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Your Data Footprint Is Affecting Your Life In Ways You Can't Even Imagine (fastcoexist.com)
An anonymous reader cites the following excerpts from a FastCoExist article: Innocently clicking on a link results in ad targeting that's hard to shake and our purchases quickly reveal more information than we intend, such as the infamous example of Target knowing a woman is pregnant before she's told her family -- and before she's purchased any baby products. [...] Predictions about you are deeply shaping your life in ways of which you are probably blissfully unaware. Predictions about you (and millions of other strangers) are starting to deeply shape your life. Your career, your love life, major decisions about your health and well-being, and even if you end up in jail, are now being governed in no small part by the digital bread crumbs you've left behind -- many of which you don't even know you've dropped in the first place.
Only buy routine items online. For anything that requires a bit of discretion, buy it at a physical store with cash.
They appear where? Oh, wait, *that's* what the ABP icon in my toolbar is saying - its been there so long I'd kinda gotten used to it. I must have become ad-blocker blind, if such a convoluted concept exists.
Adam Smith, the "father of economics" and one of the original theorists of capitalism, believed that capitalism worked because each participant in the marketplace had an approximately equal capacity with respect to other participants to understand the value which he was exchanging with others. Some people are more clever, or have better memories, or are simply more industrious, but on the whole we are all human beings, and our ability to know more than another has an upper bound.
That's not true of machine learning. There is no upper bound. Under surveillance capitalism, there is no limit to what the large companies can know about what you know, can monitor what you do, and can predict what you want. And as long as we remain human, that upper bound on large, corporate control of human beings will only get greater.
Recommend disconnect over ghostery
one is open source, other is owned by ad agency
Does that include...
...? I only ask because you only mentioned Google+Doubleclick.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
It's not just ads: financial companies track your transactions, and by default, they share your information with "partners." Scroll through your credit card usage, and you can quickly imagine how your trips to Starbucks can be used to build a valuable profile. To opt out, they make you mail a paper form because they hope you will be too lazy to find a stamp. Of course, Facebook tracks everything.
The huge difference is the global reach of the corporations and their infinite permanent memory. The old clerk may have seen you purchase a couple of items and may have put two and two together. But, they could never see what you were looking at everywhere you went in town, the next town, on vacation in Italy... They could never remember everything you bought from your babies conception to his college graduation and beyond.
The scale, the permanency, the ease of access, the inability to threaten the clerk should they not mind their own business... It's a whole new ballgame and it sucks.
"And yet....we can't seem to track down and prosecute those scumbags who try to scam old people and other tech novices on the Internet."
In fact, if the feds are unable to track down ransomware scammers, I submit that the whole surveillance problem is a mirage. If surveillance tech had the super-powers everyone imagines they have, that would be both a simple problem, and would be a way of making the public feel better about surveillance.
Except Target didn't keep it a secret.
You see, Target has done their market research. They found that the birth of child is the ideal time to shape shopping habits - if a husband and wife shopped at Target for a few basic essentials, then went elsewhere for clothes, groceries and other things before a birth, after a birth, they are highly suggestible to change their shopping habits. So Target wants to find those that are pregnant and send them coupons for essentials they may need with the hopes of attracting them to shop more stuff at Target - get more of their shopping dollars with a family who may be pressed for time and unable to do their usual shopping rounds.
The problem was, the daughter was making those kind of purchases, and the father wondered why Target was sending her coupons for pregnancy products. Target's analytics found her profile was basically that of a pregnant woman. So the father confronted Target management asking them why they're sending pregnancy-related coupons to their daughter (who you know, is very virtuous and wouldn't have a child out of wedlock, etc. etc. etc).
Said father later revealed their daughter was a teenage parent a couple of weeks later.
Target didn't tell them, but she fit the profile, and the parents didn't know until Target basically revealed it to them.
"The lady obviously knows, and it's her secret to tell, so what's the big deal with Target keeping the secret?"
The thing that bothers a lot of people isn't that target figured something out, it is that target demonstrably isn't "keeping" the secret -- they sent her pregnancy-related things that revealed the secret to her parents before she wanted them to (because fairly predictably, her parents were in the same house, and thus saw things that showed up in the mail for her).
I don't mind starbucks knowing how much coffee I consume. I do very much mind when they sell that information to an insurance company that starts calculating my life insurance or health insurance rates. If someone is stalking me, I really don't want them to be able to buy from starbucks the information about which starbucks I use when (from which you can derive roughly where I work and my schedule).
Lots of people browse for porn; it is fine if the provider keeps that info, but when they start selling to the local newspaper a list of people in your town organized by kink, that gets kind of disturbing. Profitable for the porn company perhaps, but most people find that sort of commercialization of data obnoxious.
Advertisers are demonstrably tracking and sharing a lot of information that I didn't give them. When a social network that I don't have an account on starts recommending me as a "person you might know" to coworkers, that says that they've gathered information about me and my job that I never gave them, which they are now sharing with others. I really don't like that.
You are correct that we've always had gossips around that might notice something about me and share it with others; that doesn't mean we liked them, or that we think that their behavior should be institutionalized in every corner of our lives.
Please cite as I am unaware that any county has figured out how to go fully cashless.
Sweden is almost cashless now, and plans to be fully cashless in the next few years. There are others on the way, too.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You are more than welcome to cite evidence supporting the idea that there is massive voter fraud going on and that advanced voter verification techniques are necessary and effective in correcting the problem. Until then, I would just assume not hand over any more tax dollars for programs which provide no benefit.
True. That's one aspect. Privacy is always a balance between self and community. But what do you reveal, to whom, and who has the power to decide...
Your point is made by Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life
That's the book PJ recommended when she stopped Groklaw, I picked it up because of that, and wasn't disappointed. Very readable, well argued, and a couple good thoughts on private vs. public
I don't lend much credibility to this - it sounds far too ominous and sensationalist. I mean, how can I take serious a claim that "They" whoever they are, can "Deeply Affect" everybody's life, when I on a daily basis see how ineptly information is beings handled by nearly all players? These people don't seem able to find their own backsides with two hands and a guide dog. Apart from that - I assume we are talking (yet again) about the overhyped "Incredible Powers of Advertising"? People are perfectly able to ignore the crap; I have spam filters that work well, I have adblockers, noscript and others, and I have a recycling bin by my front door for printed adverts, which I discard out of hand, un-opened.
I think this kind of stories are a relic of the sizties or seventies, when advertisers actually believed in their imaginings. The trend now is that they are struggling, not least because companies are losing faith in the value. Hopefully it will go completely away soon.