In a week when we’ve learned that the Australian government is spending taxpayers’ money on pseudo-science, based on little more than half a dozen feelpinions and talkback radio, it’s worth remembering that some of the planet’s best and brightest are focused not on a mission to Mars or a cure for cancer, but on targeting advertising at you. If you thought those ads that follow you around the web were creepy, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Advertising platforms — sorry, social networking and media platforms — like Facebook and Twitter aren’t just collecting the data you give them. They’re also buying it in from data brokers such as Acxiom and Datalogix, which in turn have gathered it from banks and credit card companies, loyalty schemes, competition entry forms, surveys that are “just for research purposes” — anywhere they can legally get hold of it.
And thanks to your smartphone, they know where you are. Even if you don’t use the GPS , your wi-fi and Bluetooth transmitters have unique IDs, which can be cross-matched back to your phone number and email address. Why do you think shopping malls are eager for you to use the “free” Wi-Fi?
Just look at how The Next Tech Stock boosted Australian retail wi-fi provider SkyFii Ltd. Indeed, a range of companies offer to roll out city-wide “free” networks, just so they can track the punters.
Advertisers (“brands”, as marketers call them) are only beginning to explore the possibilities. But if you want to explore them for yourself, do what Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Helsinki-based F-Secure suggests: sign up not as a user, but as an advertiser.
“Go to Google and buy an ad. Go to Facebook and buy an ad. Go to Twitter and purchase a ‘promoted tweet’, because it will open your eyes,” Hypponen told the AusCERT Information Security Conference on the Gold Coast earlier this month.
Twitter, for example, lets you target your promoted tweets at beer drinkers. Or people with hybrid or electric cars. Or who are into paranormal phenomena.
If your customers are in the US, more detailed targeting is already possible. You can target Twitter users with a household income between $50,000 and $74,999. Or the 1.55 million described as “corporate moms”. Or the 2.05 million who specifically buy Kellogg’s Froot Loops.
Imagine that you’re a “fit mom” (yes, that’s another category) with children aged under 10, and you’ve been buying them Froot Loops. You might well see a low-sugar breakfast product being promoted to you, including a map to the closest supermarket that’s got it on special.
Actually, since the shopping mall is tracking your location down to the last metre, you could well receive an SMS just as you pause in the breakfast food aisle, telling you to look to your left, on the second shelf — because just for you, that low-sugar brand is a dollar off marked price for the next five minutes.
Did you spend several minutes in the confectionary aisle without buying anything? As you turn to walk away, your phone offers discount chocolate. Did you just drop bread into the trolley? Vegemite is just behind you. A new T-shirt? Matching slacks are to the right.
And thanks to “big data” analysis, advertisers will be able word their offers, and time their delivery, with the precision of a cigarette’s first nicotine hit. Maximise those returns, baby!
This relentless tracking is happening, Hypponen says, because today, more than 20 years after the creation of the web, there’s still no simple, integrated way for us to pay for content.
“To pay half a cent to read today’s Dilbert, I can’t do that. The only thing that is even getting close to that are these virtual currencies like Bitcoin, but that’s not built into our browser.”
Instead, we ended up with “a system that we would never have imagined in 1994”, but which has been “perfected” by the biggest players on the net today, namely Google, Facebook and Twitter: “Profiling the user to gather as much information about individuals as possible, and then selling those profiles to the customers of these services, to the advertisers.”
You’ll note that Apple is absent from Hypponen’s list. That’s because Apple has said, repeatedly, that it isn’t interested in analysing your data. But that doesn’t mean the third-party apps running on Apple devices can’t do so. As Gizmodo‘s Luke Hopewell put it, “Apple is selling your privacy back to you as a feature'”.
At Apple’s recent World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), a little-reported announcement was that the next version of Apple’s Safari web browser will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads. Except, perhaps, Apple’s own iAd product. So presumably that’ll be their way of muscling in on the lucrative advertising revenue stream.
Finally, if retail doesn’t scare you, remember that political parties have voter databases, and they too can be cross-matched in the same was. As I speculated back in 2013, prepare for the attack of the politiclones.
*Disclosure: Stilgherrian travelled to the Gold Coast as AusCERT’s guest.
“..And thanks to your smartphone, they know where you are. Even if you don’t use the GPS , your wi-fi and Bluetooth transmitters have unique IDs, which can be cross-matched back to your phone number and email address…”
Not so fast!
iPhone (and iPad) in iOS8 have had randomised MAC addresses to prevent exactly this.
over 80% of iOS devices have updated to the new operating system.
Free wi-fi is dangerous not only to privacy, but any transaction is available unencrypted.
Banking over wifi is not to be recommended.
Bluetooth beacons will be next, some are trojans to ‘mine’ data from consumers..the simplest response is to switch to flight mode once in those ‘nag’ retailers..again iOS is limited to twenty approved UUID beacon addresses..android is unlimited and can ‘see’ every beacon in range..perhaps 150 metres
this will be both annoying and susceptible to even more privacy abuses.
While I like the issues that the article highlights the conclusions are provably wrong.
This relentless tracking is happening, Hypponen says, because today, more than 20 years after the creation of the web, there’s still no simple, integrated way for us to pay for content.
There are numerous technical solutions to this problem however they all fail due to social factors. When prompted “Pay 3 cents to read this article” most people will say no. Not because the price is excessive, rather the cost of making the decision is too high and they decide it isn’t worth it.
Targeted advertising similarly fails from the implementors not taking into account social factors. Once you target too well people find it creepy and it turns them off the product and brand.
Even if a 10% of people in the bread isle receiving an sms reminding them to buy vegemite are slightly distressed by the message the damage to kraft will far outweigh the increased sales.
Scary but maybe not so scary.
No Coles or Woolies cards. Or any other electronic stuff in stores.
Never use “free Wifi” anywhere.
Do not do “surveys” and get freebies from stores(or any other incentives).
Have the randomized MAC address in my phone.(Blue tooth off)
Occasionally use Google Scholar, but have ad blocking set-up on my browser.
Might just go back to Duck Duck to minimize the crap the comes with Bing (except the daily pics are good)
And I certainly do not read what Rupert wants me to know. Especially if I have to pay for it.
Oh, and never watch commercial TV.
Isolated? Uninformed? No way.
So for Crikey it’s pseudo-science simply because you don’t want it investigated? Oops! Of course it is for the Crikey Collective.
And tracking people’s spending to be able to encourage them to spend more is happening? Who’d have guessed.
No Norman, it’s pseudo-science because a) there have been a number of peer-reviewed studies (and meta-studies) that have been unable to find any significant evidence of any health effect and b) the parties asking for more research have rejected NHMRC as not being ‘independent’ researchers, which looks more like shopping for a friendlier researcher than any interest in science.
Somewhere in you there is a kernel of intelligence, but I’ll be damned if I can see it through all of the reflexive contrarian behavior.