That seems like a quite opinionated podcast indeed. From the blurb it sounds like the old proverb “som fan läser bibeln” (don’t know if you have it in English but it means “like the Devil reads the Bible”).
The book discussed could be interesting though. I might pick up a copy!
Ads seem like kind of a generic and misleading term for it. It's less about showing you a flashy clip for an advertised product in the classic sense, and more about building complex personality and interest profiles on users based around their engagement patterns across sites and services. That's the real resource which organizations pay money for, especially once it gets aggregated into constantly growing targeted data collections on individual users and the increasingly monopolized share of their digital fingerprints and track records.
>about building complex personality and interest profiles on users based around their engagement patterns across sites and services
Twitter very clearly thinks I'm a doctor. I am not a doctor. They show me lots of ads that are obviously oriented towards medical professionals–many of them include the language "your patients" as well as medical jargon. My wife is not a doctor, my parents aren't doctors, the only doctors I know are casual friends and family I see at most once a year. I do not have any medical conditions, and nobody I know has any of the conditions treated by the products being advertised.
I've been using Twitter at least a few times a week for several years, I follow and engage with lots of other users, none of whom are doctors as far as I know. If the ads I'm seeing are derived from this complex personality and interest profiling, it has totally misfired. This has been the case for at least two or three years.
Several years ago a conversation about a similar topic prompted me to look at the ad targeting data Facebook had on me. At the time I'd had a Facebook account for 12 years with lots of posts, group memberships and ~500 friends. Their cutting edge data collection and complex ad targeting algorithms had identified my "Hobbies and activities" as: "Mosquito", "Hobby", "Leaf" and "Species": https://imgur.com/nWCWn63. Whatever that means.
I've managed millions of dollars in ad spend on these platforms over time, and still regard most targeted ad platforms as dancing on the edge between legitimacy and being blatantly fraudulent. They work well if you're a sophisticated buyer, but if you're not they're pretty much a hole in the internet into which you can pour money.
You are a technically competent, well versed person with stated platforms. Compared to your knowledge, the rest of our citizenry are mere peons, who have little hope of understanding, or even realising the degree with which they are tracked.
As well, most people in tech are outliers of some sort, with highly unique searches on platforms. Simply put, we are not the norm. We aren't 'norms'.
While I'm sure you're correct in stating that the accuracy of such tracking platforms is not 100%, I suspect that when it comes to those who do not understand technology? Tracking is much better, more accurate.
My position for clarity, "being able to use a phone" is not "understanding technology". Some seem to think they are tech aware, because they can navigate a phone's OS. Or use a computer for work, by using word.
These people are likely more accurately tracked, for their lack of understanding, whilst combined with their heavy usage of computing devices, makes them most susceptible to tracking.
It's* an ecology-shattering waste of resources to satisfy the profit demands of a small number of globally distributed artificial legal personalities. It's a fabulously inefficient yet monetarily useful model of pernicious theft of human attention. It's bad Physics.
Everyone hireable for ops not only knows what you meant to say, not what you said, but that they’re also solving for completely different problems than you’ve inferred. It’s not about who hosts the target.
Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/) has essentially replaced my local and network share search option. It's a staggering difference, and Search in Windows 10 seems to be primarily designed to show you ad results with the occasional locally installed app thrown in around 50% of the time.
I can do this myself for much cheaper by buying a used computer from eBay, waiting 3 weeks for it to ship with missing parts, trading my old bike for more RAM from Craiglist, setting up Arch on it, compiling my own drivers, writing a webserver and firewall from scratch, connecting it to the internet and then using it twice before my ISP cuts my service for breaking TOS by running hosting on a consumer plan. I could have even just gotten a DigitalOcean VPS for $5 a month and conned friends into paying my costs for me in return for creating them a username and password to a half-working FTP server where they can upload their images in sixteen easy steps.
>Accept that you are just boring plumbing, and don't have any "value added services", and you earn my money.
I'd love to see numbers on how much long term projected revenue their captive audience telemetry and ad delivery platform are valued at. I wouldn't be surprised if it renders the actual OS license sales look like a drop in the bucket.
That seems to be the end result of companies seeking untapped income from harvesting and selling customer data, besides offering everything as a subscription service without any kind of end-user ownership or guaranteed ongoing functionality. Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?
Most people don't think twice to hit that "Accept" button prompting for permissions, allowing the envelope to be pushed further and further. The increasing ease of processing huge data sets allows all of this information to be aggregated, sold and used for whatever purpose whoever is willing to pay for it sees fit.
Yeah, this whole thing has been a big eye opener for me and you've the nail on the head. Moving from iOS to Calyx involved reading up and a few things and that's a community that's much more disposed to discussing privacy related concerns that I simply haven't been aware of. It's a bitter pill to swallow and infuriating, the degree to which we're surveilled and manipulated. Went back and paid attention to the Prism disclosures. It's all just fucking mental.
> Why just make money off the sale of the product when you can continuously gather telemetry, personal information, track their location, their usage patterns, their contacts, their photo albums, metadata and browsing activity?
This is the key issue, it absolutely makes sense for them to do it. I'm one of those people who just hit "accept" but no more. My new answer to any company that continues to ask that question is simply... because if you do that, you lose the sale. It's frustrating that basically amounts to spitting in the ocean but I simply can't participate any longer.
Citations Needed has a decent episode on the publication and its history: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-98-the-refined-so...