Please understandnim asking this question from a genuine place. I dont want the quora answer, i want the tech savvy, security expert minds of my fellow lemmings. If thats ok?
What happens to this data? What can/do they do with it? and why are so many people concerned about google tracking them?
Do i as an average user need to be concerned?
If so, What sorts of things can i do to avoid being tracked? Preferably without too much comprimise.
People don’t realize how much data is collected, how it’s analyzed to determine things about you, and how it’s given out to nearly anyone. Here are some concerning examples that hopefully speak for themselves.
Data from fitness app Strava was used to locate secret US military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq by some random guy on Twitter. He did this by pointing out people running in squares in the middle of the desert. Imagine what America’s enemies could do with this information that this company will sell to anyone.
Ad company Xandr allows you to target audiences with labels like “Recently purchased a pregnancy test”, “Has a large gambling debt”, and “Has depression”. Once again, this is freely available for anyone to purchase. These tracking companies find out things that are very personal to you and then sell that info to people who might not have your best interests in mind.
Last but not least. Governments and law enforcement can access this information at any time for any purpose. Do you really want the government and police agencies to have a database of people grouped by their religious and political beliefs or their sexual orientation?
Hopefully you can see why the information being collected and given out to anyone is concerning. As to how to avoid it, I’m not sure there is any way besides government regulation. Maybe someone else has some answers!
I watch a YouTube channel called The Hated One. He explains a lot about how to stay safe on the net. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like it’s possible to be completely safe and to be even a little bit safe is a HUGE PITA.
I remember reading something about a guy that went so hard at being anonymous that the FBI almost arrested him since it looked like he was doing something criminal to want all this anonimity.
I couldn’t find the source now
Catch 22, man.
Interesting, where can I buy the info? Maybe I find something on my boss…
I just don’t use the internet, can’t track me if I ain’t on it!
If your friends have Facebook, and they share contacts on their phone, and they communicate with you Facebook has a shadow profile for your phone number. They still track you even without the app or an account.
Just a personal story to bring one example into focus.
I got sober 8 years ago and never talked about it online until I was about 4 years sober. Never saw a single promotion for anything related to alcohol…
Until the day I made a single comment on Reddit telling my story to help support another person who was just starting their own sobriety journey.
And like magic, all promoted communities to me were alcohol related. Even though I’m an ublock user, when I would selectively disable it every advertisement I saw online was related to booze.
So even though there are ethical applications for my data, I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.
I think that’s just really shitty targeted advertising, not surprising on Reddit lol
Reddit wasn’t even the worst offender.
I made two posts one on asshole design and one on dangerous design and they cumulatively got something like 7,000 up votes and then “magically” the problem was fixed on reddit!
I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.
This doesn’t even make sense. It’d be much more lucrative to target multiple things you speak fondly about it or have expressed personal interest in by actively searching.
If you enjoy something you buy it occasionally. If you are addicted you buy it every day, every time you have money, you think about it all the time. That’s way more lucrative, it’s the whole business model of the tobacco industry too.
That definitely doesn’t describe how I act with nicotine, and I’m ABSOLUTELY addicted to nicotine.
I could say the same for alcohol, but I’m a very mild alcoholic.
Things we need are higher on our priorities than things we want, and addiction convinces you that you need that thing. So anything that can monetize that addiction is going to be more effective and consistent than something you merely want.
Keyword based advertising is overly simple
An example of this I use on occasion is:
You date someone years ago and no longer are. You’ve moved on, but that person then goes and commits a heinous crime. The police decide that since you dated years ago, and that record of your personal info is stored on some database they have somewhere, they no-knock warrant into your house, and shoot you dead in your own bed (Brianna Taylor - Louisville KY.) because they think there’s a possibility he was there.
Breonna Taylor*
This example is pretty good. I’m stealin’ it.
I don’t like the idea that if history repeats itself, a powerful entity can force the data vaults open and see who they should send to the showers. I could be on the “correct” side at that time yet something I did or said last year has the system deem me unfit for the noble breed.
I think the best example is for women. Imagine they can figure out, with 95% accuracy or something, that you are pregnant, that could be valuable data.
Now imagine you are a woman at a large corporation who just got pregnant, but aren’t telling anyone yet. Too early. Your corporation buys a batch of data and discovers there is a 95% chance you are pregnant. They don’t want to pay for maternity leave or make reasonable accomodations during pregnancy or pumping breast milk. They fire you for “unrelated reasons”, before you ever tell them you are pregnant.
Nothing illegal happened there really. You never told them so you have no way to prove they fired you for that.
Isn’t that illegal though
Only if you have the funds to prove it.
how so?
This is very unlikely, because if they did it to more than a handful of people, the pattern would become immediately obvious.
Not necessarily. It doesn’t have to be pregnancy either. It could be because you are 95% sure a Democrat. Or union friendly. Or atheist.
Bundle the “undesirables” in mass layoffs to increase the obfuscation of why they were laid off. “The algorithm said these 10% had to go.”
The US and UK have both used data from period trackers to spy on women and monitor for “suspicious” miscarriages.
Governments in free, democratic countries are not supposed to spy on you without a probable suspicion of wrongdoing. Government agencies around the world get around that by “purchasing information” collected by private firms and use it to gain probable suspicion whenever they feel like.
Why would the uk care??
Some people hate women with control over their own bodies.
I think if people knew the extent to which these big-data algorithms can figure out things about you just based on the links you click and posts you upvote then they would be more concerned. If it was just that they knew my location, age and interests then I wouldn’t really care much but the reality is that they probably know stuff about me, that even I don’t.
I simply don’t like the fact that this database exists somewhere because it can come back to bite me one day. Just imagine what a fascistic government could use data like this for. Or maybe not even that, but remember how we first didn’t have chatGPT and no one thought we would for years but then it just appeared and now it’s there. Well what if tomorrow someone comes up with an equally fun tool that you can put any person’s name into and it’ll give you access to all this data. I want my page on that app to be very brief and inconsistent.
I’m perfectly aware that it’s impossible to use the internet and not leave any tracks at all, but I want to make sure that my tracks are incredibly difficult to follow and preferably that they don’t lead anywhere.
This whole thread makes me want to quit using the internet right now…
Corporations are scummy motherfuckers. Once they have this data they will keep it forever. Even if they don’t have a use for it now they can come up with something in the future and will have no qualms about fucking you over with it. The technology available to analyze it is only getting more powerful as time goes on.
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t know but everyone is saying it’s bad.”
That’s not a lot of words to gobble corporate nutsack.
Damn that comment struck a nerve in you eh lol
Because then the authorities can get a warrant to access that information if they believe you are guilty of something.
In the case where a law is unjust or puts peoples’ lives at risk, say like abortion laws in some US states, the government can use this against you as proof in a court of law.
Edit: here’s another post about how this information is used against people:
To add to this: Many people shrug this off saying they don’t have anything to hide. Even assuming that is true, they usually mean they don’t have anything to hide right now from their current authorities. Ask yourself the question: Is there absolutely no form of government/regime you might want to hide something from? Are you absolutely certain these authorities might not get access to your data? Doesn’t even have to be a possible future government in your own country, it could be in some other country you might want to visit. Or maybe some terrorist organisation who for some reason targets people like you. Is there really absolutely no one you would mind having access to all the data collected about you?
The thing is, the data isn’t going to be uncollected again. The way things are drifting the number of countries not in some way endangered by antidemocratic movements is constantly decreasing. Call me paranoid but I just don’t want to risk it.
Here’s one example of how your data can be wielded against you: https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2?op=1
Here’s a good example why you should care
https://gizmodo.com/signal-tried-to-run-the-most-honest-facebook-ad-campaig-1846823457
My worst imagination is labelling you and selling your label to the companies they supply to, and how wrongly those companies can use that data, example: google search “prostate cancer” or searching for symptons associated with prostate cancer - label telling probable prostate cancer developing with this user - insurance companies denying insurance to you or making it too expensive. Now extrapolate this to what your searches probably tell about you or your state, and multiply by the websites you visit, the time you spend reading article/tweet/forum/post about a certain subject, where and how you comment those articles, etc, and being labeled according to their perceived likes/hates/problems about yourself.
My worst imagination is a nefarious entity using our data to determine if we are a threat or try and categorize people for some kind of psyop manipulation.
Something like Captain America Winter Soldier but more realistic. Even things like Cambridge Analytica show it is not that far fetched.
While social media companies and amazon may not have the desire to do those things, they sure make it easier for others by greedily collecting the data.
This. I remember that one video by LTT where he tried searching for a flight and he got a way higher price on the standard browser compared to the one with no personal accounts/cookies.
If I use search engines, be it to find opinions on a topic or as you said an insurance, I want those sorted by factors like the date it’s been created and maybe the reputability of the source. Not what the algorithm thinks I want to see or I should see in “its” opinion.
That doesn’t happen. These companies don’t sell user data and never have, they make money by being the only ones with your data through targeted advertisements. It’s not in their interest to sell it.
When you have enough personal info about a population you can engineer advertisement so effectively that you can convince that population of almost everything. See Brexit.
It’s not for your personal privacy, or to spare you personal embarrassment. But rather because large-scale demographic data collection is dangerous.
The Nazis used such collections to locate Jews. America used such collections to locate Japanese-Americans. The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal affiliation being printed on ID cards. In none of these cases were the data collected for the nefarious purposes it was eventually used for.
Information is a form of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power in the wrong hands is dangerous.
