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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: 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.