Why are tech company's so interested in my boring ass data?
Why are tech company's so interested in my boring ass data?
Like why do they care how many times I go to porn hub every day or that nothing gets me harder than a free use MILF? Why do they care that I don't know how to spell consistency so I have to Google it every 3 months.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
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.
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.
Not to dispute your general points, but Cambridge Analytica’s actual effectiveness was shown to have been way overblown (as was RussiaGate in general).
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.
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.
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.
Permanently Deleted
Exactly this.
Proving who has bigger balls
Why are tech company's
They're trying to track the patterns of people who attempt to pluralise words by using apostrophes. It's funded by linguists studying language change.
Do you have money? If so, knowing all your secrets and quirks is a good way to get a dollar off of you for slightly less than a dollar.
Pennies on the dollar, you mean.
No, that would be a massive get-rich-quick style return the way I wrote that. Pennies below a dollar, per annum, in order to get a dollar back as the beneficiary, on average.
It would be tiny fractions of a penny per dollar if you just look at the individual action that causes a purchase, but either it's the accumulated effect of a lot of actions over time, or it's a gamble that doesn't work the vast majority of the time, so you're back to the standard ROI everything has.
It's not just marked ads, by the way. A lot of the stuff that happens with that data is invisible, although I can't say how much exactly.
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.
Q: "Why are companies ..."
A: Money.
Every time. Sometimes also some competitive advantage or image or by mistake, but even those are just money with extra steps.
Fun story: me and my wife kept talking about our nasty neighbour we call "the slug" and she got "Slug removal tips" on her YouTube suggestions.
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.
This is the only real answer. Targeted advertising is more effective (actually true), therefore you can ask more money for it.
Because your data is used to make models of your behavior and opinions. Once someone knows exactly what you do and don't like it's really easy to frame purchase and political decisions so that they sound like something you want, even if they're really good for someone else.
And yet I keep feeding my opinions into the internet like a fool
Do they know I'm basically a monkey with depression? Can someone tell them that? Might answer some of the questions they are so desperate to find out.
Depressed? Buy these meds! Or spend your money on these therapies, visit these Facebook pages/YouTube channels where we can show you more ads under the guise of providing advice.
Monkey? Buy this chic barrel! Visit your jungle homeland by booking through this travel site.
They want to know everything about you so they can sell you (and everyone who fits in the same bucket as you) very specific things that you're more likely to buy.
I think they'd be more interested in whether you're a bonobo or a chimp because those imply very different approaches to relieving stress.
If they do it right, you won't even notice or feel like you have no choice to buy something.
They want to know you better than you know yourself. I doubt they would be interested in any information you would provide because it would be useless compared to what they can get.
Most of the phyc research is done by large companies to crack all our brains open so we open our wallets.
You're probably depressed because that is what they want you to be. So you maximize screen time for adds and purchases.
This isn't about you. Your data is key in making other, relevant people stand out. Why relevant? Because they resist. Because they aren't depressed, they are fighting back. And whatever the reason that drives them, they can be manipulated. By compromising their anonymity. By making literally everyone else a "known variable". With your help.
they’re interested because they profit from the marketing based on the data
More specifically — by matching all of your purchases with every data point about you, and the people you associate with, they can build out statistical models to determine the data points that most strongly correlate to people like you and what motivates or persuades them to GENERATE MORE PROFIT — direct purchases, attention, clicks, discussion, word of mouth, lead generation, etc, etc...
Or... You know... What motivates/persuades you to support a dictator or vote for a specific political candidate or party, as well as what demotivates/dissuades you from the opposition — including what types of psychological warfare, disinformation, deepfakes, "fake news", and lies are most successful in achieving these goals — all of which benefits the most horrifically immoral and unethical criminals, corporations, and individuals the most (the "good guys" aren't the ones using deception and lies to profit and win).
even more specifically to create what is know as W-shaped attribution. That you can zig zag around the internet (as if following the lines on the W) and when you end up at your purchase, one can analyze the paths you took, and millions of others took, and find commonality to reduce to the path of least resistance.
I mean if my grocery store app could track my purchases and then give me a suggested weekly grocery list based on meals it knows I like or ate before that would be incredible. Hell I'd pay for that lol.
Because digital advertising dollars has been in a bubble since click-through ads and for some reason nobody has noticed.
To put it succinctly they aren't. They're interested in aggregate data so that a data engineer can use it to understand consumer trends and better predict marketing reach.
It's not specifically about you, it's more of a what they can claim to know about their consumers.
How much do FANG companies pay for such posts? I'm interested in making a career.
Pixar seeing a rise in milf web searches: Ok boys it’s time to release another movie with a mom who has a dump truck ass.
Dump-truck-ass Pixar Moms are my kryptonite.
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?
@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?
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.
Why are tech companies* so interested
I can't find the source to save my life, but I believe it was a Google engineer who once said "with enough data, every problem is a regression problem".
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 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.
Because the last bastion of zombie capitalism is pushing money around.
Folks buy this information because there are other folks willing to buy this information. And so on... and so on...
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.
The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood
It builds pattersns for you and people like you.
Dynamic demographic catagories
You are now, at in part, a "free use MILF guy" in their database, so they can now shaped content for you based on other "free use milf guys" who may have more actionable info like "buys guns" or "clicks ads with light hues".
Or mine, "has only ever clicked an ad by accident and immediately closed it every time, we'll keep trying I guess. Oh fuck, he got uBlock."
Yes, but what you click on through articles, and where you stop strolling for a while in a feed (suggesting you are reading the post), and what videos you watch, and what you buy online, and who you correspond with by email and their preferences, and…
You have ass data?
Who doesn't?
My ass is so full of data, it fills the bowl
$$$
Other companies are willing to pay big money for your data so they can specifically target people who are likely to buy their shit. Also, now the government is buying that data so that they can unconstitutionally keep tabs on every person in the world.
Also political organizations want this data to help them target potential voters more effectively.
We’ve waited all this time to tell you. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. The reason you’re so interesting is
Sonofa
You know how they use facial recognition to kill people in the middle east? It's the same idea here.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
Why do people care? Well, why do you close the door to the bathroom? Why dont you send me a picture of yourself right now ("What could I do with it anyway"?)
Some people care more about privacy than others. And most people simply don't know where all their data really goes.
I mean what is wrong with they to think they should know what kind of depravity I'm into. Some messed up jabronys in this world.
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.
video games you’ll actually play
Goodness, me. I wish. Steam sure is good at selling me games that make me feel like I really want to have that experience though! Once it's bought, they did their job.
I've yet to see any ads for "How to spend time enjoying a thing just for yourself without feeling guilty and anxious that you're being left socioeconomically behind and the next (un)planned economic downturn will ruin everything for sure this time."
So... y'know they could be doing a better job. Lol
Also $10 is $10... nobody's personally selling it, it's just floating around and it could be bought if the Islamic Jihad wanted it LOL.
I'm more concerned about things like, selling my data like vehicle usage or DNA to insurance companies who would use that data against me.
Cool. Now I can subtly influence you to pay for your free use MILF porn. Or use MILF models in your ads to make you more likely to buy shit.
Even if you don't think you can be influenced by that stuff it still likely to change your behaviour just enough, even just 5% more spending which makes it worthwhile to them.
But honestly your data barely matters on its own. But once it's merged with everyone else's....that's when it's valuable.
Permanently Deleted
Because the data is worth quite a bit of money - more than people realise, otherwise these companies would be paying us for it.
