Please understandnim asking this question from a genuine place. I dont want the quora answer, i want the tech savvy, security expert minds of my fellow lemmings. If thats ok?
What happens to this data? What can/do they do with it? and why are so many people concerned about google tracking them?
Do i as an average user need to be concerned?
If so, What sorts of things can i do to avoid being tracked? Preferably without too much comprimise.
Just a personal story to bring one example into focus.
I got sober 8 years ago and never talked about it online until I was about 4 years sober. Never saw a single promotion for anything related to alcohol…
Until the day I made a single comment on Reddit telling my story to help support another person who was just starting their own sobriety journey.
And like magic, all promoted communities to me were alcohol related. Even though I’m an ublock user, when I would selectively disable it every advertisement I saw online was related to booze.
So even though there are ethical applications for my data, I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.
I think that’s just really shitty targeted advertising, not surprising on Reddit lol
Reddit wasn’t even the worst offender.
I made two posts one on asshole design and one on dangerous design and they cumulatively got something like 7,000 up votes and then “magically” the problem was fixed on reddit!
I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.
This doesn’t even make sense. It’d be much more lucrative to target multiple things you speak fondly about it or have expressed personal interest in by actively searching.
Keyword based advertising is overly simple
If you enjoy something you buy it occasionally. If you are addicted you buy it every day, every time you have money, you think about it all the time. That’s way more lucrative, it’s the whole business model of the tobacco industry too.
That definitely doesn’t describe how I act with nicotine, and I’m ABSOLUTELY addicted to nicotine.
I could say the same for alcohol, but I’m a very mild alcoholic.
Things we need are higher on our priorities than things we want, and addiction convinces you that you need that thing. So anything that can monetize that addiction is going to be more effective and consistent than something you merely want.
From what I understand and not trying to read any of the answers to this.
For the large part of the picture, it’s about marketing. To market specifically to you that is based on where you’ve been, what you’ve bought before and what your interests are. So they know that you don’t want to buy or subscribe into things you’ve no interest in at any capacity. So why not try to goad you into it by using things you’re into because of the data collected that’s filtered from your interests?
That’s probably the only not-so worrisome thing I can think of. It’s just a giant distraction and tool to get you to spend and subscribe.
A lot of people don’t like to be tracked and having data collected because, we feel it isn’t anyone’s business in what we do. So, why should it be the business of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Firefox .etc to be concerned in what we do?
Aside from marketing, it’d be a lot easier for all of them to pinpoint exactly what we do to feed data to authorities for easier prosecution. Which depends on how you look at it, I just think that if you don’t want to attract the attention of authorities who’ve been given a tip on you without you knowing, don’t be a criminal.
All in all really and I’m starting to derail my own explanation, it’s a big wiry issue with privacy.
To put it plainly, it’s largely for marketing and we really feel it isn’t the business of corporations to know what we’re doing, if we’re knowingly not breaking any laws. Also now that I’ve thought of it, harvesting so much data increases risk of security breaches that hackers can take. Which means it’s going from bad hands to worse off hands because now hackers can just sell our data around in the black market and we wouldn’t even know it.
Has everyone already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica, which scraped data from tens of millions of Facebook users and used it to microtarget swing voters in several countries with propaganda and misinformation to get them to either vote for right-wing candidates or stay home on election day?
Of course not. But in peoples defence, you can’t forget if you never knew. And I seem to have the impression that this was a thing and then it’s was pretty much gone again. Not brought up again and again over years like other, less important topics may have been.
Non-interested people would have been left with the impression it was bad, but it must have been fixed or else we’d hear more about it.
I don’t think many people comprehend the impact. Most people don’t think they can be manipulated, and they are all wrong.
It’s funny, the more likely you are to admit you can be manipulated the more likely you’ll notice when it’s happening. So I just go around telling everyone how easy it is to manipulate me.
Not sure if satire
Sometimes it is.
Well the other crazy thing with voting is how narrow the margins are.
It doesn’t have to convince everyone. Only a small percentage across the country mixed with a few people in key locations and you can change everything.
Miami-Dade and Palm Beach says hello. A 537 vote margin in a few Florida counties decided the 2000 US Presidential Election.
One wonders how different the world would be today if George W. Bush didn’t get that first term.
(Fun fact: the usual chicanery to depress Democratic votes also happened in 2000 - voter roll purges, roadblocks in Democratic areas, too few voter areas in cities… In many ways it was a trial run for the bullshit Republicans pull now)
I think the best example is for women. Imagine they can figure out, with 95% accuracy or something, that you are pregnant, that could be valuable data.
Now imagine you are a woman at a large corporation who just got pregnant, but aren’t telling anyone yet. Too early. Your corporation buys a batch of data and discovers there is a 95% chance you are pregnant. They don’t want to pay for maternity leave or make reasonable accomodations during pregnancy or pumping breast milk. They fire you for “unrelated reasons”, before you ever tell them you are pregnant.
Nothing illegal happened there really. You never told them so you have no way to prove they fired you for that.
This is very unlikely, because if they did it to more than a handful of people, the pattern would become immediately obvious.
Not necessarily. It doesn’t have to be pregnancy either. It could be because you are 95% sure a Democrat. Or union friendly. Or atheist.
Bundle the “undesirables” in mass layoffs to increase the obfuscation of why they were laid off. “The algorithm said these 10% had to go.”
Isn’t that illegal though
how so?
Only if you have the funds to prove it.
An example of this I use on occasion is:
You date someone years ago and no longer are. You’ve moved on, but that person then goes and commits a heinous crime. The police decide that since you dated years ago, and that record of your personal info is stored on some database they have somewhere, they no-knock warrant into your house, and shoot you dead in your own bed (Brianna Taylor - Louisville KY.) because they think there’s a possibility he was there.
This example is pretty good. I’m stealin’ it.
Breonna Taylor*
It’s not for your personal privacy, or to spare you personal embarrassment. But rather because large-scale demographic data collection is dangerous.
The Nazis used such collections to locate Jews. America used such collections to locate Japanese-Americans. The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal affiliation being printed on ID cards. In none of these cases were the data collected for the nefarious purposes it was eventually used for.
Information is a form of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power in the wrong hands is dangerous.
I’m sure there is a LOT of additional information about “what you can do”, but here are some very simple starting points. You can do these today if you want.
- Only use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed/active for web browsing.
- Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). https://protonvpn.com is considered one of the best.
- Turn off location services on your phone (this will probably be controversial but I think it makes a lot of sense).
For more, subscribe to @privacy and read and support eff.org
Best wishes!
My worst imagination is labelling you and selling your label to the companies they supply to, and how wrongly those companies can use that data, example: google search “prostate cancer” or searching for symptons associated with prostate cancer - label telling probable prostate cancer developing with this user - insurance companies denying insurance to you or making it too expensive. Now extrapolate this to what your searches probably tell about you or your state, and multiply by the websites you visit, the time you spend reading article/tweet/forum/post about a certain subject, where and how you comment those articles, etc, and being labeled according to their perceived likes/hates/problems about yourself.
This. I remember that one video by LTT where he tried searching for a flight and he got a way higher price on the standard browser compared to the one with no personal accounts/cookies.
If I use search engines, be it to find opinions on a topic or as you said an insurance, I want those sorted by factors like the date it’s been created and maybe the reputability of the source. Not what the algorithm thinks I want to see or I should see in “its” opinion.
My worst imagination is a nefarious entity using our data to determine if we are a threat or try and categorize people for some kind of psyop manipulation.
Something like Captain America Winter Soldier but more realistic. Even things like Cambridge Analytica show it is not that far fetched.
While social media companies and amazon may not have the desire to do those things, they sure make it easier for others by greedily collecting the data.
That doesn’t happen. These companies don’t sell user data and never have, they make money by being the only ones with your data through targeted advertisements. It’s not in their interest to sell it.
There’s no one-liner that will make the importance of privacy “click” for most people, since it requires a bit of abstract thought, but this site is the closest I’ve seen to it: https://www.socialcooling.com
If you want to do something about it, check out privacyguides.org, or the lemmy community (and instance) run by its owner, !privacyguides@lemmy.one
All my life I give up all my data to any product of any company I use. I accept all cookies to track me, send auto-reports and telemetry, try to join all beta products and gladly report bugs that occur. I use one nickname everywhere it is available, my home address and phone number and all social network pages are easily googlable, all my profiles are public. I always say what I think. I’m from Kyiv, Ukraine, and I have never had a single negative occasion due to my Internet behavior. AMA.
Because then the authorities can get a warrant to access that information if they believe you are guilty of something.
In the case where a law is unjust or puts peoples’ lives at risk, say like abortion laws in some US states, the government can use this against you as proof in a court of law.
Edit: here’s another post about how this information is used against people:
Yep, one could imagine scenarios in Texas where women could in theory be arrested if their messaging app snitches on them and tells authorities about their planned abortion (since it’s very easy for AI now to understand your conversations so it should be easy to automate in theory) or Google Maps reports them for having detected that they went to an abortion clinic.
To add to this: Many people shrug this off saying they don’t have anything to hide. Even assuming that is true, they usually mean they don’t have anything to hide right now from their current authorities. Ask yourself the question: Is there absolutely no form of government/regime you might want to hide something from? Are you absolutely certain these authorities might not get access to your data? Doesn’t even have to be a possible future government in your own country, it could be in some other country you might want to visit. Or maybe some terrorist organisation who for some reason targets people like you. Is there really absolutely no one you would mind having access to all the data collected about you?
The thing is, the data isn’t going to be uncollected again. The way things are drifting the number of countries not in some way endangered by antidemocratic movements is constantly decreasing. Call me paranoid but I just don’t want to risk it.
Good counter to people saying they have nothing to hide is the guy that lost his apple or google acct because he sent a photo of his child’s rash to his doctor and it got flagged as CSA.
You don’t need to have anything to hide to get fucked over by a lack of privacy.
It’s called microtargeting, all big tech companys are sorting people in groups, just by their use of the service. It starts with simple things, for example: cats or dogs? And this goes deeper to your religion or sexuality, politics etc. Created mostly for advertising it got used by political parties. Check the Cambridge analytical scandal. If you easily able to sort the people for your target you are able to manipulate your targeted people.
Newest scandal for microtargeting came from the EU-Commission with the chatcontrol.
Cambridge Analytica stuff though I think mostly revolved around them identifying more vulnerable users.
I don’t consider myself vulnerable to this stuff (I may consider grandparents and certain friends a bit more vulnerable) - should I still be worried about them having my personal data? I obviously would rather they don’t have my vulnerable relatives data so they aren’t manipulated, but for me personally does it matter?
That’s kind of silly really. Consider the example above where the woman gets fired for being pregnant. Now just pretend it was a man thing instead. What if you are diagnosed with a curable cancer, but your employer only sees oncology and fires you. What if they find out you go to a bar that is NEAR a gay bar and they just establish a policy that draws a radius around them? I can go on forever. You don’t have control over what makes you vulnerable.
You not considering yourself vulnerable to this stuff makes you exactly the type that is vulnerable to this stuff.
I don’t like the idea that if history repeats itself, a powerful entity can force the data vaults open and see who they should send to the showers. I could be on the “correct” side at that time yet something I did or said last year has the system deem me unfit for the noble breed.
Corporations are scummy motherfuckers. Once they have this data they will keep it forever. Even if they don’t have a use for it now they can come up with something in the future and will have no qualms about fucking you over with it. The technology available to analyze it is only getting more powerful as time goes on.
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t know but everyone is saying it’s bad.”
That’s not a lot of words to gobble corporate nutsack.
Damn that comment struck a nerve in you eh lol
It’s not so much about you as an individual, it’s about catalogueing and manipulating trends in our societies that can be used to make profit, for example Meta spends a lot of money and time manipulating election outcomes in favour candidates that will keep their taxes low through manipulating their content algorythm in favour of their desired candidates.
