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from the something-for-your-blood-pressure dept.
Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) any ordinary online Joe or Jeanette has the right to know which data are gathered about his/her activities. What's more, if a site wants to share those data with a third-party, it also has to clearly inform ya about those other companies, who in turn have to inform you about which personal data they're processing, with whom they're sharing those data and so on.
In short, turtles all the way down.
Yet that's a concept that apparently has zoomed right past the well-educated heads of such obscure companies like Oracle, Acxiom, Criteo, Equifax, Experian, Quantcast and Tapiad: just some of the data processors at the heart of the commercialized Internet.
Let's take a look at just two of them: Oracle and Acxiom.
Oracle [Data Cloud] sorts individuals into thousands of categories, based on more than 30,000 data attributes including newspaper readership, dieting, weight, ethnicity, charitable causes, online dating, politics [Pro 2nd Amendment Voters, Fiscally Conservative/Liberal, Likely Pro-Choice, Likely Supportive of Same Sex Marriage] and so on for 2 billion consumer profiles (drawn from 1,500 data partners).
Acxiom claims to cover 700 million people, with for example more than 3,500 specific behavioural insights for over 90% of UK households [Alcohol at Home, Heavy Spenders, Interest in Going to the Pub], while drumming its chest about its Personicx lifestage segmentation system and its LiveRamp IdentityLink: an identity graph which matches email and postal addresses, cookies, deviceIDs and, of course, phone numbers to individual 'consumers', merging both online and offline data.
They must be slightly envious towards Facebook's 52,000 personal attributes and 1.9 billion users.
Their curiosity piqued by such wildly optimistic messaging, the people at Privacy International decided to try out their rights under the GDPR. With some funny results: e.g. a data broker returning personal data as been provided by another data broker -- but that other data broker [Oracle] referring to an online (what else) tool only returning a blank stare. At least they made an effort, there: obtaining user consent was an interesting concept, for them data brokers do-gooders.
On November 8, Privacy International contacted data protection authorities in France, Ireland and the UK, and filed complaints against the 7 data brokers [Acxiom, Oracle], ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad) and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) mentioned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:03PM (2 children)
Learn critical thinking first. For example, what's your evidence that complete immunity to every sort of manipulation is desirable?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:49PM
Are you married? Have you never once felt the complete fool, for having allowed yourself to be manipulated yet again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @02:54AM
Well,
Eventually critical thinking leads to not just understanding that your being fucked with, but understanding the volume with which you are being fucked with. I can't even watch normal TV anymore, because I spend the whole time picking apart the psychological techniques and brain rape sewn into all the advertising and content. The fact that every show now has a periodic episode where there is a concussion or some excuse for high frequency sounds, isn't an accident. They're using high frequency audio masking to fuck with peoples minds. It also isn't an accident that content and commercials make fun of things like hypnotism and clinical psychology like mental health sciences are all just some evil boogyman.
The science is extensive. We know how a lot of the mind works. Not all of it, but enough to draw some intelligable conclusions. But finding a 12 man jury who isn't suffering the bizarre kind of PTSD these fucks inflict on the public is an unlikely event. Bias against mental health in the U.S. is the flat-earth debate of the modern times. The public has a completely wrong view, and the church (cable TV) is formenting that view because it threatens their control over the publics will. And any reasoned call to correct this, is facing the shit end of a billion dollar propaganda and reputation anhilation machine. Not to mention the most severe dilution of civil rights this country has seen since the Congress ignored slavery in 1789.
Conscious decisions are much less prevalent than they appear.