An advertising industry worker's take on adblockers

I worked at an ad agency and we'd literally have every user's email, name, phone etc in random spreadsheets that everyone had access to.

As an intern I had root access to just about everything on the company server because I was one of the people who "knew computers" who wasn't a dev.

There was constant debate about how to trick people into giving over their data etc (e.g. email sign-up for some free crap that you never actually got). Or getting people to allow apps permission to access their contacts, as then you've got 100 new people, and enough info about them to get them to open a spam email.

Also, if the user fell for a trick, their details are suddenly high value, as they are dumb enough to be a "mark" (or maybe their English isn't very good), so their stuff can be sold to scam companies or just scummy people.

Privacy is a layer of defence, and shitty people feel entitled to take it away from you.

Some things that my company does:

• Has someone watching you browse our site live. We can see everything you do in real time. All your searches, missclicks, mouse movements, etc. Only thing it cant see is credit card info.
• Uses these live views to create a profile on you. Are you in the deep south and searched for something that could be "conservative"? Your now on our Conservative mailing list. Vise-versa as well, We have email marketing campaigns that are written to cater to demographics. For each email sales campaign we put out, there are about 8 varieties of those emails that are tailored to what we think you want.
• Keep databases of all our customers and people who visit the site, with as much info as possible. IP, location, estimated salary, spending potential, whether or not you are more likely to click on our links. All kinds of info that isnt really protected in any meaningful way. Most of it is just on a Google Drive.
• For our big spenders and repeat customers, we have a separate database that has even more personal info. The marketing manager has even gone so far as to look up Facebook and Linkden and whatnot on you and take whatever they can find. Family, friends, hobbies, jobs, anything that they think can be useful to sell more stuff. Again, none of this is really secured to well.

Im not in the marketing department of my job so theres probably a lot more that im not aware of. These are just a few things we do and im sure this is mild in comparison to bigger companies. My job is a small family business with like 10 people working there.

I think you’re the only person who I have ever seen say this aloud in a public forum—I totally agree. This doesn’t just apply to advertising. “I used to work for a plastics company—YOU DONT EVEN KNOW HOW BAD MICROPLASTICS ARE” No further elaboration

Like, how bad are they?! Tell me! You can’t just say that and leave!

Attribution (how do I prove the ad I bought actually influenced a person’s decision to do something) is still not a solved problem. If a company’s furniture business increased revenue 10% in a quarter, what percent of that was due to marketing. Also which campaign attributed the most to that increase? Because companies often run multiple campaigns through different channels and vendors.

If I can prove spending 50M on TV ads resulted in 150M in additional sales, that company would probably spend 150M on the next campaign to try and generate 450M.

The problem is what kind of data it takes to prove attribution. If I could say ID 123 saw an impression on Jan 31, made an Internet search in that vertical on Feb 1, and traveled to a location with that product on Feb 2. That would be pretty fucking convincing, but it also involves knowing ID 123 person’s activities in extreme granularity.

That’s a use case for selling furniture, but what else could you accomplish? Honey pot people seeking abortions in places where it use illegal? Identify people who maybe politically subversive. Scams on scams.

Pretty much anyone with a budget and a goal can access a commercial surveillance network.

Glad to see someone say this. It's a total appeal to authority argument. With they would've explained why they think it's bad and let us come to our own conclusion.

I work for a major data aggregator of public records, which uses a lot of the same techniques the these ad places use to profile people.

You would be astounded by the sheer amount of information we have on individual people from addresses, hard pii such as criminal and finance records and your ssn if in the USA, who your neighbors and family are, your assets such as housing/vehicles etc, and even your individual devices like your phone.

Ad companies like Google run on your digital exhaust. They make it easy to embed their analytics, login, payment, crash reporting, and other tools into websites and applications.

This data is collected and combined with their other data sources. They know your physical location via GPS or approximate based on your internet provider. If you use Google DNS they know all the websites you are going to and when. Not using Google DNS?, That's cool, most websites have some component that integrates with Google. Use android apps? Almost all of those use play services, so Google gets that info too.

Hanging out with your friends tonight? Ad companies can use location data to figure out who you hang with and build a social graph of people who are around you all the time. It's almost Valentine's Day.. better buy a gift for that person you live with. Here are some suggestions based on what they have been looking at.

They own most people's email accounts, they know what you watch on YouTube, they know about your preferences, they know what you might buy and when. They are a search company so they will ingest any and all data about you on the web. If you bought it with Google pay or see an email receipt they know if their advertising is effective.

On top of that, now this data is all fed into machine learning algorithms to further mine the dataset.

They know more about you than you do.

Exactly, this is just a baseless statement of something we all know to be true and already agree with. It's like those posts that basically just say "rich people don't pay much tax, this is bad!", I'd love to read some details but just stating the obvious isn't informing the interested or convincing the uninterested.

Can't find it rn but there was a mastodon post a while back about a surveillance program using data sold for advertising purposes. Maybe someone remembers what it's called. The degree of information that program advertised as being able to find was insane.

The key word here is 'security.'

Ad networks have been used to spread malware before, for example.

The data aspect does allow for much more nuanced pictures of people's lives than you might think - Google the story about the teenage girl who Target knew was pregnant before she'd told her family as a sample (and that was only from purchase data).

But realistically advertisers know a lot less than you think they do. They have the data, but don't know what to do with it outside of aggregate approaches that move the needle for a subset of their audience (who tend to just be very suggestible in general).

They may have an NDA.

Yeah. I work in IT as well. Not in a megacorp like Google or Facebook, but I've been in large private companies and government agencies that you would hope would have strict privacy and security policies. Guess what? They don't.

Nobody in a position of power cares beyond the point of legal requirements, which are mostly shit. It's kind of like "military grade"; it sounds impressive, but what it actually means is "this is as cheaply made as possible while still meeting the bare minimum legal standard".

Seems to me that if one was running a spy agency like, say, the CIA or something, it'd be a very useful move to get one of your employees to get a job at one of those companies, so that in addition to ones own spying, one could also piggyback off the spy infrastructure of the ad companies. I imagine the government might get some of that information already, but if you were a foreign government, or trying to get info you weren't technically supposed to have, I can imagine it might make a lot of sense

IMO it’s less about insiders stealing info. I’ve seen leads lists stolen and sold on the open market, etc. What we should really be concerned about is the above board, legal and absolutely promoted evil of advertising. I’ve worked in social Media and gaming(gambling) and let men tell you: the legal things these advertisers do are diabolical. The whiteboard conversations about how to structure a user journey are exploitation and immoral, unethical and downright evil and they are so by design. You’re doing a poor job if you’re not devising ways to skirt the law and use loopholes to manipulate people.

I'm glad I'm chronically uninteresting. If I had literally any information of value I'd be much more careful but now I'm just one of many in a massive crowd of more interesting people.

I'm still blocking advertisements though. Fuck that shit.

yay! you worked at facebook and google well knowing they exploit people's emotions and tech illiteracy. Do you want a cookie?

I hope you're working at Tiktok now. I can't wait to praise you about how you tell everyone they're exploiting teenagers and spying on them that we totally don't know.  🕵️ 🕵️ 🕵️

I don't understand why companies don't have network-wide adblockers on their employee systems and intranets. Used to be in the Air Force, ads everywhere. Now work for a contractor, still ads everywhere.

Don't they know that blocking ads can speed up their networks? That ads track activity and may be revealing sensitive information about employees?

I don't get it.

I work in an advertising-adjacent field (we won't do any skeevy data-harvesting stuff, but still, ads)

My pal too; he makes signs.

I just don't understand how advertising still makes so much money. Who's watching ads and clicking on them these days? Who sees an ad that isn't annoying, pandering, or downright infuriating to them? The ad business is so profitable, it's Google's main revenue source and Netflix is getting rid of a paid tier just to focus on their ad-supported one.

How is the ad business so profitable?

It's about 15% of an engaged audience on every successful campaign where advertising really shifts behavior.

Over a few years I realized that it was likely the same subset of an unusually suggestive audience that the advertising was really for.

The industry likes to lie to itself that it's effective in aggregate, but really it's just people with poor suggestibility filters that are getting swayed through advertising channels.

Marketing channels are the much more interesting and worthwhile endeavor.

oh rly? then why, after i’ve used facebook daily for 15 years, does it thin my interests include “foot” and and actors ive never heard of? why does google, after about that same amount of usage plus me owning many androids and having an even deeper entanglement with it than with facebook, think i’m the opposite sex (!) and imagine countless interest for me that i don’t have, just like facebook?

iv yet to see any of these companies being very accurate about me.

I worked in a non-decision making ITS adjacent capacity between banks and lawyers during the 2008 downturn. I knew full well our company was contracting with awful banks but I got the job while unemployed for several months when there wasn't any jobs. People don't always have a realistic choice in the matter, I was poor and it was entry level $35k cubicle gruntwork. Nothing I did couldn't be replaced by any idiot with basic MS office skills in a 10 minute interview. Me taking the high road would have just fucked up my life for no reason. I left as soon as the job market recovered.

Anyway, I pulled all of my money out of Wells Fargo and tell anyone who will listen to do the same, out of the 30 big banks we worked with they were leaps and bounds more willfully incompetent then all of the others combined. I don't claim to be a good person, I just do what I do like anyone else, I think you're looking at this situation far to ideologically. In corrupt systems we are all complicit on all ends, there is no moral high ground other than starving to death and refusing the system entirely which is nonsense. Nearly all corporations are actively doing evil and a large portion of non-profits are only marginally better.

Well the OP isn't saying they got rich off of it. Lots of people just need jobs.

"I used to work for the cartel, now I make covers for Lipps inc., avoid the cartel btw."

Things like this just screams "I'm one of the good guys now" and probably "check my new book/course/patreon/podcast/tweets to read more about shitty things I did."

money in, money out

Yeah I agree to some extent.

There's that target / pregnancy story where basically they found that they would spook customers by revealing how much they actually knew. I don't think is an adequate explanation though.

Honestly though, even without any nefarious shady tracking techniques, someone like Amazon should be able to figure out what stuff I might want to buy with alarming accuracy just based on previous purchases. They really don't though, the best they can do is show me stuff I've already bought. Like "We see you bought a great coffee machine last month, what about this other coffee machine? Or perhaps we can tempt you with this fancy coffee machine?" I mean - show me some nice coffee mugs or something.

I always assumed that’s what the gambling and “hot women in your area want to meet you!” Ads were: least common denominators when they can’t target you well enough to place more reputable ads

It almost makes me sad that I don’t see those as much anymore. They have me pegged (and not in a fun way)

No, they don't need to get paid. People can do things for fun and not money.

Sell it to people who will manipulate you and your family. Even subtle changes could shape the direction of your life. Or, they could say people with your preferences are in a certain area and fund some other area instead. Could be anything. The less data they have, the better.

Edit: gave->have

Have health insurance?

Big into drinking, lots of bars and going to liquor stores whilst your mobile phone is with you and some apps have location access permissions?

Don't be surprised if your health insurance goes up on account of being in a higher risk group...

(It's not exactly hard to cross your location with store locations and it's probably already done generally to try and determine your consumer habits)

And this is just a mild, mild example. Stuff to do with people's sex life can have far more entertaining effects, especially in a highly moralistic country (like the US) or if cheating on a spouse.

Think about it this way: if you don't jump through hops to make it hard to track your location, there is a record, forever of every place you go to with your phone and how long you stay there (and repeat visits with long stays would signal a pattern) as well as of everything you're interested in enough to look it up and/or visit it on the Internet and it's all crossed. Further, if you have email via one of the big providers such as Google, every email you sent, received or even just drafted but never sent is tracked.

Why do you think Google started pretty much forcing people to give them their phone number for the Google account that, for example, goes with their Google Mail?! It allows them to link all that sweet information and match it to a single individual.

And this is before we go into crossing data with the kind of physical life data on you: the insurance company records, car onership and rental, financial information and transactions, even public transport use (for those which use modern touch-in touch-out cards).

sell it to police. sell it to a stalker or vengeful ex. sell it to prospective employers, landlords, debt collectors, and scammers. this is just a taste, off the top of my head.

Right now in the US? Not much outside of try to sell you stupid shit.

But the capability in the data is there for an authoritarian regime to do quite a lot to you as a result of the information.

So you know - if there was any pending threat of a narcissistic psychopath upending the government you might be concerned over what insights into individual mindsets can be accomplished with the data available...

Adnauseam

I hope you understand that services you also pay for are also selling your data.

Use patreon, liberapay, and open collective to pay the creator directly, then aggressively block ads. Thats what I do.

The point is to give creators money, not advertisers

https://kind.social/@lactol/111260501634275996