Please understandnim asking this question from a genuine place. I dont want the quora answer, i want the tech savvy, security expert minds of my fellow lemmings. If thats ok?

What happens to this data? What can/do they do with it? and why are so many people concerned about google tracking them?

Do i as an average user need to be concerned?

If so, What sorts of things can i do to avoid being tracked? Preferably without too much comprimise.

  • Krudler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    482·
    1 year ago

    Just a personal story to bring one example into focus.

    I got sober 8 years ago and never talked about it online until I was about 4 years sober. Never saw a single promotion for anything related to alcohol…

    Until the day I made a single comment on Reddit telling my story to help support another person who was just starting their own sobriety journey.

    And like magic, all promoted communities to me were alcohol related. Even though I’m an ublock user, when I would selectively disable it every advertisement I saw online was related to booze.

    So even though there are ethical applications for my data, I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.

    • guacupado@lemmy.world
      215·
      1 year ago

      I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.

      This doesn’t even make sense. It’d be much more lucrative to target multiple things you speak fondly about it or have expressed personal interest in by actively searching.

      • Yurgenst@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        1 year ago

        If you enjoy something you buy it occasionally. If you are addicted you buy it every day, every time you have money, you think about it all the time. That’s way more lucrative, it’s the whole business model of the tobacco industry too.

        • OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          1 year ago

          That definitely doesn’t describe how I act with nicotine, and I’m ABSOLUTELY addicted to nicotine.

          I could say the same for alcohol, but I’m a very mild alcoholic.

      • bogdugg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Things we need are higher on our priorities than things we want, and addiction convinces you that you need that thing. So anything that can monetize that addiction is going to be more effective and consistent than something you merely want.

  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
    40·
    1 year ago

    Has everyone already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica, which scraped data from tens of millions of Facebook users and used it to microtarget swing voters in several countries with propaganda and misinformation to get them to either vote for right-wing candidates or stay home on election day?

    • phillaholic@lemm.ee
      21·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think many people comprehend the impact. Most people don’t think they can be manipulated, and they are all wrong.

      • averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
        9·
        1 year ago

        It’s funny, the more likely you are to admit you can be manipulated the more likely you’ll notice when it’s happening. So I just go around telling everyone how easy it is to manipulate me.

      • magikarpet@lemmy.world
        7·
        1 year ago

        Well the other crazy thing with voting is how narrow the margins are.

        It doesn’t have to convince everyone. Only a small percentage across the country mixed with a few people in key locations and you can change everything.

        • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          Miami-Dade and Palm Beach says hello. A 537 vote margin in a few Florida counties decided the 2000 US Presidential Election.

          One wonders how different the world would be today if George W. Bush didn’t get that first term.

          (Fun fact: the usual chicanery to depress Democratic votes also happened in 2000 - voter roll purges, roadblocks in Democratic areas, too few voter areas in cities… In many ways it was a trial run for the bullshit Republicans pull now)

  • Jourei@lemm.eeEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    I don’t like the idea that if history repeats itself, a powerful entity can force the data vaults open and see who they should send to the showers. I could be on the “correct” side at that time yet something I did or said last year has the system deem me unfit for the noble breed.

  • Kage520@lemmy.world
    182·
    1 year ago

    I think the best example is for women. Imagine they can figure out, with 95% accuracy or something, that you are pregnant, that could be valuable data.

    Now imagine you are a woman at a large corporation who just got pregnant, but aren’t telling anyone yet. Too early. Your corporation buys a batch of data and discovers there is a 95% chance you are pregnant. They don’t want to pay for maternity leave or make reasonable accomodations during pregnancy or pumping breast milk. They fire you for “unrelated reasons”, before you ever tell them you are pregnant.

    Nothing illegal happened there really. You never told them so you have no way to prove they fired you for that.

  • Samsy@lemmy.ml
    15·
    1 year ago

    It’s called microtargeting, all big tech companys are sorting people in groups, just by their use of the service. It starts with simple things, for example: cats or dogs? And this goes deeper to your religion or sexuality, politics etc. Created mostly for advertising it got used by political parties. Check the Cambridge analytical scandal. If you easily able to sort the people for your target you are able to manipulate your targeted people.

    Newest scandal for microtargeting came from the EU-Commission with the chatcontrol.

  • Pheonixtail@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 year ago

    It’s not so much about you as an individual, it’s about catalogueing and manipulating trends in our societies that can be used to make profit, for example Meta spends a lot of money and time manipulating election outcomes in favour candidates that will keep their taxes low through manipulating their content algorythm in favour of their desired candidates.

  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
    101·
    1 year ago

    I think if people knew the extent to which these big-data algorithms can figure out things about you just based on the links you click and posts you upvote then they would be more concerned. If it was just that they knew my location, age and interests then I wouldn’t really care much but the reality is that they probably know stuff about me, that even I don’t.

    I simply don’t like the fact that this database exists somewhere because it can come back to bite me one day. Just imagine what a fascistic government could use data like this for. Or maybe not even that, but remember how we first didn’t have chatGPT and no one thought we would for years but then it just appeared and now it’s there. Well what if tomorrow someone comes up with an equally fun tool that you can put any person’s name into and it’ll give you access to all this data. I want my page on that app to be very brief and inconsistent.

    I’m perfectly aware that it’s impossible to use the internet and not leave any tracks at all, but I want to make sure that my tracks are incredibly difficult to follow and preferably that they don’t lead anywhere.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
    61·
    1 year ago

    If so, What sorts of things can i do to avoid being tracked? Preferably without too much comprimise.

    Stop using Chrome based browsers. Use Firefox or a Firefox derivative. Use adblockers such as Ublock origin or Adnausem, a plugin that will hide ads from you and click on the ads to mess up your digital footprint. Consent-o-matic is a plugin that will decline any cookies request from sites.

    More technical inclined, For your home set your DNS servers to DNS.adguard.com, again blocks ads. Use containers with Firefox, it will limit the cross site tracking when you see a share with Google/Facebook/twitter. Those share butts are particularly nasty.

  • kpaniz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Personally I feel more easy minded because I know that whatever I do online leaves as little trace as usual. If I go out by myself say for a drive and I get back home I expect no one to ever know that I went away and where unless I decide to say so. Same goes for online activity. I would expect nothing to be tied to me and whatever I do to go unnoticed unless for some reason I agree with sharing such data. It’s often said though that with privacy comes less convenience and that is true: not having app features ready before you even ask or easily paying or doing other things online so I see how wanting convenience over privacy can be preferable. For me though, the point I made in the beginning is stronger and motivates me.

    Also on a side note I watched a video from Louis Rossman where he talked about some kind of police radio going stolen and the authorities went ask google for people in that area that searched that specific model online to help track that person down so… yeah, I’m already not a fan of leaving traces I don’t want to leave. Let alone those that might make the authorities mistake me for a criminal.

    Personally I’m trying to be as offline and anonimous as possible. I’m moving away from cloud storage and if a service can be used with a client without an account where I can locally save and back up things I like then I’m using that. The biggest challenge right now is youtube as a platform with that huge of a content and a decent algorithm for suggestions is yet to be created.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    Besides what other people are saying, big data is a thing, sometimes there are correlations no one is aware of, but an unbiased algorithm finds. Let me give you two facts:

    1. Insurance companies analyse personal history as well as general statistics when determining if they’ll accept you and how much they’ll charge you. e.g. a White middle aged man with some family history of heart problems will have a much higher price than a Black young woman without family history. This does not limit to insurance companies, banks can choose to not give you a loan based on any factors they choose, in fact any private business can do it.

    2. Some of the companies that do big data can predict that you’re pregnant even before you know it, just basing on random factors like search queries and email contents. Think about this for a moment, you don’t know that you’re pregnant, but because you searched certain terms (even if they’re completely unrelated to pregnancy) a company can know it. This is also true of other stuff, but because currently this is used for ads there’s not much reason to specialise this to find things like health or financial conditions.

    It’s not unlikely that in the future insurance companies could buy that data and use it as an extra point of data to give you a quote or to deny you entirely. And this would be something like In average, 90% of people living in NY who search for the price of a flight to Rome within a couple of days of sending an email with the words "cigarette" and "help" suffer a heart attack within 5 years, so because you’re trying to help a friend quit his cigarette addiction and are planning to visit Rome your insurance just went up, because there is a 90% chance you’ll have a heart attack within some years based on big data analysis.

  • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
    31·
    1 year ago

    The biggest concern is that even if you are innocent, your data can and likely will at some point be used against you. This was proven by the Snowden Leaks. There are more than enough of these unfortunate cases, here are some examples:

    https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-location-data-avondale-wrongful-arrest-molina-gaeta-11426374

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

    I can recommend Privacy Guides, it’s a website created by volunteers to teach people about digital privacy and security. It’s great for beginners.

    If you are interested in the topic, join [email protected].