Microblog Memes

Yeah. I work in IT as well. Not in a megacorp like Google or Facebook, but I've been in large private companies and government agencies that you would hope would have strict privacy and security policies. Guess what? They don't.

Nobody in a position of power cares beyond the point of legal requirements, which are mostly shit. It's kind of like "military grade"; it sounds impressive, but what it actually means is "this is as cheaply made as possible while still meeting the bare minimum legal standard".

Seems to me that if one was running a spy agency like, say, the CIA or something, it'd be a very useful move to get one of your employees to get a job at one of those companies, so that in addition to ones own spying, one could also piggyback off the spy infrastructure of the ad companies. I imagine the government might get some of that information already, but if you were a foreign government, or trying to get info you weren't technically supposed to have, I can imagine it might make a lot of sense

IMO it’s less about insiders stealing info. I’ve seen leads lists stolen and sold on the open market, etc. What we should really be concerned about is the above board, legal and absolutely promoted evil of advertising. I’ve worked in social Media and gaming(gambling) and let men tell you: the legal things these advertisers do are diabolical. The whiteboard conversations about how to structure a user journey are exploitation and immoral, unethical and downright evil and they are so by design. You’re doing a poor job if you’re not devising ways to skirt the law and use loopholes to manipulate people.

I'm glad I'm chronically uninteresting. If I had literally any information of value I'd be much more careful but now I'm just one of many in a massive crowd of more interesting people.

I'm still blocking advertisements though. Fuck that shit.

I don't understand why companies don't have network-wide adblockers on their employee systems and intranets. Used to be in the Air Force, ads everywhere. Now work for a contractor, still ads everywhere.

Don't they know that blocking ads can speed up their networks? That ads track activity and may be revealing sensitive information about employees?

I don't get it.

I just don't understand how advertising still makes so much money. Who's watching ads and clicking on them these days? Who sees an ad that isn't annoying, pandering, or downright infuriating to them? The ad business is so profitable, it's Google's main revenue source and Netflix is getting rid of a paid tier just to focus on their ad-supported one.

How is the ad business so profitable?

I worked in a non-decision making ITS adjacent capacity between banks and lawyers during the 2008 downturn. I knew full well our company was contracting with awful banks but I got the job while unemployed for several months when there wasn't any jobs. People don't always have a realistic choice in the matter, I was poor and it was entry level $35k cubicle gruntwork. Nothing I did couldn't be replaced by any idiot with basic MS office skills in a 10 minute interview. Me taking the high road would have just fucked up my life for no reason. I left as soon as the job market recovered.

Anyway, I pulled all of my money out of Wells Fargo and tell anyone who will listen to do the same, out of the 30 big banks we worked with they were leaps and bounds more willfully incompetent then all of the others combined. I don't claim to be a good person, I just do what I do like anyone else, I think you're looking at this situation far to ideologically. In corrupt systems we are all complicit on all ends, there is no moral high ground other than starving to death and refusing the system entirely which is nonsense. Nearly all corporations are actively doing evil and a large portion of non-profits are only marginally better.

"I used to work for the cartel, now I make covers for Lipps inc., avoid the cartel btw."

Yeah I agree to some extent.

There's that target / pregnancy story where basically they found that they would spook customers by revealing how much they actually knew. I don't think is an adequate explanation though.

Honestly though, even without any nefarious shady tracking techniques, someone like Amazon should be able to figure out what stuff I might want to buy with alarming accuracy just based on previous purchases. They really don't though, the best they can do is show me stuff I've already bought. Like "We see you bought a great coffee machine last month, what about this other coffee machine? Or perhaps we can tempt you with this fancy coffee machine?" I mean - show me some nice coffee mugs or something.

Sell it to people who will manipulate you and your family. Even subtle changes could shape the direction of your life. Or, they could say people with your preferences are in a certain area and fund some other area instead. Could be anything. The less data they have, the better.

Edit: gave->have

Have health insurance?

Big into drinking, lots of bars and going to liquor stores whilst your mobile phone is with you and some apps have location access permissions?

Don't be surprised if your health insurance goes up on account of being in a higher risk group...

(It's not exactly hard to cross your location with store locations and it's probably already done generally to try and determine your consumer habits)

And this is just a mild, mild example. Stuff to do with people's sex life can have far more entertaining effects, especially in a highly moralistic country (like the US) or if cheating on a spouse.

Think about it this way: if you don't jump through hops to make it hard to track your location, there is a record, forever of every place you go to with your phone and how long you stay there (and repeat visits with long stays would signal a pattern) as well as of everything you're interested in enough to look it up and/or visit it on the Internet and it's all crossed. Further, if you have email via one of the big providers such as Google, every email you sent, received or even just drafted but never sent is tracked.

Why do you think Google started pretty much forcing people to give them their phone number for the Google account that, for example, goes with their Google Mail?! It allows them to link all that sweet information and match it to a single individual.

And this is before we go into crossing data with the kind of physical life data on you: the insurance company records, car onership and rental, financial information and transactions, even public transport use (for those which use modern touch-in touch-out cards).

sell it to police. sell it to a stalker or vengeful ex. sell it to prospective employers, landlords, debt collectors, and scammers. this is just a taste, off the top of my head.

Right now in the US? Not much outside of try to sell you stupid shit.

But the capability in the data is there for an authoritarian regime to do quite a lot to you as a result of the information.

So you know - if there was any pending threat of a narcissistic psychopath upending the government you might be concerned over what insights into individual mindsets can be accomplished with the data available...

Adnauseam