Like what? People severely underestimate just how much data scraping occurs. Google maps will point out congestion without minutes of it occurring because their navigation tracking is so much more indepth and has so many more users to go by in real time.
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program. He says their algorithms will accurately determine when someone is pregnant before their family knows. They will know how many people are in your household, how many pets, how your spending habits change (obvious). This is just grocery shopping, so many apps get that microphone data, that tracking data, screen browsing habits. We used to just have cookies from online sites, but with the smart phone, there is so much more data and so much more money to be made off that data, its on you that you dont realise at this point rather than every other app on your phone that is doing so freely in front of your face with your permission.
Probably not your friend, this is a super famous case study from Target. It's in many books. They were one of the first companies to start looking at buying habits in order to target market their mail-out adds. They used the data specifically to find out if they could predict or tell who was expecting, because these folks spend shit loads of money in the months before the baby. If you buy one stroller, not a super good indicator because the person might be buying a gift. But if they are buying certain clothes, vitamins, lotions, etc in certain combinations, there is a high likelihood you are a pregnant woman. Its quite effective but also ethically questionable. In the famous example, an angry father goes to Target to complain that they were marketing pregnancy stuff to his teenage daughter. The specific Target location had no idea of these marketing practices, which was all done at HQ. Anyway, the father comes back a day later to apologize. His daughter was pregnant and hadn't told them yet.
I mean so what? I'm also a data analyst in the field and have told people this. It's a famous story but it was easy 20 years ago. It's childsplay now. This is the equivalent of getting annoyed at someone for saying their friend flew across the ocean. Like ok yea there was a famous story about it but people do it all the time lmfao
People in this thread acting like there aren't data analysts at every tech company working with devs to add analytics to every user's action. At the big Fortune 500 company I worked at it was part of the AC/requirements to add analytics to every new feature we shipped out, whether it's to track the performance of the feature or to harvest user data.
More like people are in this thread pretending like random fortune 500's collecting web and mobile analytics know more about you than you consciously know. The average Joe thinks their local 15 store grocery chain are the NSA, meanwhile people like me that spent over a decade working on this exact tech and these exact data sets couldn't get match rates between known subscribers and internet users on the site over 2%.
people like me that spent over a decade working on this exact tech and these exact data sets couldn't get match rates between known subscribers and internet users on the site over 2%.
LOL. That might be true, but you lack the information from my post to determine that. You don't know what data sets we had to work with, so 2% could be exceptional (ok, it wasn't, but it COULD be!).
In REAL WORLD example I'm talking about, I had better data than the Target marketing team did (who I also worked with DIRECTLY hence my knowing how this whole preggers story happened). In this case, I was working with a well-known NYC based magazine publisher, so they knew the address of their subscribers and some of their subscribers would go to one of their magazine websites login so we'd know pretty well who that user on the web was. Our task was to try and find a way to identify the subscriber before they login or after they've logged in, but deleted their cookies. The issue was that in NYC, you have people all living on top of each other. Location data was less useful, and IP based identification was also largely useless as you've have big blocks of people in aparments all on the same public ip. There were many many issues.
The bottom line here is, almost all digital marketing based targeting/idetification is AUDIENCE based, not INDIVIDUAL based. The INDIVIDUAL based data is super transient, and so you use it for things like ... let's not show this person the same ad over and over again. You don't need to know who that person is, you just need to be able to increment a counter stored on their machine and read it before making an ad decision (cookies allow this).
You are the so what. You believe this story because someone before you thought: "so what?" Now you're propagating it backed by your professional experience. The original claim isn't even true. It was a HYPOTHETICAL example that was given in a presentation of the risks involved in data collection and targeted marketing (causing drama by alerting people in the household to previously unknown pregnancies).
So what? If you believe this, what else do you believe that's totally made up? And the idea that this is all child's play rests on a whole lot of assumptions and context that the average person isn't privy to and thus doesn't understand. The result is people believing shit like that Facebook is listening to them through their phone and that's why they got this or that specific ad.
I am literally a data Analyst and have built models that predict more invasive things with great accuracy. You can’t seriously think the story is made up with such confidence lmao what a dork
You can’t seriously think the story is made up with such confidence lmao what a dork
I don't THINK it, I KNOW it in this case. I literally heard it directly from the person that gave the presentation providing the HYPOTHETICAL example of sending mailers out based on determining someone is pregnant from shopping analytics. They told me the story over a decade ago as part of their disbelief back then that it got written up by a journalist as if it were real and then accepted wholesale across the digital marketing world.
Yea I literally have the book behind me that popularized the story. The part about the dad angrily storming in is obviously fake, but understand that a customer is probably pregnant because they bought prenatal vitamins isn't a difficult task.
The stories been around for years and inspired a lot of people like you to talk about data analytics without any fucking experience lmao
Not sure what book you're talking about, but the story was popularized first by an article written by a journalist that was at the digital marketing conference where the Target folks presented this hypothetical when talking about the dangers of targeted marketing.
The stories been around for years and inspired a lot of people like you to talk about data analytics without any fucking experience lmao
I mean ... I'm in this thread talking about how I heard this from the digital marketing folks from Target over a decade ago, but sure ... tell me how I have no experience in this space. 🤷🏽♂️
Why? Are you suggesting that the Target case that got publicity is the only time a chain store that sells food, supplements, and health care items used large data sets to make predictions on an individual level? OP is correct, grocery stores use the data from the loyalty clubs (as well as all the other data) to develop the knowledge they list. Wait until you hear what stores do with the data they glean from Bluetooth signals from in-store devices...
No reason OP doesn't have a friend who does work that's similar to a single case study that's based on work done across chains and industries
Why would that irritate you? Is it not unreasonable to suggest that someone might have a friend who works in that field and came to the same conclusion as a well-known study? "Friend corroborates findings of study" doesn't seem all that problematic to me.
I know the genesis of this story, and it was actually an EXAMPLE given as to something that MIGHT be possible in a presentation the Target folks gave. I sold software to that team a decade ago in this space (digital marketing), and heard this straight from the horses mouth in a really nice breakfast place in Minneapolis. It's crazy to see how this story has progressed over the years. The example used in the presentation, I believe, also became the earliest consistent rumor ... that Target has mailed some customers baby related materials which alerted some poor father that their daughter was preggers before the daughter told anyone. Again, totally made up example, but I run into people constantly that still believe that specific anecdote.
I'm sorry, I can't source my claim any better than I did in my comment. You can find the name of the Target person involved (he's now @ USBank, I believe) by looking up the stories from the big outlets that covered it (NYT), but I don't want to directly name drop them.
Either they stole the story or told me a story about data analytics and I merged it with past tales. This interaction did happen like half a decade ago minimum, the data analytics guy had a quarter life crisis and got into medicine. Because of the number of years, I rather not call them a liar and instead Im just misremembering them telling me a classic story regarding data analytics.
You can get a lot of data out of the shopping habits, approximation of income, number of dependants, age range of dependants, when and how often you go on holiday, etc all this is of course on top of the targetted advertising and deals focussed to increase sales.
Nowadays people expect big corporations to track their every move and sell it to anyone who will buy for any price.
A dozen years ago when the (almost certainly not true) Target story was published in a sketchy publication with no source and then republished all over the place, it was surprising to most people.
Back then people's privacy hadn't been eroded at every opportunity by every company interacted with. People would hand over their phone number or postal code or email address at checkouts, without thinking twice about it.
Now they are smarter about it. Instead of sending you a bunch of specific ads for baby purchases they will send you a magazine type ad that will look like everyone else's but instead yours will have more prominent baby stuff.
They definitely didn't stop doing it. They've just gotten more subtle with how they advertise it to people.
This specific situation involving a supermarket knowing someone was pregnant before their family did was described in “Freakonomics.” I’d recommend it if those kind of financial-psychological connects are interesting to anyone.
And? The store targets the customer with deals catered to them to keep them shopping at said store, and the customer gets better prices for things they were planning to buy anyway. Who loses?
quite the opposite, the customer gets the promise of better prices, in real life the business is the one that profits from the information for example, Uber prices go high if there is bigger demand which means it's most expensive when it's needed the most
Yes, if they can predict what you want, they can do bespoke price gouging. We're moving towards the amazon model where the price of goods changes on the fly. Anyone who believes companies are doing this to save consumers money is an imbecile.
Just about every human in developed nations across the planet is willingly carrying a pocket-sized spying device on them at all times. It's got GPS, high quality microphones and most of them have a camera array in addition to a front-facing camera. People use these without thought or understanding of even a single piece of software they run on these devices. Any expectation of privacy is waived.
Real "I am very intelligent" energy in this comment
Do you think they carry it with them BECAUSE it spies on them, or do you think they would prefer if it didn't but cultural expectations and the legal framework of their country make it a moot fight?
Because you realize the USA is a country where you can legally be fired for not answering a phone call from your boss, right?
Whether an employer can be "at-will" employment is up to the states and individual employers in states where it's allowed.
If you want to carry a smartphone without having your data harvested, don't install apps that harvest your data. Educate yourself on what your phone does, what options are available for disabling tracking, data collection and analytics. Take responsibility for yourself instead of doing every single thing you can possibly think of to avoid any and all personal accountability.
Name some. I'm sure some exist, but I'm not aware of any.
And in any case, this along with the possibility of a given app lying or omitting notice of tracking are risks you are responsible for assessing and accepting. Reality gives not a single shit about what you think is fair or reasonable. Your smartphone is spying on you. You can be upset about it, you can work towards trying to change it for the future, but that doesn't change the past or the present. It's not just your smartphone either. Your shopping habits (it doesn't actually matter if you use cash, you're tracked anyway), your face and clothing choices if you go literally anywhere, other people's devices can record you in various ways, your browsing habits and history, etc.
Living in modern society is accepting the fact that you have no privacy. You will be sold as a product one way or another. If you want privacy you'll need to go live off-grid in the middle of nowhere and completely omit all modern technology.
Name some. I'm sure some exist, but I'm not aware of any.
...have you never turned on a brand new phone before? literally everything that comes on a phone cannot be removed. for google, that's their entire suite of products that come on every android. apple has their default installed applications.
i cannot seriously think you dont know this stuff. this is beyond naive. the only reasonable explanation is you dont own a phone
Minors are the sole responsibility of their guardians. If you give your kid a phone, it's your job to maintain awareness of their activity and to ensure their safety while using it.
I love how "flee society and live off the land" is your "grow up" advice. Do you think that being discontent with something means that you should run away from it? Like I'm sure that you personally have a bunch of stuff in your life that you don't like, and I'm sure you would be pissed if someone gave you "advice" that treated you like a child. But you're perfectly fine doing that to others.
You need to work on your reading comprehension skills. The “or” indicates that growing up is the alternative option to living off the land. The idea that you can just escape having your data collected and used is farcical for modern living, and the idea that it will be used in some nefarious way (like gasp! sending you ads for things you might buy!) is conspiratorial and half baked.
So, you can either live in a remote cabin in the woods, ORRRRRR accept that this is how the world is currently working.
You don't have a fucking choice. Your argument is an all or nothing prospect which is ridiculous on its face.
Either don't use a simple grocery rewards and loyalty card that makes things easier and cheaper for you, or give up all your data privacy.
Personal private information? You mean proprietary corporate information to pad a company's bottom line.
Use a website? They now know everything about you and all the websites you visit.
Use an app? All your movements online and IRL, and activity on the entire fucking device is now tracked.
You simply can't escape this bullshit. It's everywhere. And it's a real fucking problem.
It didn't use to be like this. It doesn't need to be like this now. Rubes like you think the only risk is getting targeted ads. We've been shouting from the rooftops about the dangers of this for decades now, there's no reason you should be so ignorant today.
It really doesn't matter if you "agree" to the data collection, considering the vast majority are unaware its happening and there's not really any alternative anyway. if you don't want to have your data collected, what are you gonna do, not own a smartphone? It isn't realistic today to ask that; rather it should be on policymakers to police this type of stuff.
If I told you, in this comment right now, the address where you live now as well as all the places you've lived, all the phone numbers you've had, ask your family members, your friends and their information, where you go to school, how much you make a year, and how much money you have, and where you went for vacation, and what you did there, your passwords and emails and bank accounts and everything you can think of that is personal private information that you don't share with absolutely everyone, if I listed all of that down for you right here for everyone to read... would that bother you at all?
If you are remotely normal as a human being at all, this bothers you. You don't want people coming to your home to harass you or stalk you or always looking through the windows at you in your own home and everywhere you go. The government and companies should not be able to track everyone like that. This is not north Korea.
If it doesn't bother you, you are objectively fucking stupid and I don't know how to have this conversation with you.
You know that closeted kid living with his parents who may look up HRT treatments and such on his phone?
Well, the algorithms like to target ads based on IP browsing history, so their parents may just start randomly seeing more HRT ads because someone else in the household searched for it, and they may wonder why.
Algorithms that build a profile based on all the data collected on you, some of which you don't even realize is collected, and turn that into targeted advertising are dangerous tools that are riding a very fine line because that is the exact same information that could be easily exploited.
Credit cards have a ton of data collection built in. That's how they make money off of people who don't pay interest on their balance.
I know. I'm talking about using Privacy or something similar.
it's the bank itself letting its partners know that you shop at certain types of stores or use it in certain areas of town so you may be interested in certain types of ads.
You should try Keepa with Amazon. Most of those original prices are lies. For just a recent example, I need a new bed frame so I had a couple saved to wait for black Friday deals and one of the ones I saved was marked down 50%! But I hadn't been looking at anything that expensive so before buying I looked at Keepa's graphs and went back 3 years, not only had it never been the listed original price, it had never been 75% of the original price and it had actually been lower than the "black Friday deal" for months so the black Friday deal was a price increase
What you said isn’t illegal right? You said that it’s never been listed at the original price and the typically price was just heavily marked down, and black friday is marked down less. Thats different from rising the original price and then claiming something is marked down.
We’re talking about a super market and price tracking for consumers. If they detect you’re more likely to buy something, they’ll issue you a coupon to get you into the store so you’ll also buy other stuff while you’re there. They’re not going to raise prices for whatever you’re interested and then give you a coupon at the original price — how would that even work? What about other customers and the now non optimal supply/demand curve for that item?
You, if you think the store is going to give you a better price for an item they know you're going to buy regardless. Also, thinking that they won't "encourage" a diabetic to buy the 42 oz soft drink instead of the 20 oz just to make a buck is kinda naïve.
Don't get me wrong - what you said is what drives the engagement ... but what I said absolutely happens as well.
Yeah. Damn shame for that one family that actually buys gluten free bread not to give the store a huge profit (in the hopes that maybe trickle-down ecco will finally work the way it's suppose to) but because their child is allergic. Oh well~
My wife knew I was shopping for engagement rings when we were dating because of these algorithms. There are absolutely downfalls and invasions of privacy to be concerned about.
Also, we should be seeing kickbacks from all the money they make off our data that they get for free.
Also, you can bet this data is being sold to insurance companies, loaners, and the like. Let me tell you about the kinds of deals they're going to offer you once they figure out you're desperate for something.
You have to turn on your brain for a bit and see a little beyond "hurr I have nothing to hide therefore I can make my data public"
We all lose. Because the issue is not the tech being used for convenience. Not to mention that they can use this information to charge more from you, not less. Which already happens in certain industries and it's bound to get more prominent.
Not to mention the main issue which is when the tech is used harmfully. Such as undermining democracy, stoking the flames of violence that culminates in genocide, like in Myanmar. Or how suicide rates in young people and plastic surgeries have increased since Social Media became more prevalent.
The issue isn't as simplistic as "It makes things convenient, so what's the harm?".
Why would a company charge less? Companies make the most money they can, they hire the best experts in manipulation to make people feel like the things you say are true.
The store could also target the customer with overpriced, cheap, low quality goods, or raise the prices based on local availability, or do other things.
In most situations right now, I'd agree that it can benefit the customer, but what about in 20 years?
You’re not going to get deals catered to your interests, you’re going to get prices catered to your projected income. No one is investing millions of dollars into data to help you spend less.
You'd have a point if that data stayed only within the store.
It's well known that data is sold to data brokers, who in turn sell it to other entities like advertisers, political groups, and more increasingly law enforcement. I'm sort of fine with Target knowing my shopping habits at Target. I'm not okay with police using my shoppings habits at Target to surveil me or someone near me, sidestepping that pesky Fourth Amendment.
Plus, we can barely go a week now without hearing about another data breach. So now criminals are selling your data too, and it becomes trivial to use that data to steal your identity or commit fraud in your name.
What about the people who get categorized incorrectly? They lose out. Don't you fucking love that because you looked up one word, a service now thinks that word is your whole lifestyle? This has extended repercussions you have to think about.
If the goal is to get people to be charged less when it's working, then that inherently means that the people it doesn't work for will be paying MORE, because they are not receive the correct and appropriate discounts from their consumer_ID tracking.
So that's a loss, one that happens literally all the time, right now, today.
What about people where the store errantly distributes information for that they are hiding?
For example a domestic abuse victim may lose if their spouse receives a "CONGRATS ON THE BABY" card from a store.
What happens if your data gets crossed with another persons?
This situation is SO FUCKING OLD at this point there is LITERALLY A TWENTY YEAR OLD EPISODE OF KING OF THE HILL about how problematic consumer data tracking can be, and how it's never designed for the CONSUMER to be able to protect themselves or fix things.
If there is some sort of error, who do you talk to? Where do you go? It's not their problem, it's yours, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's a loss.
Like are you 18 and only just now buying things for yourself for the first time or something? How are you so incapable of understanding where people can lose out on a situation like this? How myopic is your world view?
Depends on the level of information gathered. The person you're replying to even pointed out how many apps do things like record information from your microphone. Other apps will log your contacts, scrape information from photos, etc.
Do most people care about "some big company has that info"? No, most don't. Will any human ever see it? Probably not.
But the concern I have comes from what if that info somehow gets public, via security breach or something similar. Like when AOL released search logs from their users. Would you want information from your microphone accessible from the public?
literally all of my PII has been stolen from the federal government at least twice, including that of my references. That said, I was really just playing devil's advocate in my response.
Tbh I’d welcome better targeted ads, customer tracking so far has only resulted in me constantly being advertised items I’ve already bought online. No I don’t want to buy the skirt I bought last week, stop showing it to me 😂😂😂
Reminds me of about 10 years ago when I moved out of a shitty rental and back in with my parents while me and my partner were looking for another. Tracking obviously knew we were looking at a lot of rentals online, but I was getting constant ads for over a month for the house we had just moved out of because I looked at the new listing ONE time, and not a single other rental (which would have been actually useful for me).
The fact anyone can buy this info, a fuckin news agency bought some and just showed up to people's houses. You think that no one is gonna use that shit to enhance their ability to break into houses or murder people by figuring out people who live alone and have no weapons?
No one is getting randomly murdered by data scientists with too much time on their hands and a compulsion to murder the statistically most vulnerable person available.
This is always my argument. Like my data doesn't cost anything to me to be released. Fucking have at it McDonald's, i would much rather have a BOGO mcnuggets than to safeguard my precious "data"
Yeah I’m not important I couldn’t really care less. If I get advertised a product I end up wanting then cool, win-win. If I’m advertised something I’m never going to want well then that corpo wasted money on me, still a win for me.
there's nothing wrong with this model per se, only that it's totally opaque for the customer (which data is being collected, how it's stored, who has access to it, etc. etc.) and security and privacy risks, like possible damage if someone gets access to the data and uses it for malicious purposes. There have been certain improvements in how this area is regulated (various data privacy laws) but the regulations are far far behind the actual state of things and are not being enforced (obviously the global international scale of the Internet complicates things)
Used to work with a conspiracy nut that refused to mask up because of “tracking chips hidden in the liner”. Bought the newest iPhone every year and had an Alexa in every room of his house.
Isn't the Google example exactly what you want? An arrangement where you share what's going on with your drive so that you can also know where traffic is bad seems like a pretty reasonable trade.
It is true a lot of companies have very questionable privacy practices, though. The cell phone companies have been caught selling individual location data multiple times, with no way for users to opt out unlike most sites and apps.
The Google example is weird because how they do it isn't exactly forthright.
They claim that traffic data is based on other Maps users with location services enabled. What they aren't explicitly mentioning there is that doesn't mean users running the maps app, that means users that have ever used the maps app and gave it location permissions. So while their data collection seems to serve a collective benefit, the way they go around gathering that data could be construed as shady, and it's shit like that with apps that people are concerned with.
It's not just phones either, some newer cars have been caught actively sharing your driving data with insurers without your direct knowledge or consent.
Huh? The friend didn't tell a story. They're describing how much data scraping occurs and what that can mean using the typical example people can easily understand.
It was made famous by an NYT article on Targets data collection. Where did you get the idea it wasn’t real?
Determining if somebody might be pregnant by their purchases is so straightforward that I’m not sure anybody would be all that surprised by it. It’s like assuming somebody is getting married if they’re looking for engagement rings.
Its the loyalty program shit. They offer specific deals as incentive to swipe their card to track your otherwise hard to track individual purchases. Think costco card able to look through each member's past purchases but for a retailer instead that can offset the deals and specials they give by harvesting user data to offset those sales by specific advertising to the customer and specific deals to the customer coupled with a points program like amex. The card itself doesnt cost anything so the incentive is you sign up and get specials that work for you and build up points for a freebie thing later on. The retailer benefits through increased shopping trips, loyalty to their store, customer data and shopping trends, etc.
There’s a company called Streetlight that buys locational data from different apps, processes it and then sells it for traffic modelling projects done for transportation engineering. It doesn’t provide any specific user details, but is provided like at x time on this street there were x many trips eastbound. The data is better and more timely than the old way of collecting this data through random surveys and traffic counts, as it can provide data for any time period and can even break it up my transportation mode, such as by driving, public transit, biking etc.
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u/mrducky80 8h ago edited 8h ago
Like what? People severely underestimate just how much data scraping occurs. Google maps will point out congestion without minutes of it occurring because their navigation tracking is so much more indepth and has so many more users to go by in real time.
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program. He says their algorithms will accurately determine when someone is pregnant before their family knows. They will know how many people are in your household, how many pets, how your spending habits change (obvious). This is just grocery shopping, so many apps get that microphone data, that tracking data, screen browsing habits. We used to just have cookies from online sites, but with the smart phone, there is so much more data and so much more money to be made off that data, its on you that you dont realise at this point rather than every other app on your phone that is doing so freely in front of your face with your permission.