Granted, all my shit is blocked and what not, to the best I can do. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
“Almost every company”
You mean like 5-10 major companies?
There are thousands of smaller companies buying ad space and access to consumer data.
And “buying data” isn’t what it sounds like for the most part. Few companies are out there buying and selling raw data tied to individuals. For the most part it is a company buying heavily targeted ads from someone like Google that has ALL of your data. They know, with surgical precision, how to target ads at you. Company B just tells Google “ we want to target a 35 year old, white, dad of three that is lacking in his masculinity and wants to feel rugged, while not making him feel emasculated”.
The you get a Dr Squatch ad.
I just like the way the soap smells
There’s like 5-6 possible soap smells made for men, surely you could find similar smells elsewhere?
I’m sure I could, but going from shitty body wash to real soap made a huge difference in my skin so I’ve been using them since
I caved and got it because people would not shut up about it. I don’t care as long as it smells good and keeps the bugs away.
This is gonna be the death of democracy when political advertising comes into play (as it already has).
“Point this piece of fake news at uneducated 40 year old single parents in <area>” - "point this piece of scientific news reinforcing my party’s message at university students who are interested in " and on and on.
My mom gets fake news advertisements on Facebook all the time, occasionally they are political in nature. Platforms aren’t doing their due diligence at all, so government must act to restrict the information that can be collected and the specificity of the targeting that may be employed.
Our economies worked in TV times, with broad-stroke advertising - why couldn’t they now? We don’t need this.
Consumer buying patterns and browsing behaviors are constantly changing in the aggregate. It’s not about an individual, it’s about “trends”.
And of course, a lot of it is also complete bullshit, as you suspected. People with MBAs in marketing are pretty good at justifying their parasitic existence to gullible executives.
It’s not that all of the data is useless. Every business needs some information to compete. But, these data miners have gone deep into the rabbit hole of “business intelligence” and are often hoarding information its own sake and to look good to the boss.
Effectively, as an advertiser, you can pay for some info on someone you have the option to show an ad to.
They’ll tell you things like “they are in their 40s and love anime and shopped at target recently”
The worst part is that typically, when you get hyper-specific enough, you can make unidentified info identifiable.
“Male, muslim, just got married, works as a plumber, late 20s, lives in this part of this city, has this device” and then paired with “has this IP” (narrows down to the block or house)
Also the US government buys the same info via shell companies.
.“has this IP” (narrows down to the block or house)
Even worse, They know what room you’re in.
I sold geolocation advertising and they know where your cell phone is within 15’.
Ever notice an ad from a competitor of a business you just visited? Car lots love this one. They geotag all the other car lots in town and if you go to one of them, the next time you check Kelly Blue book on this used Camry, an ad for a deal on a Honda Civic pops up.
Creepy as hell
Advertising agencies mostly. Probably a few government offices, too. Google uses theirs in-house.
all have the same information
Thousands of “bits” of new info are being generated every second
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As the other guy said you’re not actually buying data, just targeting ads really specifically. this means that you pay google to show your ad to x people and they go “okay we’ve done that” and basically you have to take them at their word.
but surely they wouldn’t lie? well, not on technicalities. for years, you could buy pre-video ads that would play on youtube, and it turns out they would also play them across various websites, not at all to do with youtube or that type of content consumption, but it’s obviously all in the TOS so you can’t sue them for bait and switch :)
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There isn’t really a universal answer. Different companies have different objectives. Some of them sell it to third parties, some of them use it for a variety of business purposes. Some of them collect and store it without any idea what they are going to do with it.
I actually worked for a company that did this. They’re a commercial and industrial vehicle OEM. A lot of their hardware interfaces with the vehicle CAN bus (the computer network on all modern vehicles). They would vacuum up every message broadcast on the CAN bus and dump it into a data lake while having absolutely no idea what they were going to do with it.
Just ballpark, how many companies do you think there are in the USA?
Not from USA, but I want to have a go at that question.
I would say, around 2,000,000 companies?
That’s about what I would have guessed. And I’d say it answers the question. About 100 companies are collecting tons of data, then selling it to 10,000 more companies.
That’s why I have been taking some actions to reduce the data they collect on me
It’s purpose is to make marketing or influencing as quantifiable as possible
typo in title
