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I left the ad industry because of data tracking

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Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#151

Post by spaced-out »

YUMad wrote: post #144
heer4it wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that he (and you) comment on that because if someone is extremely concerned about the media promoting miscegenation, that's usually a good proxy for them being a racist cretin.

So just the good old ad hominem then? I simply pointed out a fact: there is a significant discrepancy between the rate of black male + white female couplings IRL and in the media. I am bringing no judgement on it. Considering how frothy at the mouth you got over this fact being mentioned, you are no better than those 'racist cretins' you try to insinuate I am part of. Do you actually have any valid arguments to dispu…

>Considering how frothy at the mouth you got over this fact being mentioned

Is it a fact, or just your imagination? Does this fact come from statistics or your gut?

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#152

Post by heer4it »

YUMad wrote: post #144
heer4it wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that he (and you) comment on that because if someone is extremely concerned about the media promoting miscegenation, that's usually a good proxy for them being a racist cretin.

So just the good old ad hominem then? I simply pointed out a fact: there is a significant discrepancy between the rate of black male + white female couplings IRL and in the media. I am bringing no judgement on it. Considering how frothy at the mouth you got over this fact being mentioned, you are no better than those 'racist cretins' you try to insinuate I am part of. Do you actually have any valid arguments to dispu…

To be frank, I don't think you've actually conducted an empirical comparison of "black male + white female couplings IRL and in the media", nor do I think such a discrepancy would be worthy of comment even if it exists, and perhaps most importantly, I do not believe in the innocent motives of anyone who brings up the subject and then acts like they are only attempting to make an innocuous anthropological observation.

I'm not interested in a 'debate' about race-mixing with you. I just want to point out that when you tell on yourself like this, both online and IRL, people notice, and we'll treat you accordingly.

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#153

Post by Paradigma11 »

2Ccltvcm wrote: post #52

Hedge funds and intelligence agencies are fingerprinting all groups within our society by monitoring the responses of various target audiences to engineered stimuli. This comes in the form of observing the response to selective dissemination of content with a known effect on observers (you). A few years ago we heard about some outrage nobody did anything about when it became clear Facebook was manipulating reader emo…

I would start taking these kind of arguments more seriously if Amazon stopped sending me washing machine ads AFTER i already bought one on Amazon. No, i am not becoming a washing mashine aficianado.

You choose to believe the advertisments of advertising companies about their own power and efficacy. That these are dystopian to you is not relevant.

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#154

Post by michaelt »

throwayEngineer wrote: post #126
michaelt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Location data tells me how often you go to the gun shop and the shooting range, when your house is empty, which political protests you go to, how often you visit the pharmacy/doctor, what prostitutes you visit, what gay bars you visit, how often you break the speed limit, how much sleep you get, when you visit your lawyer or your STD clinic, whether you've kept up going to Alcoholics Anonymous, what restaurants you g…

Why? Don't you want to hear your different lawyer options, STD check options, gun options, alcohol help, etc? Or rather, would you rather have useful advertisement or spammy advertisement? I still could not relate that those would be bad. The only thing I can imagine is blackmail. Which is cultural and not moral.

  I still could not relate that
  those would be bad.
I believe the ad tech industry would literally show alcohol ads to recovering alcoholics if A/B testing or 'machine learning' said they converted at higher rates.

I believe the ad tech industry does not protect medical and political data with the appropriate level of privacy protection. So even if they wouldn't sell their database of gay Iranians to Iran, I think they'd get hacked by them.

And I believe some companies probably would sell their gun ownership database to a government that wanted to arrest gun owners, and their gay bar customer database to a government that wanted to arrest gay people.

  Or rather, would you rather have
  useful advertisement or spammy
  advertisement?
I run an adblocker, so you can guess my answer to that!

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#155

Post by grzm »

Frondo wrote: post #149
2Ccltvcm wrote: post #52

Hedge funds and intelligence agencies are fingerprinting all groups within our society by monitoring the responses of various target audiences to engineered stimuli. This comes in the form of observing the response to selective dissemination of content with a known effect on observers (you). A few years ago we heard about some outrage nobody did anything about when it became clear Facebook was manipulating reader emo…

HN Admins: it's a bad look to leave a bit of white supremacist angst in one of the top comments of a thread on the front page. > "strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male" I've already flagged the comment, but hopefully others will do so too; this kind of stuff really sticks out on a "hackers" forum.

If you want to bring something to the attention of the mods, it's most expedient to email them using the Contact link in the footer.

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#156

Post by xfitm3 »

drdeadringer wrote: post #116
xfitm3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad targeting is intentionally fuzzy to avoid creeping you out. Companies like Acxiom have an incredible amount of data on you. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

> to avoid creeping you out I assume in terms of "how did they know this about me?" a la Tom Cruise being advertised a particular brand of alcohol based on an automatic eye-scan whilst walking through a public space ["Minority Report"]. I used to be "creeped out" about this about 10 years ago. Now-a-days I am not. To be honest, a part of me wants this type of thing. I'm all for exploring knew products and "discovery"…

Ads are also for branding. Ferrari is selling an instantly recognizable status symbol. Their ads reinforce conspicuous consumption.

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#157

Post by Hermitian909 »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #153
2Ccltvcm wrote: post #52

Hedge funds and intelligence agencies are fingerprinting all groups within our society by monitoring the responses of various target audiences to engineered stimuli. This comes in the form of observing the response to selective dissemination of content with a known effect on observers (you). A few years ago we heard about some outrage nobody did anything about when it became clear Facebook was manipulating reader emo…

I would start taking these kind of arguments more seriously if Amazon stopped sending me washing machine ads AFTER i already bought one on Amazon. No, i am not becoming a washing mashine aficianado. You choose to believe the advertisments of advertising companies about their own power and efficacy. That these are dystopian to you is not relevant.

I see the line of "they showed me an ad for X after I bought one on their site!" thrown around a lot as a sign of incompetence, but the fact you made the purchase recently actually makes you a good target demographic.

You wanted some good and paid money for it. There's is now a real chance that the good you bought did not meet your needs, it broke it sucks, etc. If so, you're a prime target for these ads. If it broke you're probably looking for a new brand, or maybe it just isn't that great and you're considering returning the item and making a new purchase. While you may not need one you're part of a demographic that responds well to these ads relative the rest of the population.

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#158

Post by enraged_camel »

SPGWhistler wrote: post #124

This is fear mongering. I work in the ad industry as well - and I can promise you - 99% of the companies in the ad industry are NOT leading the way when it comes to tracking you and your data. They are incompetent and can barely do their jobs. Just take a look at any display advertising for belly fat ads and you know for sure they aren't targeting you. The 1% however (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) ARE t…

>> 99% of the companies in the ad industry are NOT leading the way when it comes to tracking you... The 1% however (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook)

This representation by percentages is a bit disingenuous. Yes, numbers-wise you may be correct, but if you consider the companies' enormous resources and amount of influence and impact, Google et al make up the 90+%.

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#159

Post by ikeyany »

trophycase wrote: post #139
ikeyany wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One that comes to mind is a motif you will see in advertisements once you are more aware of it: strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male. Ads are generally tailored to the user's preferences.

Good joke but I think this applies mostly to TV advertising

I wonder why advertisers would want to pit races against each other. What possible benefit could come from making people unhappy?

Re: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

#160

Post by tonyarkles »

adrianN wrote: post #38
ramraj07 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes from discussions and lectures from people working on engineering in some ad aggregstors - at least one said that in the end, they have a table with 300 million IDs for each person in the country and they key all the data they can link to that person with this id. In principle this data is annonymized. But does that make a difference? At least in health care people worry about hipaa and do audits to minimiz…

It's basically impossible to anonymize data. There a numerous papers about how little data is enough to uniquely identify people. Things like the zipcode where you start your commute and the zipcode where your commute ends are enough to identify the vast majority of people.

In our case, the postal code (Canadian) and almost any other piece of data is uniquely identifiable. Through a quirk in the layout of our street, my wife and I have the only house in our postal code. Add age, gender, birth month, hair colour, t-shirt size... pretty much anything, and you’ve reduced from 2 possibilities to 1.

I still want to try dropping a letter in a mailbox from a different city with just our postal code written on it and see if it arrives.

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