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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.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and NSA start requiring retailers to log cash purchases on their systems.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Recommend disconnect over ghostery
one is open source, other is owned by ad agency
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.
Or do it the other way around buy lots of bizare and unrelated items, you can always sell them later at eBay. Let Amazon wonder how you can be a pregnant gay man parapalegic who buys a lot of shoes and bike pedals.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
"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.
I thought something similar when I skimmed the headline. I mean, I don't bother using an adblocker, but I also ignore and don't click on banner ads. Then I decided to dig deeper and read the NY Times article in the "Target knowing a woman is pregnant" link. That was a very illuminating article and showed me just how clever companies have gotten about analyzing data and creating marketings strategies around the data.
Companies like Target can now do intelligent marketing targeted towards you even if you block all banner ads. Hell, even if you haven't touched a computer in the last 5 years they can still find a way to market to you. Have you ever bought anything from a Target store? If you used a credit card, they have a way to uniquely identify who you are and what your shopping habits are at their stores. What's more, from other sources of publicly available data and purchase histories they can buy from other companies, they can fill in a lot of gaps and figure out much more about you and what you may be interested in buying than you might think.
To those who have never been to a Target store, whenever you buy your items and check out, you're handed a few coupons along with your receipt. These coupons don't exist until your payment is being printed - they come out of a separate printer whose sole purpose is to print coupons tailored to the person who is buying goods. If you've used their store a few times with the same credit card, you start seeing a lot of coupons either for the items you have already bought in the past or for items in the same general category as items you've bought in the past. And that's even if you've never bought anything from them online or used any of their online offers.
I was especially surprised to read that Target had apparently already considered that people don't like companies like Target knowing too much about them. So, if they do figure out, for example, that a woman is pregnant then they pepper in random coupons for unrelated things along with the baby-related coupons to make it seem like the baby-related coupons were just random chance coupons that anyone could have gotten.
It's a very interesting age of data analysis we're entering into. Potentially dystopian and Orwellian? Sure. Potentially utopian and equalitarian? Sure, that too. As usual, I'll predict it ends up somewhere in-between.
They can tell a lot about you by routine purchases, especially if they look for patterns of change. I've read about the Target case; it isn't just obvious things like buying prenatal vitamins and maternity clothes; a sudden switch in preference for unscented products is common with the hormonal changes pregnant women experience.
The prediction doesn't have to be perfect to be uncannily accurate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That $10K limit was set a very long time ago, when $10K might have bought a house in the burbs. It keeps getting more intrusive as time goes on, but technology keeps making it easier to do the transaction checking and logging.
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?