Like why do they care how many times I go to porn hub every day or that nothing gets me harder than a free use MILF? Why do they care that I don’t know how to spell consistency so I have to Google it every 3 months.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
It is not about having your particular data. Is about the aggregated data of a population. On a shallow level that information can be used to engineer ads to appeal to a greater audience. On a deeper level, population dynamics can be used for nefarious purposes such as driving them to an agreement that wasn’t in their best interest. Brexit and the Trump election are two examples of this being possible thanks to data from Cambridge Analytica. See voting paradoxes and Asimov’s psychohistory that each day is getting farther from fictional.
Oh, so evil shit.
It’s just sureal to me. Since they know I was up till 2:00am on a Wednesday wrenching my hog like there was a million dollars hidden inside Donald Trump was elected president.
Absolute poetry.
Not to dispute your general points, but Cambridge Analytica’s actual effectiveness was shown to have been way overblown (as was RussiaGate in general).
Money.
Your data can help sell you stuff. If they know you’re into MILFs, they can sell advertising to the MILF companies. Then you see a bunch of MILF ads. The more they know, the more they can target you. Eventually we’ll have ads in our dreams like in Futurama.
Jokes on you, he probably already has MILF dreams!
Upgrade those MILFs to GILFs with this one weird trick!
You know, knowing advertising algorithms, expect a lot of mistakes like that in your dreams, thanks to the users-like-you-also-like thing they do. “Thirsty GILF scatporn near you!”-- the future is bleak.
But golden showers sound so optimistic!
Why are tech company’s
They’re trying to track the patterns of people who attempt to pluralise words by using apostrophes. It’s funded by linguists studying language change.
Better watch out, they also go after people use “s” instead of “z” in “pluralize”.
Zhit!
Wall of text, I know, but I had trouble sleeping so… Yeah… Here goes;
Knowledge is power.
Here in Sweden there’s a service that has been pouring money on marketing the last two years. The service is called House ID and they let you store all important documents about your house for free… Free… Free?
So what will they make money on?
Well, let’s jump 10 years into the future and just imagine the possibilities.
Criminals can easily check what house owners have upgraded their locks or purchased home alarm systems. They could even purchase data about all the houses in an area that has a specific lock type with a known flaw.
Your phone is, with all its sensors, a fantastic surveillance device and people happily take it with them wherever they go.
In the 90’s, when I worked for IBM, the buzzword was “Data mining”. Ordinary people never understood what it was and I was often asked about it. Extremely simplified: look at the data you have and try to read between the lines to generate data that you originally didn’t have.
The biggest chain of convenient stores in Sweden launched banking services and a pay card around this time. If you used the card for grocery shopping you’d get a monthly bonus and great offers and discounts. So I gave an innocent example of what your purchase data could be used for. They could see that a woman purchased pads on fairly the same time each month or quarter. Now, when cross checking this with purchase history from other women they could see that a lot of those women also purchased chocolate at the same time they purchase pads. Something something with a lot of women getting cravings of chocolate around the same time each month. Yes, it’s a generalization but still a real life example in this case. So they sent out coupons for chocolate, matching the time around when the customer normally purchased pads, and what do you know? The sale of chocolate increased. Significantly.
Now, pads isn’t a very sensitive subject of you’re older than 15… But think what data Tinder registers. They can’t know for sure if you’re liberal, conservative or even a communist… or can they? By looking at your behavior in their app, what you did, where (Tinder uses GPS, remember?) you did it and when you did it, they can draw conclusions about a lot of things that you never intended to share with them.
Today there are sensors placed strategically in shopping malls that registers what store windows you stopped to look at. They actually know, with a pretty high certainty, exactly what product in the window that caught your attention. How they can be so accurate you say? Because you have Bluetooth activated and the mall app installed. They just triangulate your exact position.
All of this is data about you that is correct. You did all of that and it was registered.
But what if corrupted data was registered? What if that data was the basis for you getting a loan for your dream house? How do you correct a conclusion that is obviously wrong when the bank just tells you that what data they purchase, from who and how they process it is a business secret and they refuse to share any details.
Now, all sorts of data has always been collected but in the old time it was stored on paper and cross comparison/compiling data was an expensive and tedious task. Today it is not. Today your phone could store and process data that would take months to process in the old times.
That slowness/inertia acted as a law of nature, protecting us and our life from being mapped.
It’s not just that data is collected or what data is collected… It’s what it might be used for that should bother you. Not only what is used for today but also what it could be used for tomorrow.
Because your data is used to make models of your behavior and opinions. Once someone knows exactly what you do and don’t like it’s really easy to frame purchase and political decisions so that they sound like something you want, even if they’re really good for someone else.
Do they know I’m basically a monkey with depression? Can someone tell them that? Might answer some of the questions they are so desperate to find out.
I think they’d be more interested in whether you’re a bonobo or a chimp because those imply very different approaches to relieving stress.
If they do it right, you won’t even notice or feel like you have no choice to buy something.
They want to know you better than you know yourself. I doubt they would be interested in any information you would provide because it would be useless compared to what they can get.
Most of the phyc research is done by large companies to crack all our brains open so we open our wallets.
You’re probably depressed because that is what they want you to be. So you maximize screen time for adds and purchases.
This isn’t about you. Your data is key in making other, relevant people stand out. Why relevant? Because they resist. Because they aren’t depressed, they are fighting back. And whatever the reason that drives them, they can be manipulated. By compromising their anonymity. By making literally everyone else a “known variable”. With your help.
And yet I keep feeding my opinions into the internet like a fool
Fun story: me and my wife kept talking about our nasty neighbour we call “the slug” and she got “Slug removal tips” on her YouTube suggestions.
they’re interested because they profit from the marketing based on the data
More specifically — by matching all of your purchases with every data point about you, and the people you associate with, they can build out statistical models to determine the data points that most strongly correlate to people like you and what motivates or persuades them to GENERATE MORE PROFIT — direct purchases, attention, clicks, discussion, word of mouth, lead generation, etc, etc…
Or… You know… What motivates/persuades you to support a dictator or vote for a specific political candidate or party, as well as what demotivates/dissuades you from the opposition — including what types of psychological warfare, disinformation, deepfakes, “fake news”, and lies are most successful in achieving these goals — all of which benefits the most horrifically immoral and unethical criminals, corporations, and individuals the most (the “good guys” aren’t the ones using deception and lies to profit and win).
I mean if my grocery store app could track my purchases and then give me a suggested weekly grocery list based on meals it knows I like or ate before that would be incredible. Hell I’d pay for that lol.
even more specifically to create what is know as W-shaped attribution. That you can zig zag around the internet (as if following the lines on the W) and when you end up at your purchase, one can analyze the paths you took, and millions of others took, and find commonality to reduce to the path of least resistance.
To put it succinctly they aren’t. They’re interested in aggregate data so that a data engineer can use it to understand consumer trends and better predict marketing reach.
It’s not specifically about you, it’s more of a what they can claim to know about their consumers.
Pixar seeing a rise in milf web searches: Ok boys it’s time to release another movie with a mom who has a dump truck ass.
Dump-truck-ass Pixar Moms are my kryptonite.
Why are tech companies* so interested
A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.
They are interested in your data because you are human and you do human things, the more they understand you and your activities the better they can gather knowledge for economical decisions such as Ads, Trends etc.
Most commonly they use this information to manipulate you into using their services or changing your preferences by marketing and Ads. The more they understand you the more effective it is.
Because the last bastion of zombie capitalism is pushing money around.
Folks buy this information because there are other folks willing to buy this information. And so on… and so on…
$$$
Other companies are willing to pay big money for your data so they can specifically target people who are likely to buy their shit. Also, now the government is buying that data so that they can unconstitutionally keep tabs on every person in the world.
Also political organizations want this data to help them target potential voters more effectively.
It builds pattersns for you and people like you.
Dynamic demographic catagories
You are now, at in part, a “free use MILF guy” in their database, so they can now shaped content for you based on other “free use milf guys” who may have more actionable info like “buys guns” or “clicks ads with light hues”.
Or mine, “has only ever clicked an ad by accident and immediately closed it every time, we’ll keep trying I guess. Oh fuck, he got uBlock.”
