictate what gets written.

If it feels a bit pessimistic, I agree, but pessimistically, I also feel like it's just realistic.

UnFleshedOne• 7 years ago

There is a difference between a news platform publishing a news article or op ed story that denounces things the host company itself might be doing and a corporate PR office issuing a statement.

Is google hypocritical for having flat earth stuff on youtube and running huge satellite imaging operation?

(Edit: I should probably have replied to the "hypocritical" comment below :))

unclefishbits• 7 years ago

As their long form journalism with moving graphics and images is so popular and gets so many clicks, think how awe inspiring and what a major effect it would have to shut down all of that stuff on articles talking about that stuff, just to give people a dose of what it could/would be like. It would be respected, get other articles about it, etc.

lhorie• 7 years ago

The problem of this line of thinking is that it assumes every company is just one guy in a basement who's responsible for all facets of all operations. In the real world, an editorial department doesn't get to dictate what technology gets adopted by the SEO department, or how accessibility is implemented by the software development team.

It's easy to say "well company X should really simply do [Y] to fix [morally good cause]", but in reality that ends up being non-actionable because it doesn't take into account that due to bureaucracies, some things are easier said than done.

Another thing that I think is somewhat counter-productive is criticizing a news outlet for doing things that are at odds with what they write. News outlets are not about leading world changing initiatives by example, they are about spreading information so others become conscious of issues they might otherwise not think about. I feel that saying "well I see you don't put your money where your mouth is" somewhat weakens the importance of the point being made (i.e. if it isn't being done, then it must not be that important)

m4632• 7 years ago

CDNs absolutely identify and track you on the backend.

ssivark• 7 years ago

The author of this post seems to be running a Kickstarter now, for a hardware privacy device: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winstonprivacy/winston-...

I dunno enough; can folks comment on its technical capabilities vis-a-vis other solutions available now?

bobblywobbles• 7 years ago

This is why you should block these trackers by modifying your hosts file (https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/01/how-to-block-on...). It doesn't just block ads, but trackers too.

JSeymourATL• 7 years ago

This FastCo article is really a brilliant advertorial for Winston. Upvote for their cheeky video > https://winstonprivacy.com/

I left the ad industry because of data tracking

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