I once showed up to one of those MIT Biz-Tech mixers a few years ago and one of the presentations we had to sit through was an almost appalling peek at one of these tracking systems through the eyes of its enthusiastic business owner.

Afterwords we had time for open questions, and I joined the line. When it became my turn, I asked the owner about whether he had any ethical or moral qualms about what he was doing and he just laughed. He gathers data from hidden interactions with client websites (fashion brands, for this demo) to quite literally 'follow the customer around' and 'influence their purchasing decisions'. He was quite proud of just how deep into his shoppers' lives his product was integrated.

When I looked around the room during the height of this exchange, most everyone seemed indifferent and only a few seemed to acknowledge or validate my arguments. It was a supremely disappointing and depressing experience.

> When I looked around the room during the height of this exchange, most everyone seemed indifferent and only a few seemed to acknowledge or validate my arguments

It was the same thing, pre-crisis, in finance. "Of course I screwed him on pricing! He isn't my customer, he's a counterparty. He should have expected I'd screw him."

When an industry is making money to society's detriment, it will not fix itself.

I work in finance, for a dark pool. Our "value add" is to provide the anonymity to both buyers and sellers (both in who they are, the side they're on and their limit) while doing minimal disturbance to the market. We only disseminate the symbol on an IOI, and we don't quote prices, at all. We facilitate moving large block trades with minimal information leakage to market et large while abiding by NMS rules. Effectively, we run blind auctions for large blocks of US traded equities.

What are you trying to say? You add tremendous value for large customers who have the ability to not let everyone on a lit exchange know what they are doing. Actually from what I've heard more than 54% of all stock transactions are on on unlit alternative trading venues.

In you position, you are privy to a lot of information about your customers identities and order sizes before the order is executed. Do you sell this information to other customers? Because if you did, your example would be comparable to what's being discussed here.

Even if they didn't sell this information wholesale via data brokerages, your argument leaves open wiggle-room for claiming innocence while still monetizing the information via selling aggregate data.

This is something that is wholly uncovered in this whole debacle -- aggregate data (aka "anonymized" data ) is the cake beneath the icing. While Facebook et al may play nicely with regulators (and the general public) by quickly backing away from wholesale "unfiltered" data access, they can skirt the rules by providing "researchers" with anonymized data.

All of them want this anonymized data for their own analytics reporting to measure success metrics and most will walk away when the spigot is closed.

> they can skirt the rules by providing "researchers" with anonymized data.

Probably, given the many past cases of academics using this kind of data to demonstrate de-anonymization attacks, with some very special vetting of who the researchers are and where their loyalties lie.

Here's a decent writeup of their first big research-related privacy blunder: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Harvards-Privacy-Meltdown/...

I think the point here is either that

1) industries can evolve to no longer be predatory against their own customers/consumers of their services, or

2) just because one sector participant is behaving in immoral behaviour doesn’t mean all are, and labelling the entire industry as corrupt as a result may not be fair.

How is that related to the parent comment? Those trades pre-GFC weren't on dark pools, that was mostly voice (over-the-phone trading).

Thanks for sharing and this in many ways captures the central contradiction of our societies.

People often talk about ethics and values when they expect it from others or wider society. Yet they often fail to act in ethical ways when it comes to them and somehow manage the dissonance.

Our current system incentivizes profit over all else and many will respond to this. If our system rewards unethical behavior we should not be surprised with the results. Regulations around safety, environmental, labour and other ethical issues have to be put in place to temper the worst impulses. If slavery was legal many would be willing justify it as long as they gained from it.

We will have to regulate and disallow micro targeting that drives this insatiable need to stalk users and hoover data to build incredibly invasive profiles. And unless something is done it will keep getting worse.

It's almost as if the incentives of capitalism are inherently exploitative

when the capital is borrowed then another party needs to earn a return which amps up the exploitation and justification... i.e. I need to pay back my investors and also pay myself.

What do you mean, "when"? This makes it sound like we could fix Capitalism by banning banks and investors or something. They're inherent to this system. Institutionalized loans were a corner stone when Capitalism emerged a couple of centuries back in Europe. If we want to organize society differently, we should have a honest and broad debate about that rather than focusing on one aspect / one group of supposedly bad actors.

True, I think there are specific organizational structures that allow or encourage exploitation and they are not limited to capitalism. imho, when people need to please another with power over them they more readily justify their actions when they exploit others. Institutionalized loans seem a step removed from this as there is less opportunity for influence from the powers that be.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around!

Can we possibly have discussions without them devolving into false dichotomies between two or three ideologies? It may come as a shock to some, but it’s not all about crony capitalism or Marxism, there are other options, hybridized options, and room for new thinking. It’s stultifying to see every critique of what the US laughingly calls the free market devolve into people screaming “Communism then, haha! Mao and Stalin killed 100 million!”

Can we at least pretend to argue in good faith?

> there are other options, hybridized options,

If you put economies on a line between free markets and communism, the economies do better the closer they are to free markets.

> and room for new thinking.

About every mix has been tried already, and the results are clear.

no one is forcing anyone to buy shit. i'm on the internet all day browsing all sorts of sites and all of these companies are completely powerless wrt to me. you know why? because i haven't bought anything except underwear from amazon and groceries from my local supermarket in about 9 months.

I'm glad to hear that you aren't influenced by these tech giants, but the problem is that most people are. When these tech companies can greatly influence elections and popular opinion, we should question their morals and decide how much personal data they should be able to access.

I understand your point, but people are volunteering to give up this information. At some point, grandma has to learn to stop calling the psychic hotline.

Explaining to grandma that she’s wasting money calling a premium rate number is relatively easy, and if she ignores you, the impact to society is minimal.

How do you explain to grandma that publishing photos of her grandkids is to the detriment to society as a whole?

Does grandma brag in front of the tax collectors about how much her children are making? Does grandma rat out the grandkids partying too hard to their parents? Grandma isn't stupid, grandma can keep secrets, but no one explained to her that Facebook isn't a benevolent entity. Her perception of Facebook is a cozy digital dining room where she can talk to the friends and family that don't have time to visit anymore.

I think it's important to remember that Facebook provides a service people really want, which makes it hard to convince them to mistrust it.

Is it OK for a business to collect and sell their customers' personal information if their customers didn't knowingly agree to it? These tech companies are hiding their intentions in the fine print and it's clear that their users don't understand what their personal data is used for. We can't expect the average person to spend 10 minutes [0] reading and trying to understand the legalese on every app or website they sign up for.

Most countries have consumer protection laws to protect the rights of customers and stop deceptive business practices. When a significant portion of a company's customers feel deceived, it's easy to see that the company is not being honest to their customers.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/readi...

Your point is moot, if advertising had absolutely no effect on customers, then it would not be profitable to use it and the industry would not exist.

In fairness certain types of advertising have very little roi but continues to be used because of past association or the network effect.

That's your behavior in commerce, sure. How were your political and social views nudged?

Advertising is also for services and websites and political campaigns, universities, clubs, schools and charities not just consumer goods. Many of these actors benefit from having targeted advertising, just because you are not buying consumer goods does not mean a profile of your online activity is not being created and sold to advertisers used by these various groups.

Oh, yeah? I bet you think you picked the brands you bought, too.

brands of what? milk? eggs? cheesy crackers?

An anecdote is not data.

The particularly scary thing about Facebook and Google is that they can link it to your name/location/other PII easily. Your ISP is in this group, too.

Joe's Ad Tech Shop has a tougher time of that, even though they do build exactly the same profile.

Everyone wants to know what people do on their site, the big technological problem with all of the above is that the same companies do it across everybody's sites.

I've been to presentations of marketing teams that said they know how much is left on your mortgage when you hit their website, and they use that data, and a lot more, to figure out what price tier of items show up on the landing page.

The level of tracking that happens that people aren't aware of is scary. What Facebook has been revealed to do is pretty low on the creepy scale compared to what is happening.

Person X works hard to get that raise, promotion, bonus, whatever to build a better life for themselves and their family. Not so it can be siphoned away by person Y sneakily charging them more. All dynamic pricing of this kind should be forced to be transparent. Display the real price alongside the custom one they want to charge you.

Since before money was invented, salesmen would size you up and steer you towards what products you'd be most likely to buy, and would dynamically set the price based on sizing you up.

Walk into a car dealership, and you'll see this blatantly in action.

Told my sis to put on her most raggedy clothes you can still wear. I put on some threadbare shorts, some worn sandals, and a t-shirt with the collar fraying. Then we went car shopping. 3k off a used car's listed price for her, lol.

You can take that too far - they can think you're a bum and refuse to talk to you. (Happened to me!)

But yeah, it's very plain that how you are treated by a salesman and what they offer and at what price is very strongly connected with how you dress, are groomed, speak, what car you drove up in, etc.

Waste of time to go to dealer to negotiate. Do everything over the phone. Never relent their insistence to come in. Finalize price over phone. Done. Success.

I find the cars online, then just go into the area, and always remember I can walk out.

But you can’t negotiate with a website, and it won’t tell you you’re seeing a custom price. It’s not like a store (or actually most car dealerships) where there is a price displayed in the open

I’m OK with being shown different products. But not with generic items being marked up.

Years ago, I walked onto a car yard. I watched the guy look at my jeans and my t-shirt, and he tried to sell me a $2000 car. Exactly as you said.

Care to name products/companies? It would be fun to play around with a VPN and see what variations in pricing would really happen.

The difference is this: a website tracking you while you're there is just using their own data.

FB, Google, twitter get data from all the websites which make the error of using their scripts: be it analytics, social buttons or "login with whatever". Everytime you use assets hosted by a third party they get free data about your users. Every time you use a third party service you're giving data about your users.

I don't think that's the case.

Facebook's ad/privacy page told me KLM had shared data with Facebook. I don't remember agreeing to that, I'm diligent at unticking the box or whatever, but in any case, I doubt it only goes one way.

KLM's website includes at least 15 trackers.

I'm looking forward to 25 May. I will write to all these companies, and demand that they stop sharing my data.

Does the GDPR give us the tools to do that?

I suspect most big companies will have teams set up whose only job is to respond to GDPR-related requests.

I think the difference that is pointed-out most of the time is the scale at which FB operates.

Even if other sites are doing (fundamentally) the same, they probably don't have such a clear and overarching picture as FB does.

I don't disagree with you though. Having most sites track you sucks.

I mostly agree that the scale of a system like FB makes its impact far greater.

But on the other hand, any company that can admit to controlling (at least in part) a person's interests, choices of purchases, etc. control a significant more of a person than you'd think.

Said person thinks they're making the decision themselves, but in reality they're being prodded in a certain direction. When they make a purchase and use the item, others see, and they might also be influenced as a third party, and so on.

I'd say it's pretty dangerous, but it tends to be overlooked.

All true, but Facebook is unique in its reach. It has tracking bugs on far more websites than almost any of these other ad services. It has specific personal information about billions of people, including their social network, their private messages to friends, their exact relationship status history, photos, videos, voice recordings, location information, including lots of such information for hundreds of millions of other people who have never consented or even been given the opportunity to consent. It's the biggest, most intrusive database of personal information in the world, and it sells access to that data in order to serve poorly targeted ads (which honestly are a scam on their actual customers as well). And their entire business model is premised on this leaky bucket--in order to allow sales of tightly targeted ads, they also are knowingly revealing personal information to malicious parties who can and have and will continue to take full advantage.

So sure, there's an entire industry built for this, but Facebook has some truly unique properties that make it light-years more dangerous than your typical ad network.

I had an interview once with a company that essentially wrote tracking libraries for Starbucks's app. Everything you mentioned in your post is pretty much exactly what the app did. Their nonchalance around their extent of tracking was chilling to say the least.

If these companies instead spent their time on improving the UX of their sites so that users (and not some creepy AI Clippy) could easily find stuff they cared about and in the sizes they needed then the companies would easily dominate their respective markets. Taking a cue from the physical world if I walk into my local grocery store I would be seriously creeped out and annoyed if I was greeted with a cart full of recommended items based on my previous purchases.

I'd like that. Saves me having to find everything.

It is about saying, "NO" and not creating this in the first place. That's the point. Until devs figure out they are responsible for this the quicker it will end. Would FB and Palantir be where they are today without people smarter than the founders enabling this?

I suspect the majority of people implementing this stuff are either largely apathetic or are so thick they wouldn't ever see the bigger picture. Most wouldn't have a clue where to start with even the simplest of articles posted here.

Showing me my favorite style clothing in my favorite color is manipulating me?

This seems to be news to so many people but marketing and advertising has been tracking and advertising to you this way for centuries including sharing of data.

To your question: yes it is. You may find it convenient, but it is definitely manipulating as well. And it really depends on where you see that clothing. Is it on the "buy" page? Ok maybe not so bad. Is it on an advertisement in a flashlight app on your phone after you last googled for something similar on your laptop? Is that still just a convenience, or have we entered territory that is creepy for you yet?

Marketing and advertising has not been tracking all of us _as individuals_ for more than the last couple of decades. How could they possibly have done this in the previous eras of dumb broadcasting and dumb print media? Newspapers can't follow you around in department stores to see what you like and target future ads to _you_ as an individual. They can advertise in places that make more sense, e.g. kids toys on a kids TV channel.

So yes this is new and yes this is manipulation, and this isn't the only way it has to be. We can still have convenience and better advertising without the mass tracking of individuals. But as long as we have people defending the current status quo as you have here, then nothing will change.

No, this is not new, as ad agencies would gather information on where you shopped and what you bought and sold that information to others. Then you might receive a flyer in the mail advertising something complimentary to your purchase. National retail chains paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for such information going well into the early 1900s.

Playing devil’s advocate but if a company “wants to help surface more of what the customer wants to buy”, why is that a bad thing? Would you want to step into a store filled with stuff you would never buy?

Many reasons:

- It assumes this is all that the data is used for and that the data doesn't get a second life with companies that can use the information to punish you.

- It assumes that the data is never stolen by malicious entities and put to use against you

- It assumes that all the data collected is required to provide the information promised

- It assumes you want to buy things from theses stores in the first place (think ideological reasons for not shopping at a place)

- It assumes you knowingly consented to these terms with understanding of the cost

Basically no matter how you shape it, it's the advertisers trying to avoid saying they've entered you into a system and contract without your consent, but it's okay because "you get to see things you want to buy", neverminding that this rarely is the case and the algorithms are hyped up beyond belief, often offering advertisements for items you have already purchased and need to rarely purchase. (e.g., you just bought a water heater, here are some other water heaters you might like)

I'm not really convinced by lengthy Terms of Services and FAQs like Facebook's that they honestly care about people being upset as they miss the point entirely. You still don't know what was collected specifically, you cannot opt out of it from their side (must use blocking tools which companies constantly change their code to avoid), there's no way to verify about any of the information they've collected or whether they've stopped collecting it if you opt out, there's no way to confirm that your data is deleted if you request it, etc.

All this for slightly targeted ads?

It's 50/50, honestly. In some cases doing that is incredibly useful for the customer.

The problem is when the business decides to start promoting similar, yet different items, knockoffs, etc. that "match" your profile, yet aren't what you would've wanted to originally buy. So you wind up getting steered to something that may be of lesser quality, etc. This might be the result of the company making a larger profit on the alternate item or something else.