Tracking Caucusgoers By Their Cell Phones (schneier.com)

Okian Warrior writes: Dstillery gets information from people's phones via ad networks. When you open an app or look at a browser page, there's a very fast auction that happens where different advertisers bid to get to show you an ad. Your phone sends them information about you, including, in many cases, an identifying code (that they've built a profile around) and your location information, down to your latitude and longitude. On the night of the Iowa caucus, Dstillery flagged auctions on phones in latitudes and longitudes near caucus locations, some 16,000 devices. It then looked up the characteristics associated with those IDs to make observations about the kind of people that went to Republican caucus locations versus Democrat caucus locations. It drilled down farther by looking at which candidate won at a particular caucus location.

Comments

Re:so now the NSA knows when i vote

[DaHat]

Given how much your average social media user shares, I'm pretty sure the NSA knew who you were planning to vote for before you did.

Re:so now the NSA knows when i vote

[Thud457]

If you're doing nothing wrong^W we don't like, you have nothing to fear.

Slippery slope is slippery, news at 11

[CCarrot]

While disturbing, this news is by no means surprising.

Advertastards can wave their hands and shout "we're just trying to see what you like so we can send you info on stuff you might find interesting!" until they're blue in the face, but simply having the vast reams data considered 'necessary' to 'get to know' the vict^H^H^H^Hcustomer is too much temptation for some to resist.

Of course, political advertising is still, well, advertising, and they're still trying to sell something to you, even if it's only a predefined set of prejudices or empty promises. So I suppose in the broadest sense this is a legit business purpose for Dstillery...but the ramifications are just a wee bit chilling. The stakes on this sort of ad campaign are a bit higher than whether people buy a Ford or a Toyota, and the one that they don't 'buy' doesn't have access to a list of people who ultimately didn't buy what they were selling...