They see your photos

> The age and other details (racial characteristics, ethnicity, economic status, lifestyle) are impossible to ascertain regarding the swan.

Emphasis added.

> and the output is the likelihood that you'll click on an ad or buy a product on a specific surface.

Surveillance capitalism isn't really about ads. Increasingly that data is being used to impact your life offline. It influences how much companies charge you for their products and services. It determines what version of their policies companies will inform you of and hold you to. It determines very big things like whether or not you get a job offer or a rental agreement, but it's also being used to determine even small things like how long a company keeps you on hold when you call them. It's being used to make people suspects for crimes. It's being used against people in criminal trials and custody battles. It informs decisions on whether or not your health insurer covers your medical treatments. Activists and extremists use it to target and harass people they perceive as being their enemies.

The data you hand over to companies is being used to build dossiers stuffed with inaccuracies and assumptions that will be used against you in countless ways yet you aren't even allowed to know who has it, what they're using it for, when they use it, or who they share it with.

Nobody really cares about what ads they get shown when they use the internet so companies like to pretend that that's what their data collection is all about, and they absolutely do use it for marketing, but the truth is that digital marketing is a smokescreen for everything else that your data is being used for and will later be used for.

That phrasing raises my weasel-word hackles… first of all, it’s unclear what it would mean to “use your photos and videos for advertising.” That sounds to me like reprinting your photos to advertise something—which nobody accused them of doing.

Perhaps more importantly, it only mentions the photos and videos themselves in relation to the advertising. Analyzing the photos (as per the demo in TFA) isn’t “advertising,” and neither is building a user profile.

Then later on, when they use that user profile to allow others to advertise to the user—that’s not “using your photos or videos for advertising” either. Nor is it “selling your personal information to anyone,” since what they’re selling is access to you instead of selling specific personal dossiers.

From where I’m sitting, that still seems to leave the door open to Google itself using what it gleans from your photos to build out your profile, use those insights across their whole company, and target ads at you. It also seems to leave the door open to selling “depersonalized” analyses to third parties, not to mention giving free access to whoever it might see fit (research groups, state actors,…), no?

There’s also a big difference between “doesn’t” and “will never.” Once an analysis with value exists, it seems counter to the forces of nature and commerce for it not to find its way out eventually. Just as the consumer DNA-sequencing firms pinky-swore everything was private, then gradually started spreading people’s genomes farther and wider.

"The subtle shadow suggests that he is a well-known terrorist. The paving stones in the square appear to be recently laid, implying relatively recent explosives training background."

  cat *.txt | grep -nE 'explo|terror' | fbi -open -up

Expect something similar to this in the near future.

"My instructions are to amuse visitors with information about themselves. [...] The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with datamining algorithms."

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKN9trFSACI