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posted by martyb on Saturday September 29 2018, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-YOU-don't-know-won't-hurt-US dept.

The New York Times reports:

What do you call it when employers use Facebook’s advertising platform to show certain job ads only to men or just to people between the ages of 25 and 36?

How about when Google collects the whereabouts of its users — even after they deliberately turn off location history?

Or when AT&T shares its mobile customers’ locations with data brokers?

American policymakers often refer to such issues using a default umbrella term: privacy. That at least is the framework for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing scheduled for this Wednesday titled “Examining Safeguards for Consumer Data Privacy.”

[...] What is at stake here isn’t privacy, [it's] the right not to be observed. It’s how companies can use our data to invisibly shunt us in directions that may benefit them more than us.

[...] revelations about Russian election interference and Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling company that obtained information on millions of Facebook users, have made it clear that data-driven influence campaigns can scale quickly and cause societal harm.

And that leads to a larger question: Do we want a future in which companies can freely parse the photos we posted last year, or the location data from the fitness apps we used last week, to infer whether we are stressed or depressed or financially strapped or emotionally vulnerable — and take advantage of that?

[...] It’s tough to answer those questions right now when there are often gulfs between the innocuous ways companies explain their data practices to consumers and the details they divulge about their targeting techniques to advertisers.

[...] AT&T recently said it would stop sharing users’ location details with data brokers. Facebook said it had stopped allowing advertisers to use sensitive categories, like race or religion, to exclude people from seeing ads. Google created a feature for users to download masses of their data, including a list of all the sites Google has tracked them on.

Government officials in Europe are not waiting for companies to police themselves. In May, the European Union introduced a tough new data protection law that curbs some data-mining.

It requires companies to obtain explicit permission from European users before collecting personal details on sensitive subjects like their religion, health or sex life. It gives European users the right to see all of the information companies hold about them — including any algorithmic scores or inferences.

European users also have the right not to be subject to completely automated decisions that could significantly affect them, such as credit algorithms that use a person’s data to decide whether a bank should grant him or her a loan.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @10:31PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @10:31PM (#741930)

    Conscious decisions are less prevalent than they appear.

    The techniques that are used by advertisers are effectively the same techniques that are used for interrogation, hypnosis, run of the mill psychological abuse, and therapy. There is nothing wrong with not being able to identify the abusive techniques yourself. That doesn't mean the techniques haven't been clinically identified. Advertisers are using MRI's for christs sake. This is a science.

    It would be less of an issue if the major media vendors selling the advertising didn't continuously run fictional stories that defame mental healthcare as quackery. This is by design. Mental health is the enemy of advertisers, because healthy people are harder to persuade.

    Long and short of it, is that ad-tracking based targeting of persons subconscious minds is battery. Particularly when industrial psychologists are used to craft that battery. The data aggregated for that purpose is wiretapping. Or more simply, both of these activities can and should be prosecuted under existing felony laws. Anything less is to commoditize the 3rd, 4th, and 14th amendments.

    If they weren't aware of the fact that they were fucking with peoples subconscious minds in potential harmful ways, they wouldn't be hiring shrinks to write advertising copy.

    Now I'm sure there will be a deluge of posts regurgitating any one of dozens of mass media memes. Of course everything I just said must be kookery. But.. Read some books on self hypnosis. Employ the techiques. Watch some of the videos describing psychological disorders on youtube. You will recognize things that people have done to you, and you will realize that you harbor a lot of ideas that aren't your own, and exist solely to your disservice.

    People have a right to psychological self defense in the digital realm.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @12:48AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @12:48AM (#741962)

    I almost never buy anything I see advertised unless I was planning on buying anyway. Perhaps people would be better off to learn to control themselves to avoid marketing tricks.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 30 2018, @11:41AM (2 children)

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 30 2018, @11:41AM (#742055) Homepage Journal

      That's the old-fashioned use of advertising -- to tell people that want a certain kind of think where they can get it.

      The modern use is to create associations in your unconscious mind so that someday later, you suddenly realize that you want it.

      Then you look for ads that tell you wht's available and go and buy, thinking you are firmly in charge.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @02:03PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @02:03PM (#742081)

        Or further to induce fear of security of something that would cause you to buy something. You see this all the time in medical advertising, but also in everything else. Some off the cuff examples I can think of:

        Bayer: "You are going to die today" asperin commercial.

        This is the most insideous commercial I have ever seen. In all probability there are people that were caused enough stress by repeated exposure to this commercial, that they did actually have a heart attack and die because of it.

        Gieco: "You're impotent and your neighbor is coming in the window at night and fucking your wife, and everybody knows it". This is the painting commercial they used to run. If you watch the commercial, the message above, is what they are trying to pump into your subconscious. Why they think this is good for selling insurance I'll never know, but O.K.

        Lowes: "The moment you realize that..."

        All of this series of commercials are designed to induce insecurity about something. For example, being insecure about what your friends and nieghbors will think about your backyard, or your kitchen appliances.

        We all like to think that we aren't being manipulated. And the TV industry goes goes to a huge effort to convince people that psycholigcal analysis of this stuff is mumbo jumbo. But they do hire doctors of psychology to make this stuff more insideous, so clearly the message to you, is different from their own internal viewpoint. The subconscious mind absorbs this stuff whether you like it or not. And the conscious minds selects from a pallette of decisions provided by the subconscious.

        These techniques have much less impact when they aren't targeted. But when they are targeted they are more effective at creating insecurity and agitation. That is what they are designed to do, because insecurity creates an effective buyers intent. People subconscious minds think there is a "problem" and the conscious mind acts out to fix that, buy buying things. Given large enough volumes, the effect is gaslighting. People start experiencing induced insecurty about a wide variety of things, and that becomes a psycholigical disorder.

        There is a clinically measurable harm being induced with mens rea (intent). The fact that the victems don't know who is harming them is irellevant. Victems of mass water contamination often do not know their water is poisoning them, or have a conscious understanding of how they were harmed. Yet the law provides them recourse.

        The mind can be harmed by mass polution. Millions of people ARE being harmed this way. They are being harmed with premeditated intent. The mechanism of harm is only available to the offending parties, because of the mass liquidation of privacy rights. One of the reasons we have privacy rights, is so that people can't come in your home and move your furniture around just to fuck with you. This is true whether the "furniture" is physical or psychological. In both cases the effect is the same.

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday September 30 2018, @06:38PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday September 30 2018, @06:38PM (#742135) Homepage Journal

    "Why do you like advertising, Mrs. Salzman?"

    "It tells me what to buy."

    I Swear I'm Not Making This Up.

    It happens that I once worked for a Direct Mail company. The software I wrote was simply a vehicle for their Direct Mail: they'd rent - always rent, never buy - a list of names from some _direct_ competitor that was also in the Direct Mail business - then drop tests of a hundred pieces of each with various permutations on product price, offer letter text as well as the text printed on the outside of the envelope.

    Once they were certain that a particular test was profitable, then they'd drop larger and larger quantities - one thousand, ten thousand. Once we dropped a quarter million pieces of just one offer.

    This company grossed three million its peak year during my time there.

    Now get this:

    Our marketing guy was a UCSC Psychology grad student, and our Direct Mail broker, the guy who guided us on the best ways to proceed, he had a Doctorate in Psychology.

    It gets better:

    Once we have a confirmed buyer, then one a quarter we'd drop our newsletter that offered "specials" on all our products. That was always a good way to get some quick cash.

    But the real meat of the operation was to rent our lists of confirmed buyers back to our direct competitors.

    It could be worse:

    No one ever does iOS App Direct Mail, because having to buy Apps from the App Store prevents list testing.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]