Like why do they care how many times I go to porn hub every day or that nothing gets me harder than a free use MILF? Why do they care that I don’t know how to spell consistency so I have to Google it every 3 months.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
How much do FANG companies pay for such posts? I’m interested in making a career.
It all comes down to targeted advertising. They’ll cluster you and other people with similar interests in groups, determine statistic likelihoods of buying/using/subscribing to certain products or services, and then blow up every channel with stuff you might like.
Maybe a MILF hunter with mild dyslexia is exactly the right audience for cat food and entry level red wine?
This is the only real answer. Targeted advertising is more effective (actually true), therefore you can ask more money for it.
The important part being that other companies are very willing to spend a lot of money on targeted advertising, enough to make up for all of the costs of the aggregated data plus a tidy amount of profit for the companies that collect the data.
The more they claim they know about you the more they can charge for ads. I have recently realized that Google, Facebook and such are not only powerful because they aggregate data, but rather because they can sell their product (=your attention) to other companies very, very well. People often claim companies would not pay for advertisements had they didn’t work — I claim otherwise; they pay for advertisements because Google falsely claims how effective they are and that’s why they need to collect your data and be able to show that to their customers to boost their (Google’s) sales. In other words they don’t do that to sell the customers product well (the one that has been advertised) but rather sell their own product, which is ad space.
I’ve heard this a few times. It’s certainly compelling to me, I guess it’s obviously a hard thing to know given it will be heavily debated by those companies and it’s always going to be obscured by them to maintain a mystique, whether it works or doesn’t since in both cases it helps to keep everyone a little bit in the dark.
Part of this idea that the surveillance economy is not nearly as effective at controlling consumer behavior as claimed makes me wonder if I’m being unnecessarily paranoid when I jealously guard my privacy since it seems it could be that my data is taken potentially in service of nothing. Nevertheless I instinctively just don’t want to take the risk that hooverig up all that data really does work for manipulation and control.
This is a bot ^
I don’t think it’s paranoid. Best case scenario, they really are using your data ineffectively, which imo is still bad because you are not getting any benefit from it. But worst case scenario is a government coming into power that abuses this data to extents we can’t possible fathom today.
Why are tech companies* so interested
Pixar seeing a rise in milf web searches: Ok boys it’s time to release another movie with a mom who has a dump truck ass.
Dump-truck-ass Pixar Moms are my kryptonite.
they’re interested because they profit from the marketing based on the data
More specifically — by matching all of your purchases with every data point about you, and the people you associate with, they can build out statistical models to determine the data points that most strongly correlate to people like you and what motivates or persuades them to GENERATE MORE PROFIT — direct purchases, attention, clicks, discussion, word of mouth, lead generation, etc, etc…
Or… You know… What motivates/persuades you to support a dictator or vote for a specific political candidate or party, as well as what demotivates/dissuades you from the opposition — including what types of psychological warfare, disinformation, deepfakes, “fake news”, and lies are most successful in achieving these goals — all of which benefits the most horrifically immoral and unethical criminals, corporations, and individuals the most (the “good guys” aren’t the ones using deception and lies to profit and win).
even more specifically to create what is know as W-shaped attribution. That you can zig zag around the internet (as if following the lines on the W) and when you end up at your purchase, one can analyze the paths you took, and millions of others took, and find commonality to reduce to the path of least resistance.
To put it succinctly they aren’t. They’re interested in aggregate data so that a data engineer can use it to understand consumer trends and better predict marketing reach.
It’s not specifically about you, it’s more of a what they can claim to know about their consumers.
Money.
Your data can help sell you stuff. If they know you’re into MILFs, they can sell advertising to the MILF companies. Then you see a bunch of MILF ads. The more they know, the more they can target you. Eventually we’ll have ads in our dreams like in Futurama.
Jokes on you, he probably already has MILF dreams!
Upgrade those MILFs to GILFs with this one weird trick!
You know, knowing advertising algorithms, expect a lot of mistakes like that in your dreams, thanks to the users-like-you-also-like thing they do. “Thirsty GILF scatporn near you!”-- the future is bleak.
But golden showers sound so optimistic!
Fun story: me and my wife kept talking about our nasty neighbour we call “the slug” and she got “Slug removal tips” on her YouTube suggestions.
Yeah, it’s advertising. They want to be able to sell you clothes you’ll probably actually wear, video games you’ll actually play, etc. They probably don’t care about your google spell checks as much as they care about what posts you’re liking on your Instagram reels.
On one hand, it sucks to not really have that privacy. On the other hand, people act like if you don’t use a VPN for every single online service today that in 5 years data brokers will sell your exact address to the Islamic Jihad for ten dollars.
The Google spell checks are probably pretty big too because it gives them info on what you’re thinking/writing about in that moment.
Well, true for some words. OP checking out how to spell “consistently” and me trying to figure out effect/affect for a specific case…. Probably less so.
Actually, both of those are indicative of educational attainment, social philosophy, probably political leaning….
video games you’ll actually play
Goodness, me. I wish. Steam sure is good at selling me games that make me feel like I really want to have that experience though! Once it’s bought, they did their job.
I’ve yet to see any ads for “How to spend time enjoying a thing just for yourself without feeling guilty and anxious that you’re being left socioeconomically behind and the next (un)planned economic downturn will ruin everything for sure this time.”
So… y’know they could be doing a better job. Lol
Also $10 is $10… nobody’s personally selling it, it’s just floating around and it could be bought if the Islamic Jihad wanted it LOL.
I’m more concerned about things like, selling my data like vehicle usage or DNA to insurance companies who would use that data against me.
Cool. Now I can subtly influence you to pay for your free use MILF porn. Or use MILF models in your ads to make you more likely to buy shit.
Even if you don’t think you can be influenced by that stuff it still likely to change your behaviour just enough, even just 5% more spending which makes it worthwhile to them.
But honestly your data barely matters on its own. But once it’s merged with everyone else’s…that’s when it’s valuable.
Pick up habits, profiling so they can know what you are interested in and the areas you frequent to target you more efficiently. More likely for directed advertising but can also be for influencing.
The influencing aspect here is almost certainly tied into the drop of search engine efficacy recently. Big tech finally collected enough data from you and everyone you know to now be able to alter what answer you find for the question you asked. Wildly, this same question now generates different results depending on the profile they’ve assigned you. MullVads Total Surveillance paper published last October highlights this explicitly. This is why data collection matters, not due to ads, but the ability of Big Tech to change how you view the world. Your data impacts the search results you see, as well as everyone similar to you…
Edit: Here’s the link to the MullVad paper https://mullvad.net/pdfs/Total_surveillance.pdf
Couldn’t they just like, ask?
No. You’ll tell them what you like, but you might not tell them what you can’t look away from.
The latter is more useful for manipulating you into buying stuff or just spending more time on their platforms.
@Daft_ish Why go through the trouble of asking you when they can ask your browser who will tell them everything instantly and also knows you better than you ever will?
I assume because they have to pay for that shit
@Daft_ish If they are the ones who supplied your browser, they don’t have to pay shit.
Some one has to pay. Facebook ain’t making money selling me facebook.
@Daft_ish Facebook’s making money selling *you* on Facebook. You are the raw material.
But like I’m saying. If you’re buying me on Facebook you’re going to be way disappointed.
It is not about having your particular data. Is about the aggregated data of a population. On a shallow level that information can be used to engineer ads to appeal to a greater audience. On a deeper level, population dynamics can be used for nefarious purposes such as driving them to an agreement that wasn’t in their best interest. Brexit and the Trump election are two examples of this being possible thanks to data from Cambridge Analytica. See voting paradoxes and Asimov’s psychohistory that each day is getting farther from fictional.
Oh, so evil shit.
It’s just sureal to me. Since they know I was up till 2:00am on a Wednesday wrenching my hog like there was a million dollars hidden inside Donald Trump was elected president.
Basically knowledge of us is power over us.
okay wrenching my hog is a new one lmao
Yep, I only knew wrestle the chicken yet.
Absolute poetry.
Not to dispute your general points, but Cambridge Analytica’s actual effectiveness was shown to have been way overblown (as was RussiaGate in general).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
We’ve waited all this time to tell you. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. The reason you’re so interesting is
Sonofa
Because the last bastion of zombie capitalism is pushing money around.
Folks buy this information because there are other folks willing to buy this information. And so on… and so on…
