“It’s one thing for a pile of data to be gathered about me or you and crunched [to send us ads] designed to persuade us to buy [stuff]. It’s quite another when it can potentially shift election results.”
“[Micro-targeting] cuts out the noise of all the alternative viewpoints that would otherwise complicate a person’s political decision-making”
Scary.
Here’s an excellent profile-piece of a man who gets paid to buy people’s private data, to target them for propaganda.
It’s ironic that this global-scale privacy-violator is himself very reluctant to reveal any details from his personal life. It was touching to read how, after Eton, he studied Art History because “It was something that I always have been incredibly passionate about” So, after all that hype, he’s not even a “Math Man” after all. Nevertheless,
“I just thought this was the last opportunity to study something that I cared about. I was pretty adamant I’d go into finance.”
It’s disgraceful to mislead people into surrendering their data, then using this data to maximise how manipulative your ads are to said people.
Check out the barefaced lying in this Youtube Keynote Speech
23:15 How did you get the emotional profile of people? “There’s no reason why people should give up any data at all, and there’s certainly no obligation to. We managed to collect millions — hundreds of thousands — or millions I should say, of emotional profiles in the US by people volunteering this information to us. We can then match these emotional profiles against the data attributes that we hold on those individuals who have taken these personality inventories.”
25:00 “They’re voluntarily giving up their data, they’re doing this in full knowledge of what’s happening here, this is not anything Machiavellian or out-of-order.
This is a lie! The US data-set Cambridge Analytica used was largely harvested without consent, using an exploit that, if one person volunteered themselves through a survey, the rest of their entire friends-list data would be scraped as well.
Nix defends Trump’s election as “free and fair … the will of the people” after having spent 20 minutes taking credit for manipulating people into voting for Trump. Can ANY advertising exec say in good conscience that their adverts exist to provide “fair representation” of their product? The very act of targeting the delivery to exploit people’s specific personality faults is coercive.
Back to the Article:
“[Nix] doesn’t [shy] from Cambridge Analytica’s contribution to the Trump campaign. “We’re a service provider and we’re just trying to provide the best possible service for our clients.”
Nix acts like a respectable professional, but he’s really just a mercenary, willing to exploit people’s data for the highest bidder.
Taking a step back, it needn’t be all dooms-day. Your data is out there, including psychometric tests and shopping habits (if not even porn habits). But can they REALLY use that already? Surely that’d take too much effort and processing-power. Surely Cambridge Analytica would profit if they exaggerated their effectiveness, so they can’t be as powerful as they claim. We can debate about today’s data-hotshots; how nice, nasty, naive, or nefarious they are. That doesn’t matter. It’s the NEXT round of predatory advertisers who’ll buy (or steal) your data that we should be concerned about. Even if the data can’t be abused today, the fact that it’s ALREADY out there means we have no way of preventing it from being abused tomorrow.
I want to be able to live a quiet life, where I control “who knows me” and I opt-in to any political choices I make. That’s no longer possible. You can’t browse, shop, or communicate online without your clicks and eyeballs being tracked, manipulated, and monetised.
"”Remember, Google’s customers are advertisers, not users,” says academic Vanessa Teague. “So the service to Google’s customers is that they can get good data about how effective their ads are.””
From now on, I refuse to consent to Google violating my privacy. Recently I was making a new email account. I’ve attached Google’s current Gmail ToS (dated 2018.03.20). After reading that, I closed the Gmail signup window immediately, and made this account instead Vanitas.V@protonmail.com
The cat’s largely already out-of-the-bag, but there are still some basic improvements you can make today. There exist other, high-quality, free Email providers, beyond Google (e.g. Proton Mail). Same for Instant Messaging, screw FaceBook (which also includes WhatsApp and Instagram), use Telegram instead! Consider sacrificing some of the convenience of Google Chrome, to switching to Mozilla (or even TOR) and using a VPN.
The bad news is our default, free, convenient web options are abusive. The good news is we can still do something about it. Share this article with your friends, and we can start making privacy (not profit) the priority.
By choosing “I agree” below you agree to Google’s Terms of Service.
You also agree to our Privacy Policy, which describes how we process your information, including these key points:
Data we process when you use Google
When you set up a Google Account, we store information you give us like your name, email address, and telephone number.
When you use Google services to do things like write a message in Gmail or comment on a YouTube video, we store the information you create.
When you search for a restaurant on Google Maps or watch a video on YouTube, for example, we process information about that activity – including information like the video you watched, device IDs, IP addresses, cookie data, and location.
We also process the kinds of information described above when you use apps or sites that use Google services like ads, Analytics, and the YouTube video player.
Depending on your account settings, some of this data may be associated with your Google Account and we treat this data as personal information. You can control how we collect and use this data at My Account (myaccount.google.com).
Why we process it
We process this data for the purposes described in our policy, including to:
Help our services deliver more useful, customized content such as more relevant search results;
Improve the quality of our services and develop new ones;
Deliver personalized ads, both on Google services and on sites and apps that partner with Google;
Improve security by protecting against fraud and abuse; and
Conduct analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used.
Combining data
We also combine data among our services and across your devices for these purposes. For example, we show you ads based on information from your use of Search and Gmail, and we use data from trillions of search queries to build spell-correction models that we use across all of our services.
Comments