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Kathi Berens

I'm Being Followed: How Google-and 104 Other Companies-Are Tracking Me on the Web - Ale... - 0 views

  • The creepy feeling is a sign to pay attention to a possibly harmful phenomenon. But we can't sort our feelings into categories -- dangerous or harmless -- because we don't actually know what's going to happen with all the data that's being collected.
  • there are key unresolved issues about how we relate to our digital selves and the machines through which they are expressed.
  • At the heart of the problem is that we increasingly live two lives: a physical one in which your name, social security number, passport number, and driver's license are your main identity markers, and one digital, in which you have dozens of identity markers, which are known to you and me as cookies.
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  • As a Wall Street Journal investigation put it, data companies are "transforming the Internet into a place where people are becoming anonymous in name only."
  • With our data-driven advertising world, we are relying on machines' current dumbness and inability to "know too much."
    • Kathi Berens
       
      Arguments that data collection isn't harmful rely on machine's current capacities of speed and storage.
  • This is a double-edged sword. The current levels of machine intelligence insulate us from privacy catastrophe, so we let data be collected about us. But we know that this data is not going away and yet machine intelligence is growing rapidly
  • A voyage into the invisible business that funds the web.
  • While the big names -- Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. -- show up in this catalog, the bulk of it is composed of smaller data and advertising businesses that form a shadow web of companies that want to help show you advertising that you're more likely to click on and products that you're more likely to purchase.
  • We shop for wedding caterers and suddenly see ring ads appear on random web pages we're visiting. We sometimes think the ads following us around the Internet are "creepy." We sometimes feel watched. Does it matter? We don't really know what to think.
  • never before in the history of human existence has so much data been gathered about so many people for the sole purpose of selling them ads.
  • But increasingly I think these issues -- how we move "freely" online, or more properly, how we pay one way or another -- are actually the leading edge of a much bigger discussion about the relationship between our digital and physical selves.
  • The unconsciously created profile may mean more than the examined self I've sought to build.
  • Already, the web sites you visit reshape themselves before you like a carnivorous school of fish, and this is only the beginning.
  • Behind the details, however, are a tangle of philosophical issues that are at the heart of the struggle between privacy advocates and online advertising companies: What is anonymity? What is identity? How similar are humans and machines? This essay is an attempt to think through those questions.
  • It's worth noting how different this practice is from traditional advertising
  • Now you can buy the audience without the publication. You want an Atlantic reader? Great! Some ad network can sell you someone who has been to The Atlantic but is now reading about hand lotion at KnowYourHandLotions.com. And they'll sell you that set of eyeballs for a fifth of the price.
  • Those people become your training data, and soon you're only "retargeting" those people with a data profile that indicates that they're likely to purchase something from you eventually.
  • content providers
  • They are simply tools to improve the grip strength of the invisible hand.
  • They deliver more relevant advertising to consumers and that makes more money for companies
  • There are literally dozens and dozens of these companies and the average user has no idea what they do or how they work
  • We just know that for some reason, at one point or another, an organization dropped a cookie on us and have created a file on some server, steadily accumulating clicks and habits that will eventually be mined and marketed.
  • All that I had "opted out" of was receiving targeted ads, not data collection. There is no way, through the companies' own self-regulatory apparatus, to stop being tracked online. None.
  • In essence, Curran argued that users do not have the right to *not* be tracked.
  • The only right that online advertisers are willing to give users is the ability not to have ads served to them based on their web histories
  • "There is a vital distinction between limiting the use of online data for ad targeting, and banning data collection outright."
    • Kathi Berens
       
      A crucial disconnect between what readers/users *think* they are doing and what opt-out actually permits.
  • a full 61 percent of respondents expected that if they clicked such a button, no data would be collected about them.
  • scrum
  • privacy advocates who want to limit collection, not just uses
  • Digital Advertising Alliance
  • Many stakeholders on online privacy, including U.S. and EU regulators, have repeatedly emphasized that effective consumer control necessitates restrictions on the collection of information, not just prohibitions on specific uses of information.
  • But advertisers want to keep collecting as much data as they can as long as they promise to not to use it to target advertising. That's why the NAI opt-out program works like it does.
  • Companies' ability to track people online has significantly outpaced the cultural norms and expectations of privacy.
  • so, so different
  • We don't have a language for talking about how these companies function or how our society should deal with them.
    • Kathi Berens
       
      Crucial obs: we don't have language to specify the harm heralded by the "creepy feeling" b/c our ability to name and limit the harm doesn't exist.  It's "so, so new."
  • Everyone can know who you are, even if they call you by a different number.
  • "match cookies," s
  • But we just do not have an adequate understanding of anonymity in a world where machines can parse all of our behavior without human oversight.
  • Your visit to this story probably generated data for 13 companies through our website. The great downside to this beautiful, free web that we have is that you have to sell your digital self in order to access it
    • Kathi Berens
       
      The downside to the "free" web is that you have to sell your personal data to access it.
  • I am all too aware of how difficult it is for media businesses to survive in this new environment. Sure, we could all throw up paywalls and try to make a lot more money from a lot fewer readers. But that would destroy what makes the web the unique resource in human history that it is. I want to keep the Internet healthy, which really does mean keeping money flowing from advertising.
  • Perhaps there are natural limits to what data targeting can do for advertisers and when we look back in 10 years at why data collection practices changed, it will not be because of regulation or self-regulation or a user uprising. No, it will be because the best ads could not be targeted.
  • Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized.
  • Allow me to introduce the list of companies that tracked my movements on the Internet in one recent 36-hour period of standard web surfing: Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet. Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science. And that's just the As
  • Let's look at three companies from our list of As. Adnetik is a standard targeting company that uses real-time bidding. They can offer targeted ads based on how users act (behavioral), who they are (demographic), where they live (geographic), and who they seem like online (lookalike), as well as something they call "social proximity." They also give advertisers the ability to choose the types of sites on which their ads will run based on "parameters like publisher brand equity, contextual relevance to the advertiser, brand safety, level of ad clutter and content quality."
Kathi Berens

The Myth of the Disconnected Life - Jason Farman - Technology - The Atlantic - 1 views

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    using "disconnection" as a reason to disconnect thoroughly simplifies the complex ways we use our devices while simultaneously fetishizing certain ways of gaining depth.
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