> match your customer with data about them from countless other sources

With so many data sources, it should be easy to find proxies for protected classes (race, sex, etc). Indirect discrimination was (and still is[2]) used to enforce racial segregation ("redlining"[1]). Facebook was recently caught[3] enabling direct discrimination. I wonder if your roommate cares that his company is probably doing the same thing indirectly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[2] https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas...

[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...

We both discuss how our jobs will step over moral lines on occasion. It is something I don't like, but not something strong enough to make me quit. If I were in charge I wouldn't be supporting some of these types of advertising.

Apple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they do not do this...

Apple has plenty of its own ethical issues, starting with 350,000 Chinese workers paid $1.90 an hour in dubious conditions.

Well, that particular issue is not really Apple's "own" - pretty much every single tech company on earth benefits from cheap foreign labor.

But then they'll tell you that these employees are very happy to work at such factories, because they make way more money than they would ever make on the farm in their hometown, and often work there a year or two to save as much money as they can before moving back to where they lived before.

(Apple actually does way better than most other companies on that front - see http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/)

Does it open an entire rabbit hole about the ethics of globalization? Sure. Is it a strictly black and white issue? ...heh.

They do.

Source?

Source that they don't?

I'd presume that they do absent a credible source they don't.

They don't offer any services that would benefit from it.

They have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/

Search advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.

They have audience options for ads (like age/gender/location, see http://searchads.apple.com/how-it-works/#features), meaning they collect data about their users as well.

Also, they colluded with other companies to, effectively, keep employees' wages down. Amount of money they saved was probably a rounding error for them in this case too.

Tangential question: Do you know if it's possible to identify financial institutions which don't sell this kind of data? Credit unions?

Up until a few years ago, credit card networks had divisions that were trading on transaction data, but they've had to shut those down. So now they sell the anonymized data to prop trading firms and advertisers. I think cash is your best bet.

Hah, I actually did a small project on some of this data for one of those companies. Pretty amazing what you can get out of 50 char descriptions at scale.

Do you happen to know the law that caused them to stop trading PII? Is it only the networks, as opposed to the issuers who trade information?

Small credit unions would be your best bet, but I'm not aware of any specifics unfortunately.

The problem is small credit unions still use co-branded cards with Visa/MC, etc who sell your data. I believe AMEX is your best bet for privacy, because you are already paying a premium to them, or good ol' cash money.

"Everyone is doing it" sounds wrong on so many levels.

Go ahead and take the moral high ground here. No one is stopping you. But you'll be broke as hell if you do (or run out of funding).

As someone who's been bootstrapping his own startup for the past ... 6 years and refused VC money (not for moral reasons), I have to take it. I still refuse to implement Google Analytics and integrate FB/Dropbox/Google in any of the projects I'm involved with.

Moralist? No, I'm just not into feeding the monster.

Got a link to your startup?

Total rubbish. Targeted advertising is not the economy.

maybe that's not the worst thing.

Fatalism.

My first time creating an ad on FB was startling. I didn't know all those targeting options existed.

But, they've worked extremely well for my niche SaaS. We currently focus 60% of our ad budget on FB.

With it being so rampant, why is it so difficult to discover what people know about you. And what are the barriers to changing this?

Regulation. Consider EFF membership.

https://eff.org

I think you mean Cardalytics.

The amazing thing is that hedge funds trade on aggregate credit card purchase data.