Ask Slashdot: Why Do Companies Need All That Personal Data They're Collecting? 273
"People tend to think that the crazy amount of personal data gathering happening on the Internet is 'because companies otherwise wouldn't know who to target where with what product and at what price," writes Slashdot reader dryriver.
"But there are two problems with this reasoning..." 1) Experienced marketers already know how to sell products successfully to various demographics without needing trillions of data points on tens of millions of random internet users. They were able to pull off this feat long before the Internet even came into existence. They are not dumber or more incompetent today than they were 20 years ago. Internet data is not the only tool in their marketing toolbox.
2) Most products are not being improved significantly based on the data collected -- almost everything sold has obvious weakness, flaws, deficiencies and sometimes outright annoyances baked in that any good product designer would spot quite easily before the product is manufactured and shipped out. So you 1) already know how to target my demographic and 2) do not listen to my feedback even when I send it to you directly and really are not trying to improve your product to genuinely satisfy my needs.
Why all the crazy data gathering at all? Why do you need to know what news articles I read, what I type into a search engine, what I post in a comments section or whether I know "Bobby K. from back in high-school" on Facebook? Do you really need hundreds of Internet data points on me to design a decent laptop, TV, electric screwdriver, running shoe or lawnmower for my use?
We hear people saying big data is the new gold rush -- but can anyone explain in layman's terms what exactly it is that they're up to?
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Why do companies need all that personal data they're collecting?
"But there are two problems with this reasoning..." 1) Experienced marketers already know how to sell products successfully to various demographics without needing trillions of data points on tens of millions of random internet users. They were able to pull off this feat long before the Internet even came into existence. They are not dumber or more incompetent today than they were 20 years ago. Internet data is not the only tool in their marketing toolbox.
2) Most products are not being improved significantly based on the data collected -- almost everything sold has obvious weakness, flaws, deficiencies and sometimes outright annoyances baked in that any good product designer would spot quite easily before the product is manufactured and shipped out. So you 1) already know how to target my demographic and 2) do not listen to my feedback even when I send it to you directly and really are not trying to improve your product to genuinely satisfy my needs.
Why all the crazy data gathering at all? Why do you need to know what news articles I read, what I type into a search engine, what I post in a comments section or whether I know "Bobby K. from back in high-school" on Facebook? Do you really need hundreds of Internet data points on me to design a decent laptop, TV, electric screwdriver, running shoe or lawnmower for my use?
We hear people saying big data is the new gold rush -- but can anyone explain in layman's terms what exactly it is that they're up to?
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Why do companies need all that personal data they're collecting?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Voodoo (Score:5, Funny)
They are creating digital voodoo dolls: https://apple.news/AYPDVUTzzSV... [apple.news]
Re:Easy Peasy (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies who want to sell you stuff believe that they need massive amounts of information about you. The more information they have, the more effect their advertising will be and the more stuff they will sell. Or so they believe.
Whether or not all that data and "targeted advertising" really works is questionable. But a lot of people believe it and are willing to pay for it. Since Google, Facebook, etc. are in the business of making money, they are taking advantage of this situation and selling people the information they think they need.
Re:Easy Peasy (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether or not all that data and "targeted advertising" really works is questionable.
No, it really isn't "questionable". Target advertising works, and works well. There are a lot of analytics available to advertisers, and if they don't see the ads working, they change the ads or re-target them. If they don't, they will fall behind their competitors and eventually go out of business.
Also, people that say "Advertising doesn't affect me" are affected by advertising just as much as anyone else. Walk around your house and see how many brand names you see.
... selling people the information they think they need.
They don't "sell people the information". That is not how their businesses work. They use the information internally to place ads on behalf of advertisers. Selling the underlying data would be idiotic.
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Googles number one marketed product, targeted advertising. The need to do it, in order to be able to sell it and then they lie about how well it works. Also, politically speaking, ahh you support the Greens, at this corporation we support the Republicans, you are not welcome. You complained about a product from out company, you are not welcome and we will report you to the government as a security risk (al la zero accountability no fly list).
There is also not what they are advertising but how they are adve
Re:Easy Peasy (Score:5, Informative)
The need to do it, in order to be able to sell it and then they lie about how well it works.
Actually, the biggest change Google brought to the advertising marketplace was the ability to measure exactly how well it works. The combination of real-time auctioning of ad space, where advertisers were able to bid for clicks, and analytics, which helped advertisers measure how effectively they converted clicks into sales, allowed advertisers for the first time to know exactly how much money they would spend to reach each buyer (on average).
The result is that advertisers largely don't care how effective Google's targeting is; that's Google's concern. The advertiser only pays when you click on the ad, and they know what percentage of those clicks turn into sales. So the targeting is for Google's benefit, not the advertiser's, in that to maximize ad revenue, Google needs to correctly estimate (P_click * Bid) for each combination of ad and user, where P_click is the probability that you will click a given ad and Bid is what that advertiser offers to pay if you click. P_click * Bid is the statistical expected value, to Google, of showing a particular ad to a particular user. If Google can correctly estimate the expected value of each ad, it can rank them correctly and pick the one that will generate the highest expected revenue.
It goes a step beyond that as well, of course. Google actually wants to maximize not only clicks, but advertiser revenue per click, because that will increase what advertisers will bid. If Google can show me an ad that makes me intensely curious about a product I absolutely will not buy, I may click, and Google will get paid, but the advertiser won't make any money which will reduce their expected conversion rate, and therefore the amount they're willing to bid. So Google's wants to show me ads which I'm not only highly likely to click on, but which are likely to convert into sales, boosting what advertisers will pay per click.
This is why one of the key figures investors look for in Google's quarterly reports is the "cost per click", which is what, on average, advertisers pay per click. It's a measure of how effective Google's ad targeting is, which predicts Google's revenue.
So to the extent that Google might "lie" about how well it works (and I put "lie" in scare quotes because it's actually illegal for publicly-traded companies to lie about such things, so they generally try very, very hard not to), they don't lie to advertisers because advertisers don't care. Advertisers can see how much they pay for a click and how much revenue they get for it, and don't have any reason to care what Google might or might not say about it.
Also, politically speaking, ahh you support the Greens, at this corporation we support the Republicans, you are not welcome. You complained about a product from out company, you are not welcome and we will report you to the government as a security risk (al la zero accountability no fly list).
There is also not what they are advertising but how they are advertising it. What message formats can you most readily be manipulated with and target you with that 'style' of ad not a targeted product advertisement but a targeted advertisement style. Then of course there is out and out extortion, think of any teenager latter in life trying to become say a politician, well, they have the dirt on them from their teenage years, delete all you want, nothing gets deleted.
The whole thing is disgusting and should be banned but corporate lobbyists dollars and the deep state keep it going. They are especially into the political extortion thing.
Those are some pretty amazing claims, especially about political extortion. Cite?
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Yes most people are affected by advertising.
But brand names aren't just the result of being a slave to advertising. Sometimes it's the result of experience.
For example, one have good experience with 3M products, so I'm likely to buy more in the future, rather than go for something cheaper and hope that it works as advertised. The more important (e.g. PPE) the less likely I am to try and cheap out.
Is that the result of advertising? Or is that the result of experience?
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Also, people that say "Advertising doesn't affect me" are affected by advertising just as much as anyone else. Walk around your house and see how many brand names you see.
There's a TV that is branded. Find one that isn't :-) There are a few computers. There are Philips Hue lights, which I bought because they are quite useful, not because of the name. That's it.
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How about your appliances? You know, some of the more expensive things in your house? Good money says that they've got GE, Whirlpool, Samsung, Kenmore, or Frigidaire clearly displayed on them if you're in the US.
Off-topic, but man I do love my Philips Hue lights. I have them programmed for sunrise and sunset, and it makes a huge difference in the winter to have a regular "sun" to tell me when to get up and when to go to bed. Sunrise and sunset colors even!
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Also, people that say "Advertising doesn't affect me" are affected by advertising just as much as anyone else. Walk around your house and see how many brand names you see.
What bullshit. Most things have brand names but that does not mean you bought it because you saw their ad. What camera or car does not have a brand name on it? Even the crappiest and cheapest tin of beans has some brand name on it, advertised or not.
OK, I admit ads affect me : I avoid buying heavily advertised stuff because I know they are spending money on ads instead of quality. They are also patronising.
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Maybe they're not targeting you. After all, why waste money advertising to someone that their data shows will be unresponsive.
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Re: Easy Peasy (Score:3)
Yes this. When I'm targeting an ad I'm literally trying to hit less than 10k people in the world. I would target fewer but Facebook has a min audience size.
Re: Easy Peasy (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was curiuous about wood chipper prices and after looking that up every bloody website I went to had ads for wood chippers.
Sounds like you have not got your adblocker set up properly. You should find out how to purge cookies too. I rarely see an ad either on line or in real life, other than inside shops.
Re: Easy Peasy (Score:2)
You haven't seen one that you've identified as an ad. But unless you are totally off the grid, you are subject to merketing of one form or another. It happens in textbooks, all kinds of media, "memes", even your friends and family are unwitting transmitters. As are you, yourself.
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You seem to think that someone couldn't cut out most of those things. You are wrong.
I block my internet ads, and with a DVR I see no ads except during the occasional live sports broadcast. I generally don't watch sitcoms, so there's minimal to no product placement in most of what I see. I don't use social media, so my friends and family are not unwittingly transmitting advertisements to me, nor am I to them. When I call my mom to talk to her, she's not pitching products to me.
If you just give up control and
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I generally don't watch sitcoms, so there's minimal to no product placement in most of what I see.
How is it that you believe non-sitcom programs have minimal to no product placement?
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There are many cases where you can't buy and unbranded item.
You mean the vast majority of cases.
Very few things are unbranded, at least in the UK. Even sand I have bought for building has a brand name on the sack. The only place I can think of where you will find unbranded stuff is fruit and veg from an old-fashioned market stall, and those are disappearing. It does not take much for a supplier to stick a brand name on a packet of anything.
I could not tell you the brand name on the sack of sand and I don't care - it does the job. It's what the local builder
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>Whether or not all that data and "targeted advertising" really works is questionable
It's not "questionable", you bloody idiot. It's a fact.
Re: Easy Peasy (Score:2)
That's probably the best reason I have seen. Using it for marketing will usually just end up in reactive marketing for stuff you already have instead of figuring out what you really need.
Re: (Score:3)
They want to control you. Or sell it to someone who wants to control you.
Your comment is certainly a lot better than the crazy one I just dreamed up. But I'm going to spew mine out anyway.
In the past, your labor was the commodity that you sold to your boss. That labor became part of the means of production. In abstraction, the relative prices on the market depended, in large measure, on the price for that labor, at least according to Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx.
Now, in the "Age of Information", your personal data is the commodity, or as Scott
Dream the undreamable dream! (Score:2, Interesting)
They want to control you. Or sell it to someone who wants to control you.
Really? That's what mods pass for insightful these days?
You're giving the corporate cancers way too much credit. They are merely mindless, soulless machines programmed for one problem. They cannot dream the undreamable dream, they can only seek to solve the unsolvable problem of insufficient profit.
There is no solution, which to my way of thinking proves that it's a fake problem. There's NO amount of profit that is "sufficient" to solve that insufficiency problem.
Our human problem is that the programs have
their real business model (Score:3)
Advertising is a distraction. A way to make obviously-abusive practices seem tolerable to the public.
All these "ad" companies don't actually make their money selling advertisements. Their real business model is selling your personal information to Uncle Sam and other repressive governments.
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Experienced marketers already know how to sell products successfully to various demographics
True, but why not fine tune it further?
2) Most products are not being improved significantly based on the data collected
Also true, but you ask the wrong question. What they're asking is how cheap can they make it and still get your money.
Re: [($)] roi (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can simply target pages that are related to the product or service.
But how do you find those pages? The best way is to tell Google to show your ads to people searching for those products. Then those pages which have ad space agreements with Google, will automatically display your ads, because their visitors will match your criteria.
Same result, far less effort, and lower cost because you are buying in bulk.
Re:Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Selling is primarily about solving a problem
Selling is about getting someone else to give you money, anything else is an "obstacle" at best.
Re: Money (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with sales and marketing is far worse than this.
If you're good at selling your product or service, you're also good at selling your job as necessary, even critical to the business. I think this is why sales and marketing always gets way out of hand. They are good at what they do, and it doesn't matter if they're selling the product or the sales and marketing department as a whole.
Sales and marketing get expense accounts. They get paid travel. They get to wine and dine. Engineers generally do not
Demographics are bogus (Score:4, Insightful)
For many years, companies have been gathering data from public records. Companies like Experian and others have amassed all this and resold it. So, your demographic might be that you're likely "18-25 years old, unmarried, male, $50K-75K / year, etc..."
Now take a look at what Amazon and Facebook know about you! They know your political orientation, your hobbies, the things you buy online, etc. They also know this about dozens or even hundreds of your "friends".
Which is more valuable in selling you stuff? I't certainly not your "demographics"...
A.
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Re: Demographics are bogus (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Demographics are bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon has 21 years worth of my buying history.
In 21 years they have yet to offer any kind item to me on sale. That (I am looking for and don't own) or I could want.
The problem is companies don't know what to do with the data and what it means. They collect it but don't want to it the time to understand it.
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Re: Demographics are bogus (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Demographics are bogus (Score:2)
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The problem is companies don't know what to do with the data and what it means.
I'd add that I bet a lot are just waiting on AI to come along and solve all their problems. They're collecting it all on the hopes that at some point it will be valuable. Even if it's not current, there might be a lot to be learned from a long history of information that may be applicable in the future.
Re: Demographics are bogus (Score:4, Interesting)
Your presupposition is incorrect (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Your presupposition is incorrect (Score:2)
NSA, Third Part Sales, and Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do companies collect all this data? Duh...
Top 3 Reasons have to do with revenue generation:
The NSA can pay companies directly for info skirting the 4th amendment.
Third party marketers can buy leads.
Companies with the data can market directly.
Seriously, do we need to ask this question?
Re: (Score:2)
dryriver - that's the "why does graphics use polygons and not turnips" asshat, isn't it?
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Ah, yes, the old NSA trope. There's nothing, NOTHING, that cannot be attributable to the NSA when you are talking out of your ass.
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One would think that if this were common, there'd be some leaks about it. People don't stay quiet forever, and if there was a sudden, unexplained rash of IT deaths at major companies, I'd imagine /. of all places would notice that.
Look: We are the people who would be asked to either grant an outside entity access to this info, or to harvest it and package it for sale. The CEO isn't going to do that. And we're also smart enough to figure out how to leak that we're doing that fairly safely, and most likely ye
I'll tell you all about it (Score:2)
after you explain why this page alone has 15-20 tracking links, and what /. does with the data it collects.
Money Dear Boy (Score:4, Insightful)
So long as they can convince someone that the data is worth something, they can sell it. Marketing is great at marketing itself, which is technically all they need to do in order to get paid.
If the data ever actually made marketing more effective is moot.
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Half of it is. They just haven't figured out which half.
Re: (Score:2)
So long as they can convince someone that the data is worth something, they can sell it. Marketing is great at marketing itself, which is technically all they need to do in order to get paid.
Except that the most successful of the advertising-based tech companies don't sell the data.
To sell it (Score:2)
In many cases, their business model is selling it to other companies who haven't yet worked out that it's mostly useless.
Having said that, the distinction between "mostly useless" and "only barely useful" is a matter of perspective. Cambridge Analytica is the perfect example here; it's still unclear if their "services" were any use or not in the 50 or so political races they were involved in.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that this is also the business model of spammers. They get paid to send spam, and out of a million people who get it, a few go, "wow, this must work or they wouldn't be spending money to do it", and then they go and hire the spammers to spam. Rinse, lather, and repeat. It might not ever be really effective, but that doesn't matter.
It's amazingly easy to see everyone doing something and assume you should as well, or you'll be at a disadvantage. Sometimes that's true, but other times it's just the b
A silly question (Score:4, Interesting)
It is well known that companies can make money out of collected data. It costs nothing to collect data so collecting a little bit or an insane amount is exactly the same cost. There is no motivation to not collect a huge quantity of personal information so the only way corporate websites are going to work is "Collect lots of data".
So there is no question and there is no mystery.
In other words (Score:2)
"Because they can."
Re: (Score:2)
But I think the question is, why is there a market for this data?
That is the question, and the answer is yes.
There is a market in that other ad companies will buy it, and they buy it because other ad companies will buy it from them, etc like a pyramid, until it ends up being bought by people at the bottom trying to sell real stuff, who have been convinced by the marketing people higher up the pyramid that is worth what they paid for it.
The smart people are the middle-men.
Several reasons (Score:5, Informative)
1. Selling data to companies that will pay for it. A say, review site might not care all that much about all the details of who exactly reads the articles, but if the advertisers pay, that pays the bills.
2. In many cases it's not the site itself doing the collection, anyway. It's all the advertisers and affiliates whose scripts run on the main site.
3. Targeted advertisement. Some people want to target users by political affiliation, age, sex, pregnancy, marriage, etc, etc. For instance there may be a great benefit to being first: if you're the first advertiser to figure out who is pregnant, you can be first in sending them targeted ads for diapers and perhaps become their supplier for as long as the product is needed. That's a huge benefit.
4. Just because. If you can collect something, pragmatically, you should, because you can't obtain data that would be useful to have today, and that you failed to collect in the past. So the incentive is to collect everything possible, just in case. Who knows what you can figure out once you dig deep enough in your archives. It could be very profitable.
A good example of #3 and #4 is the infamous Target debacle, in which they figured out that by going through archives one can find out which women had a baby by say, looking at who buys diapers. And then using that, you can go 9 months in the past and see if women's habits change when they're pregnant but haven't given birth yet. Turns out there are changes in behavior that don't scream "baby" such as changes in the purchase of alcohol and vitamins, but that together have very good predictive power. And using that information you can deliver a targeted ad for diapers to a woman who's about to give birth, and is in the exact right moment to receive a convenient discount for a product she needs right at the moment she starts needing it. This resulted in them figuring out a teenager's pregnancy before she had told anybody.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; (Score:2)
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half. John Wanamaker
The data they collect tells marketers exactly which half is wasted.
They want to know how much you would pay (Score:5, Insightful)
The price you pay for a box of cereal or a gallon gasoline would be different from what I pay for my cereal or gasoline. That is their holy grail. They will know when you last bough cereal or gasoline, how urgent your need is and you will get individualized surge pricing for every product, every service.
Re: (Score:2)
Bingo, first reasonable explanation on this entire story.
Short answer: THEY DON'T. (Score:3)
This is why these assholes have to be STOPPED and people's right to privacy must be PROTECTED.
I wonder how much howling for justice there would be if people started getting blackmailed en masse with data purchased from these data-mongering asshole companies?
Parallels to IBM during the Holocaust. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an interesting book called "IBM and the Holocaust" that details the massive data collection and data mining operation engaged in by National Socialist Germany in order to specifically target Jews and other undesirables for extermination.
IBM and the National Socialist state had to devote all their energy and target Jews specifically as there wasn't sufficient bandwidth or storage space to go after anyone else.
The thing with today's amount of data mining and 23andme is miles worse. In the future, any future National Socialists will be able to target anyone they like for extermination easily. You hate left handed Hmong males between 17 and 32 that have donated to the NRA? Easy peasy, here's a list, get on the train, peasant.
It is inevitable that today's massive data warehouses will be used to target *some* group for genocide, but we don't know *who* yet.
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It is inevitable that today's massive data warehouses will be used to target *some* group for genocide, but we don't know *who* yet.
What ever happened to the people China arrested for membership in Falun Gong? Where are they now? I mean literally, physically.
And I ask you, who fills that same need now? If you look at the numbers, they're probably running low on Falun Gong prisoners at this point. They might have already run out a few years ago.
You say "Socialist" a bunch of times, instead of "Nazi," because you're too busy trolling domestic politics talking points to even notice that the thing you point at is already happening, but with
I've been wondering the same thing (Score:2)
AFAICS -- most of this data collection is both pointless and risky. Pointless because the data has little or no real value. Risky because if your data trove leaks, you may find yourself faced with a whopping fine.
If you have a risk taking personality, I can understand collecting and selling data. If you can find a buyer. With any luck at all you can grab a bunch of money and be lounging by a pool in some subtropical paradise long before your successors come to a bad end. But who is buying this garbage?
Ads, gov and profit (Score:2)
Profit making to sell their own products again.
Government compliance to city police, federal gov, NSA, DEA, US mil.
Do not sell lists. People on list who cant buy a product/service.
Ads created for a person drawing from spending habits found in a few different data sets. Selling to create larger data sets
Data sets the US gov wants kept.
Data sets about how a person reacted to a product/service?
How many had an adverse reaction when using a product and had to have extra work done
They want is because it is is easy to get. (Score:4, Insightful)
To coders and admins. I'm quite sure you sometimes log much more than you really need. Your program is crashing and you want to see why, chances are that you start setting log level to 9999 because is is easier to grep later than to find what log levels really mean and decide which ones are relevant.
Same thing with personal data collection. It is easier to take everything than to study beforehand which ones are really useful.
Re: They want is because it is is easy to get. (Score:2)
Partially true, but not a real analogy with ad services.
The logs are usually deleted on a regular basis.
Marketing is like the stock market (Score:3)
You want to know what will be trendy, not what's trending right now - that's way too late to position yourself. Marketing's goal isn't to get mostly on target, it's to present you with the worst deal you'll take for maximum profit. A typical example is freemium games where you pay to skip the grind. If you keep grinding many games kinda give up and give you some progression to avoid bad PR. If you're a whale you get all the perks. But if you're trying to spend just a little you get all sorts of nasty mental manipulation where money releases a rush of progress, but then you go in the tar pit... unless you spend some more money. Personalized advertising it not about custom tailoring it to your needs. It's maximizing how big a sucker you are.
The thesis is wrong... (Score:2)
John Wanamaker once said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.
Google advertising is no better: it pays off in clicks and sales when your company’s ad appears opposite a search like “shoes near Toronto”. It doesn’t sell shoes, though, if the search was for “Bata shoe museum near Toronto”.
There is real value in knowing, for example, I bought an Outback. Subaru knows that, and should be paying for ads for "
Re: The thesis is wrong... (Score:2)
If I want genuine accessories then I visit the dealer. Today when things shows up in ads as 'genuine' it often isn't, but are instead at best lookalikes that works to some extent and at worst dangerous flimsy items that don't even fit. If it's true genuine parts then when all costs are paid like freight it may still be the same or even higher price than at the dealer, sometimes even damaged during the transport.
And the ad providers like Google don't care as long as they get their money.
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Machine Learning for AI (Score:2)
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A lot of unsuccessful companies use accountants for data rather than Statisticians, data scientists, or AI. They only know how to cut costs. As a result these old school players are being beaten by more agile less conservative competitors.
The answer is AI brings a competitive advantage. It also shows markets (marketing does more than sales) that the big aloof boys do not see that they can capture.
They do work (Score:3)
In the old days Nielsen Ratings watched your analog cable box so the big networks could target obnoxious commercials at you. Today, people skip commercials. They also spend more time on a phone than a PC which is why Intel and Microsoft aren't big players anymore in the tech world. These folks need targeted ads. A phone is a great spying device which is why the NSA uses them for surveillance on citizens and gathers all sorts of data.
Like the government a marketer who sells a beer to a young millennial audience doesn't want to waste cash with expensive ads. Same with cars. A liberal is more likely to be a Subaru or a smart car and a fox news viewer a Ford F-350. If someone is buying cars this is a great thing to have as Subaru or Ford are wasting their time targeting ads to the wrong political Persuasion. GLBT folks are incredible loyal to brands that advertise to them. See 2 girls holding hands and laughing would offend an evangelical Christian but would make a sale to a lesbian etc.
This stuff really works and targeted ads make you or break you if you ask any professional marketer or executive.
Why all the crazy data gathering at all? (Score:2)
More importantly, maybe in the future we'll have flying cars AND a way to filter all of that data that we didn't have / think about before.
BET you didn't know that every woman with 10 cats buys lots of cat food, and that men with lots of exercise equipment regularly buys lots of protein. Just THINK of what else we might discover! We might find a whole new species of human to sell to!
(I'm thinking trolls, but I'm not sure if they have internet under all those bridges.)
Re: (Score:2)
Trolls have smart phones, but they only have small amounts of cash, no internet-usable money.
They also don't have deliverable addresses.
There Are People... (Score:2)
You're wrong (Score:3)
Sales people don't know how to sell to you. They know how to sell a product, but the question is whether YOU are interested in the product. The problem for marketers on the Internet and increasingly in meatspace as well is limited real estate. You can only buy so many ads and too broad of a range is not only useless but also very expensive, impressions for generic keywords on Google's front page or YouTube are going for ~$5-15 per view and up to ~$50 per click.
So if I sell/purchase $200 worth of ad space per person per night (you easily see 20-something ads in an evening browsing or streaming), I damn well want to make sure that YOU are the target audience and may be interested in what I have to sell you.
As an ad company I want to sell as many ads as I can and to do so, I can't rely on a few big companies, I have to sell to everyone. If ad-space on Google costs $10M, it would only be Coca Cola and car manufacturers that could afford ads, they are 1 company with a huge spend, they have me by the gonads because they know nobody else can afford the space so the price is relatively low. If I however can sell ads in increments of $500 to everyone, I collect much more than selling to a single company, but to be able to sell in increments of $500 I have to be very specific, my customers don't want to waste their money and bidding wars would end up again with Coca-Cola sized companies owning the top end and going just high enough to keep competitors out but the prices would be artificially low.
Hence why we need everything about you and your friends. We want to be able to predict who is going to buy what at which point. If your friend buys an iPhone,
and you don't have one you're a prime target for iPhone ads. Once you buy the iPhone, I don't need to spend any more ad space on selling you the iPhone, I can sell you the apps and make your mom watch the iPhone ads. But if you go on Slashdot complaining about Apple, I have to sell you an Android instead. So I have to have the knowledge about your purchase history, your interest, which sites you visit and what you belief. That requires a lot of data, which is relatively cheap to collect and store (your profile probably can be stored in ~$0.05 worth of storage) but it allows these companies to sell your profile and ads for hundredfolds more.
Better Question: Why give your information. (Score:3)
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just saying no to giving information
Until the day that your local grocery store stops selling food for cash.
Credit card or Apple Pay only. Gotcha!
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the font of all wisdom
Dingbats?
If I know... (Score:3)
...that users of a certain web browser pay more for airline tickets than other browser users, I show different prices to different ones.
If I know Mac users are willing to pay more than Android/Windows/Linux users, I show different prices.
Once there was a time you could save money by switching browsers, or switching to privacy mode with no cookies, or nowadays, enabling cookies, leaving the site, then returning the next day.
It's no longer married white men in an age range. It's now guy who is already known to spend extra because all his data points match others who also spend extra.
If you can get 10% from x% of the user base, what is that worth? THAT is the value of the data.
Previously different state/regions income levels were used. Now precise location data allows more specifics than just "wealthy community with average salary". It can discern bad side of the tracks from uptown in said community.
It used to be you'd spend thousands sending direct mail to everyone. Now you can avoid wasting money on those who can't afford, or wouldn't buy, and target exactly who. That makes the sale process more efficient too.
So, you just came from a vlogger's site and YouTube knows you just watcher her video on a certain product, and now you are googling it? You also have purchased something after seeing an online recommendation X times in the past. Seems pretty likely you'll do so again. Sounds like we should send more products for the vlogger to "review".
To Perdict the Future (Score:2)
When you have multiple data points on multiple individuals, trends can be interpreted.
With these interpretations, you could theoretically predict something. At least to a certain degree.
Even the most mundane data points, could help with these interpretations.
More data points, on more individuals, could lead to more accurate the predictions.
Companies are not looking to identify a market, they're looking to predict how
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Companies like Amazon are always looking to optimize their supply chain. If you take some daily use product like toilet paper, toothpaste, dish soap, or something. Amazon may notice that the sale of a product dips or spikes by 20% throughout the course of a year.
If Amazon were to pull in travel information, purchased from a data broker, they might be able to make a correlation. Which could help them understand why consumers do not purchase the product like clock-wor
It is a lot less ominous (Score:2)
The rich people who are interested in technology, i.e. investors have otherwise no idea about technology but they are sure there is a next Microsoft or Google or Apple or Facebook right around the corner that they don't want to miss out on. They have also seen successes like WhatsApp or Dropbox or Slack that repackaged very old solutions and upended industry behemoths who weren't focusing on it.
This incentivizes creative leaders to sell them the new-shiny by opening "startups".
This happened with Web 2.0 whe
But seriously, why? (Score:3)
I think some of the answers so far are missing the point of the question. Setting aside ethical questions, while it may seem superficially that more information is better, that's not the outcome we've been seeing. There's more advertising - that's merely because of lower cost - but it is targeted only marginally more effectively than it has been in the past. There is obviously a diminishing returns effect with the additional data, and on top of that it adds complexity and overhead to the advertising process and carries the risk of bad publicity in the event of a data breach. And quite a few product lines are very obviously not using market insights to improve their products and frequently are making products worse despite having better information. It's one thing not to care about your customers, it's another to actively alienate them and their money.
In other words, why is such a large amount of additional data producing such a small benefit and is sometimes even counter-productive?
Usage data is used (Score:3)
First of all, usage data isn't personal data. This post really confuses two distinct issues.
Secondly, usage data is used. Just because you see bugs or don't see your feedback used, that doesn't mean companies aren't modifying software based on what's measured.
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First of all, usage data isn't personal data.
Wrong. Server stats might be aggregated enough to not have personally identifiable data, but access logs show what I've been looking at on your site. This is the very definition of personal data.
Nice to have, cheap to aquire, ... (Score:2)
... easy to store. That's from the top of my head.
Unless we have something like the new and brilliant EU GDPR that says we're going to fine you for a bazillion moneys if you collect data outside of its stated purpose and only for that purpose and only the truly necessary data ... Unless that happens, companies will continue to do this. With potentially dangerous effects once the next Hitler gets his hands on Google or the next Goebbels his hands on Facebook.
We need laws and the GDPR is pretty much a perfect
Old vs. New (Score:2)
"They were able to pull off this feat long before the Internet even came into existence."
Sure, with Flyers, posters, billboards, and movie theater ads, all of which costed a fortune to create.
Nowadays the actual costs are negligible, so they can concentrate on getting everybody they missed with the old methods.
You Missed the Point (Score:2)
In the intro you stated that sales people already know how to sell things -- such as "big data". The same is true for "cloud".
To rephrase, the users of big data don't need the possible features of big data. Indeed, the possible features (as you point out) are questionable. But the sellers of big data are the ones that need the possible features to promote to get sales of big data.
Coupled into all this is the sellers of big data are not mentioning the liabilities that come with the giant stores of data.
Who came up with those "problems" (Score:2)
There are no problems with the reasoning. The person saying it just doesn't understand marketing in general:
1) Experienced marketers already know how to sell products successfully to various demographics
They do it much better and far more accurately now than ever. Claiming it hasn't changed in 20 years is just fundamentally showing that you have no idea how marketing works and have never spoken to a marketing department.
2) Most products are not being improved significantly based on the data collected
Likewise false. The fact products are released with flaws is not evidence that products aren't improved based on the data collected. It is evidence only that products are optimised do
selling data to insurance companies (Score:2)
There's gold in them thar hills ... (Score:2)
... of data mining and targeted ads is a legal basis for transactions that are questionable regarding ethics.
Imagine this:
In a court, the plaintiff has a shit load of personal information regarding the whereabouts of the defendant, along with search terms, websites visited, social media posts (even though defendant set tight privacy rules), online purchases, and crap like that.
Pretend the plaintiff is the NSA. The court is gonna know, "Given that you're not supposed to spy on US citizens, how in Sam Hill di
Easy (Score:2)
first law of MacGuffin (Score:2)
After you've sold your first-round investors on personal data as your ultimate secret sauce to power their lucrative exit round, one must pay constant and visible alms to the Great MacGuffin, or risk his eternal wrath.
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Dumbest argument ever (Score:2)
Whoever wrote this is a brainless imbecile.
Human behavior is random (Score:2)
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Next trope, the unnamed CONSPIRACY theory. Could you please show us the government memos you've been getting outlining this conspiracy so we cannot come to believe?