1y ago

Surveillance advertising in Europe: The adtech industry tracks most of what you do on the Internet. This file shows just how much.

netzpolitik.org Surveillance advertising in Europe: The adtech industry tracks most of what you do on the Internet. This file shows just how much.

The advertising industry has more than 650,000 labels to target people. Reading through them reveals how even the most sensitive aspects of our life are monitored. EU-based data brokers play a vital role in this system.

Internet @kbin.social

The adtech industry tracks most of what you do on the Internet. This file shows just how much.

netzpolitik.org /2023/surveillance-advertising-in-europe-the-adtech-industry-tracks-most-of-what-you-do-on-the-internet-this-file-shows-just-how-much/

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I've worked in advertising for a decade and, while on the one hand, the industry indeed tries to track your every move, it's rarely done well or in a coordinated fashion. Ever wonder why it's still not possible to switch off ads for products you've already bought? Online advertising is mostly blind spam, which is why you will be advertised the thing you've just bought ad nauseam. If they had these ultra-accurate profiles of everyone, they'd advertise you something you haven't bought. Using a basic adblocker instantly kills 99% of an advertiser's ability to publicly gather your data. It gets more complicated in the walled gardens: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft etc. have an unbelievable amount of information about you, but they don't willingly share this. They use it to milk you within their walled gardens (do note, that in order to avoid Meta, you cannot use Threads, Instagram, any of their hardware, Facebook or WhatsApp).
Ultimately, it's still your choice whether you let them surveil you and it turns out people give these rights up willingly.
If you have an Alexa, it's your fault that Amazon can spy on everything your family says. If you've given WhatsApp your mobile number, then it's your fault that Facebook can read and analyse everything you've said to anyone on WhatsApp, connected to a near-perfectly unique ID against your name.
It is up to the users to not willingly provide this information. Trying to do this the regulatory way is all well and good, but it takes decades and the industry moves faster than that. And many countries don't care at all anyway.
You simply have to give up this dream of corporate ultra-convenience. You have to decide to live a slightly harder life: Linux instead of windows, open source instead of proprietary. Mastodon instead of Twitter, Lemmy instead of Reddit, etc etc
- This puts too much blame on the users. Individuals do not have the power to fight international mega corporations. It also ignores that, regardless of who you think is at fault, adtech violates a ton of privacy laws, at the very least in the EU. If a company doesn't have a legal basis for collecting personal data, they are not allowed to do it. Especially if it is sensitive data like medical information, religion and sexual preferences.
  I don't get why we have to defend these practices or downplay them.
  
  Excellent point. I completely agree and should have perhaps put more emphasis on the fact that these practices are of course egregious and the onus should not just be on the user. There should be more public awareness of these privacy nightmares, however. Somehow people need to learn to start caring about this stuff, because if nobody uses Facebook, Facebook doesn't have the power to act the way it does.
- If you've given WhatsApp your mobile number, then it's your fault that Facebook can read and analyse everything you've said to anyone on WhatsApp, connected to a near-perfectly unique ID against your name.
  But it's end to end encrypted, so I doubt Whatsapp is able to read any messaging content. The meta data (who is contacting who, when from where) is probably worth enough for them already.
  
  Has that ever been independently verified? I remember the WhatsApp founders quit over FB policy to use messages for advertising, but perhaps they've changed course on that. You're right, the metadata alone would be insanely valuable.
- You can't do much. You simply cannot not use a platform you actually need, Whatsapp is an example in Italy.
  I've now been 2 years on Linux, but only because I prefer the system itself. You can't simply not use Windows for most, as unless you use very few generic programs you will eventually need to run a program that Wine will not handle. And talking about Linux, if you have newer Nvidia hardware you have no choice but to use the proprietary driver.
  Full privacy online doesn't exist without giving out convenience, but that's honestly fine. In the end, its all about how much we actually need or want those services. The most important thing is finding the right balance between privacy and convenience that each of us feels comfortable with.

While I agree that advertisers go much too far, the 650k labels figure used here is a bit manipulative. They make it seem like the advertisers have 650k different bits of information on everyone, but clearly they don't.
The examples they provide of labels show that they are combinations of multiple things. For example they show a label "France + Land Rover", which really are two different bits of information combined into one label. If they would have an exhaustive list of all countries (about 200) and the most popular car brands (let's say about 20), that would be around 4000 labels, or 0.6% of the 650k labels. If they add a third characteristic, that number would explode.

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