SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The study, based on research conducted at Harvard Business School and published in the Journal of Consumer Research, is an inquiry into the tradeoffs between transparency and persuasion in the age of the algorithm. Specifically, it examines what happens if a company reveals to people how and why they've been targeted for a given ad, exposing the algorithmic trail that, say, inferred that you're interested in discounted socks based on a constellation of behavioral signals gleaned from across the web. Such targeting happens to virtually everyone who uses the internet, almost always without context or explanation.
In the Harvard study, research subjects were asked to browse a website where they were presented with various versions of an advertisement - identical except for accompanying text about why they were being shown the ad. Time and time again, people who were told that they were targeted based on activity elsewhere on the internet were turned off and became less interested in what the ad was touting than people who saw no disclosure or were told that they were targeted based on how they were browsing the original site. In other words, if you track people across the internet, as Facebook routinely does, and admit the fact to them, the transparency will poison the resulting ads. The 449 paid subjects in the targeting research, who were recruited online, were about 24 percent less likely to be interested in making a purchase or visiting the advertiser if they were in the group that was told they were tracked across websites, researchers said.
In a related research effort described in the same study, a similar group of subjects was 17 percent less interested in purchasing if they had been told they'd been targeted for an advertisement based on information that we inferred about you, as compared to people who were told they were targeted based on information they themselves provided or who were told nothing at all. Facebook makes inferences about its users not only by leveraging third-party data, but also through the use of artificial intelligence.
It's easy to see the conflict this represents for a company recently re-dedicated to transparency and honesty that derives much of its stock market value from opacity.
The paper inadvertently offers an answer to a crucial question of our time: Why won't Facebook just level with us? Why all the long, vague transparency pledges and congressional evasion? The study concludes that when the data mining curtain is pulled back, we really don't like what we see. There's something unnatural about the kind of targeting that's become routine in the ad world, this paper suggests, something taboo, a violation of norms we consider inviolable it's just harder to tell they're being violated online than off. But the revulsion we feel when we learn how we've been algorithmically targeted, the research suggests, is much the same as what we feel when our trust is betrayed in the analog world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday May 15 2018, @09:41AM (3 children)
I am pretty sure that kind of stuff is already out there, but most of us are unaware of it because the crap is just fetched, not displayed.
To us, it just looks like a sluggish site.
Its all I can figure out.
Example: I just installed an "IP Tools" app in my Android phone....
Suddenly the FTP server in the file manager became slow as all sin. Several seconds to change directories. Yes, I am using that stock file manager's FTP server to talk to WS_FTP6 (IPSwitch) on my PC so I can readily transfer files from phone to desktop or back without messing with wires. Works great, well, at least until I installed IP Tools on the phone. Then it ran like molasses on a cold day.
My guess is that IP Tools had to go fetch an ad every time any sort of FTP activity took place... or either it was spilling beans. I really need to snoop a WAP to see what they are really doing, but all that crap takes time.
I removed "IP Tools" from the phone and now the phone's FTP server works properly again.
Yes... this happens even if the IP tools app is NOT RUNNING. It obviously has something running in the background. Something that hooked into the TCPIP stack and hung up the FTP for seconds at a time. IP Tools could be useful, but its the kind of tool I have to install from .apk when its needed, then delete the app from the phone when done so the rest of the phone will work.
I am having enough fits trying to use business grade crap, especially since all this copyright crap has gone through that limits how far I can observe what my stuff is doing.
I really miss the "hacker grade" stuff I used to use twenty years ago... SoftIce... WDASM ... IDA Pro ... KGB .... and several others I can't think of right now.. I really miss that old program I had back in the early days of Dialup Netscape, where I renamed Winsock.DLL to something else, loaded this program in the same place and named it Winsock.dll, and told it what I named the original Winsock.DLL to, and it would then proxy all internet activity, and tell me, much like "netstat -a" with an almost immediate interval - on a monochrome monitor ( the color and mono monitors each had unique addresses so the normal web browsing ran as before on the color monitor, but you could look at the mono monitor and know for sure who you were connecting to! ). It was a Godsend for doing internet banking, as it made it quite clear that just the bank and me were on the wire. This latest incarnation is like my dad's party line! Everyone snooping on the line and you did not intend a conference call with a lot of strangers snooping in on what you wanted to be a private conversation.
But, as time went on, everyone wanted to get everyone else and his brother in on every confidential internet meeting, and I had not a clue as to who was supposed to be privy to the proceedings, and who was not. And this kind of ignorance is just the invitation to the kind of internet chicanery I see going on a lot today.
Netstat your wire today and you get pagefuls of Gawd-knows-who snooping on your wire.
As far as I am concerned, its as if I eat a certain thing at a restaurant that is labeled as being one thing, but has something else in it too, but I am not supposed to go back and demand to know exactly what was in the dish, and its a violation of the restaurant's "rights" if I "reverse-engineer" the dish to see if it had something in it that is making me ill.
No-one seems to be looking at Congress and saying "You are the guys who are passing all this law that's fomenting the production of all this shitware."
Its illegal to drive on the highway with impaired skills, but yet it seems Congress is damned near determined we all drive on the Information Superhighway with blinders on.
Wanna stop this crap? Change the law and make it well known its perfectly legal to reverse engineer anything one buys if he's just trying to fix the damned thing so it works or quits leaking his personal info on the web.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:59AM
It's already legal to reverse engineer under the fair use exception for interoperability [eff.org]
The linked contains other exceptions which allow reverse engineering, exceptions carved over time - if you fall out of those precedents, (or even if you not) you can still expect some skirmishes in court with those more able to fire the lawyerpult [dilbert.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:17PM
dude
those things exist
but you aren't going to find it on an app store. you didnt find those things on an app store before.
if you stop demanding convenience, you might get what you really wanted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @11:28PM
Good luck with that. Laws are made to be worked around, bent, and broken. These are multinational corporations you're talking about here. Laws don't apply to them, especially in the United States under the orange piece of shit and all his marching moron MAGA minions.
(Yes, PLEASE keep wearing that MAGA hat. I have never seen a better replacement for your "I'm stupid" sign. The sign is big and bulky and easy to lose, whereas the hat sends exactly the same message and tends to stay on your head where it's very visible to those who are looking.)