Problems coming for online publishing

> Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate.

This hasn’t been true for quite some time. These banks on you are really elaborate. They know where you live, they know where you work, they know where you drink your coffee and they know your online behavior.

Those factors mean that you’re never truely anonymous anymore. When you buy a new device it gets tiered to your access points, then your online behavior gets profiled and matched to people who frequent your access points.

Last summer I was on a business trip to another region of my country. Just before I went I had to turn in my work pc for repairs, which meant I had to use the borrow device from our IT department. Despite never having used this device before, and never having logged in from that particular hotel I still ended up getting adds for a very specific online course that I had taken earlier that month as well as a pair of shoes I had just bought.

I guess the irony in that is that even though they we’re able to pinpoint who I was, through what seem like impossible means, they still didn’t know I had actually already bought those products they were advertising.

No, change isn't coming. Sorry.

Trump's victory signaled a social media gold-rush for political campaigns. 2018 is a major election year in American politics. You can bet that campaigns are evaluating and signing onto social media related efforts. To meet this demand, as Cambridge Analytica buckles, others will take it place. The people who benefit by these services are those who make the laws. While legislators benefit by social media targeted services, there won't be a political will sufficient to pass a law that will slay the goose laying golden eggs.

Compare ad tech that news websites use to what Cambridge Analytica did.

1. Ad tech:

As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

The result: when I visit a news website, I might see an ad for tennis racquets (because of interest), or a local bank (because of location), or DigitalOcean hosting, because I recently visited that site.

2. Facebook's platform, used by Cambridge Analytica:

I install a Facebook psychological quiz app (supposedly from the prestigious Cambridge university), and give it permission to access my data.

Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her deepest fears.

They hire designers and writers to create fake news websites, and get their propaganda stories to appear in her Facebook news feed, where they appear to be legitimate right next to the news about the local sports team.

The result: when I visit for Christmas, I have to try to calm her down, that Hillary Clinton isn't actually running a late term abortion clinic out of a pizza parlor. And she won't believe me.

Can we please keep the reddit style hysterics on reddit? I pretty much left reddit to escape the fake political nonsense. And with all due respect, you are doing exactly what you claim cambridge analytica did. You are pushing extreme fear and agenda. But for what end?

> As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

You are forgetting installing cookies and fingerprinting ( amongst others ) to track across platforms. You are forgetting using that data to target customers with tailored fearmongering news articles to better clickbait.

> Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her deepest fears.

I hate to break this to you but everyone does this. Obama did this. The democrats did. Hillary's campaign did this.

I love how you excuse news websites when they cause hysteria and panic over nonsense like campus rape crisis and pay gap in male and female sports. Not to mention the hysteria over cambridge analytica. Seems like the news has done far more harm to you than facebook did to your grandmother, assuming your story is legit and not made up.

I recommend you go watch the 13th on netflix to see how news and media can be dangerous. The problem now is that news has access to tons of data about us ( just like facebook ). The biggest difference is that facebook was pretty much "neutral" whereas the news/media are highly biased. Facebook allowed both trump and hillary political ads.

> You are right, both sides are to blame, but this don’t make any of the them better.

(Both sides refer to the broadcast/online media & commercial/political ad campaigns)

Blame can only be placed on either party if there exists the prior assumption that people should believe all things which are presented to them as fact. If this assumption does not exist and without facilities responsible for fact-checking then it's only the individual that is responsible for dividing fact from fiction.