Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
stratechery.com
Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#2I get the worries about the anticompetitive nature of regulation. (Goes back to George Stigler:"regulation is purchased by the industry".) I'd like to see more evidence that small businesses need targeted advertising to survive.
Also, I'm not sure that the opposition between "small businesses" and "giants" works. The giants are mostly platforms for the small businesses to work off. Amazon is a marketplace too. There's no bright line between "integrated giant" and "platform for micro-businesses".
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#3> To strive for a world without the generation or capture of data is to fight against the very nature of technology.
How is "the very nature of technology" to tell every site on the planet my GPU?
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#4I completely disagree with this article. It is almost like he assumes that data harvesting at the level of Facebook and Google is normal and should be accepted. Quoting from the article, "Computers emit data as a matter of course, and the Internet makes the transfer of that data free. To strive for a world without the generation or capture of data is to fight against the very nature of technology."
No, my device generates data and I should be allowed to know who is gathering that data. If the application on my phone is doing things like trying to access my pictures or Bluetooth settings, I should know and be allowed to block it.
I have a right to privacy. I appreciate that Apple is making it slightly harder for companies like Facebook and Google to harvest my data.
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#5> “ Facebook data is valuable only to the extent that it is usable on Facebook”
This is an incredibly wrong and misleading section. That data can be processed through data fusion centers and then joined against other data aggregators - all your physical location checkins from Yelp or Foursquare, all your grocery purchase history, what activities you booked on your last vacation.
I used to work for a well-known stock photography company and the company collected huge amount of data - browser signatures, upload geolocations, login locations, in addition to the actual images and customer behavior within the product.
Most of it was completely unused and one of the senior VPs of engineering was fond of saying we were making “a bet on data.” They had no immediate use for the data, but felt strongly that the larger and more comprehensive they could make an in-house data warehouse, augmented with as many types of data as we could collect, the more valuable it would eventually be in the future for use cases or third party sales that just hadn’t been thought of yet.
They are still doing this today with no uses of that data yet (or private uses selling to third parties like Facebook).
I can’t believe Stratechery would have an article so completely wrong on the absolute basics of data hoarding.
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#6[deleted]
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#7> “ Facebook data is valuable only to the extent that it is usable on Facebook” This is an incredibly wrong and misleading section. That data can be processed through data fusion centers and then joined against other data aggregators - all your physical location checkins from Yelp or Foursquare, all your grocery purchase history, what activities you booked on your last vacation. I used to work for a well-known stock…
The article also claims the captured data will never be leaked:
> [Apple's privacy ad is] truly scandalous, but not for the reason Apple wants you to think it is: the way in which this ad depicts how your information is used — literally broadcasting your web browsing and searches and private conversations to those around you — is so misleading that it is hard to call it anything but misinformation.
It's like they have never seen any of the huge data leaks that occurred over the past few years, or that whole NSA data collection system. There is no such thing as computer security in 2020. If there is data on a networked computer, it should be treated as effectively public.
The article describes how privacy could be compatible with data collection in some perfect fantasy world, not the real one we inhabit.
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#8Someone should tell the author Facebook do a lot more than simple lookalike audiences with the data they collect.
> What makes that Apple advertisement so misleading is the level of individuality it implies in terms of data collection and application. Individuality is a real problem when it comes to data collection
I guess the author has never come across this before https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#9I completely disagree with this article. It is almost like he assumes that data harvesting at the level of Facebook and Google is normal and should be accepted. Quoting from the article, "Computers emit data as a matter of course, and the Internet makes the transfer of that data free. To strive for a world without the generation or capture of data is to fight against the very nature of technology." No, my device gene…
This article isn’t about access to photos or Bluetooth.
Re: Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences
#10I completely disagree with this article. It is almost like he assumes that data harvesting at the level of Facebook and Google is normal and should be accepted. Quoting from the article, "Computers emit data as a matter of course, and the Internet makes the transfer of that data free. To strive for a world without the generation or capture of data is to fight against the very nature of technology." No, my device gene…
I don't know - on the other side of the coin imagine if no data was collected. It would be near impossible for companies to do any sort of troubleshooting or QA.
Taking it a step further, it'd also be significantly more difficult for them to understand their audience and users... which could actually make the experience worse for those users.
Even in the more nefarious case of ad-tech, I'd personally prefer more relevant ads than generic non-relevant ones.
I'm not saying all data collection is fine and well intentioned, but I also don't think it is necessarily as zero-sum as people think.
I do think when data gets licensed or shared w/ 3rd parties it should be more clear how it gets used.