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Facebook Will Track What Physical Stores You Go Into (popsci.com)
Facebook will soon roll out a feature that will allow advertisers to see which brick and mortar stores you've physically walked into. These details are collected from anyone who has the location services feature turned on, Facebook says. The will allow advertisers to see in real time which Facebook ads are turning into actual sales. Popular Science reports: Using the location services on your phone, Facebook will keep a tally of who goes to what stores, and show the anonymized numbers to advertisers, as evidence that buying ads on Facebook is getting people to visit brick-and-mortar businesses. It's a great thing for Facebook, which will now have excellent data to prove (or disprove) on a user-to-user basis what a store is getting for its advertising dollar. But it's a pretty frightening idea that a company will have information not unlike your credit card statement all from location services data.
So what happens when you're in a multi-story building, like the Water Tower in Chicago? You may be in the Lego store, but 3 floors below is Victoria's Secret...
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I know no one ever went broke underestimating the idiocy of typical consumers, but do people _really_ buy every single thing someone sticks an ad in their face for? Is advertising really that powerful? Will knowing that X male, 35-44 year old, potentially Republican Facebook users entered the East Nowhereville Walmart make any difference to Walmart?
I admit I'm not a hipster embedded in the SV startup culture, but this new dotcom bubble based on advertising (again) is looking a lot like the old one from an outsider's perspective. The difference this time is that everyone has a tracking device in their pocket and voluntarily gives these marketing companies the Big Data they need. And oh yeah, real time machine learning cloud analytics for synergistic cross platform marketing opportunities.
I might be an outlier, but I find ads intrusive. I'm not pissed off enough to worry about blocking them, but I certainly remember which companies and products have shoved the most obnoxious ads in my face and avoid them when it makes sense. I just don't get _why_ advertising works; it's annoying! It doesn't make (smart) people more willing to buy your product!
If you have a good product, all you need to do is get it in the hands of a few smart people who will tell their friends about it. That's it; there's no mystery.
Install cyanogen. Configure it to give bogus information to apps that want location information for no good reason (all but navi).
Optional: Have that location be some ridiculously overpriced shopping district. Rodeo drive, Monaco, Manhattan etc. Just to fuck with the companies trying to monetize the information.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
[...] most people do not want to be tracked by GPS by a company which exists to sell information about them to advertisers.
This begs the question... How many store-branded reward cards do you have in your wallet?
The concept of disabling location tracking or possibly just leaving your phone at home probably doesn't enter into the conversation, does it?
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At a certain point, it feels like the data is being obsessively collected to be used by marketing people with absolutely no math or statistics backgrounds to merely bolster whatever bullshit arguments, gut instincts or dart-throwing decisions they make.
Scientists schooled in the scientific method with math/stats backgrounds making a conscious effort to not fall into correlation/causation or selective bias errors often fail at producing good data.
A room full of marketing people, jockeying for corporate positions and status? That's a recipe for data errors.
It also makes you wonder how often the people responsible for the data alter it, simply to see what happens if they tweak the data so that suddenly it seems entirely sensible to sell polka-dot hats to 20-somethings or hoverboards to old people.
I recently had Facebook prompt me to add a business associate as a "Facebook Friend".
I discussed with him the matter of how Facebook could have known that we know each other. I never used Facebook to communicate with him in any way, nor did I view his profile, and he says that he never even viewed my profile. We can only guess that the Facebook app on his phone (which I steadfastly refuse to install on mine) scraped my phone number from his contacts list and then Facebook somehow matched it up with my name.
Sad to say, that's exactly what I would expect them to do.
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Aside from a few Sheldon Coopers out there who would be shut-ins without social media, most people do not want to be tracked by GPS by a company which exists to sell information about them to advertisers.
This is it for me and the FB mobile app, I have just deleted it and will not be reinstalling it.
I only have WiFi or mobile data turned on when needed, usually for brief periods. After I'm finished, I turn them off until I need them again. I don't enable location services - never have. And I don't have a Facebook account - never have. I've rooted my phone, and the FB app, (along with all similar bloatware), was the first to go. And still, I'm sure I'm being tracked all over the place, if only to the degree of granularity allowed for by cell tower triangulation. If my provider can monetize that data, I'm certain they will. In short, these days there's only so much we can do, (short of dropping out of mainstream society altogether), to thwart advertisers and other collectors of personal data.
On a daily basis I think 'Fuck it, I'll cave in and let my privacy be whored out - I'll join Facebook, turn location services on, be one of the crowd, and try not to worry about it.'. But somehow, I can never quite manage to pull the trigger. Stubborn, I guess...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If you're running Android v6 you can disable location services for just the Facebook app.