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Oh, Brave New World! The Novel World of Big Data.
Last week @claire posed the question “What does Facebook know about us?” It is a worthy question, and one not easily answered. Facebook certainly can automatically glean a number of facts about us, but as her post demonstrates, that does not translate necessarily well into knowing us. Why else would she constantly receive ads for products in which she clearly has no interest? Ours is a brave new world of massive data gathering and data mining, where our personal profiles, in any form, are traded much as one would once have traded baseball cards. Yet for all its ubiquitous reach, this is still new, it is still novel, and it is still buggy, as I will relate below.
I have some direct experience as a customer of Google’s Ad Words program, though this experience is now somewhat dated. Six years ago I enrolled my company as a buyer of Google advertising. The program is fairly simple:
- Assign a monthly budget cap.
- Pick or spell out the search terms where you want your listings to come up first.
- Pick or spell out the search terms where you want your banner ads to appear in the search sidebar.
- Bid on how much you want to pay per click.
- Create your ads, and link them to the appropriate landing pages.
After some automated vetting by Google, your ads are (hopefully) approved, and, depending on your bidding levels, will appear accordingly. Others who have bid higher than you will have their ads appear more often, and in more prominence than yours. You are not billed per ad displayed, but by click-through. I ran with the program for 18 months, and it never paid for itself.
Perhaps I had not bid high enough to get my ads displayed often or prominently enough to get through to the sorts of customers who would have made the program at least break even. Perhaps my ads were poorly constructed. Perhaps the products themselves were not the sort of things that lent themselves well to this sort of advertising anyway, as I sell business-to-business, not to consumers. Perhaps it was a combination of all of these factors. All I can say for certain is that whatever the monthly budget I set, Google would consume it in 2-3 weeks, without fail. I spent in excess of $20k over 18 months and garnered only a scant $500 in sales that I could definitively trace to those ads.
Throughout that time, Google routinely fed me reports of how my ad-buys were faring, and included many suggestions for improvement — better words (which had higher minimum bids), higher bids on my existing word set, catchier jargon, paying extra to include photographs, paying extra to be featured in more sub-networks, and so forth. In short, all of their “advice,” if heeded, ultimately meant spending even more money. Maybe if I was selling consumer goods, perhaps I would have fared better (and let’s be honest, back-end automotive electronics are not “sexy beasts” that can sell on looks alone). Yet I looked where my ads were featured, and, generally speaking, they were featured in the appropriate target markets. I know from direct sales into those markets that our products have homes (and fans) there, and I know (because my budget was always expended in full) that someone was certainly clicking, yet the ad program itself was a failure for us. So much for the power of Big Data.
My second experience is far more recent. Over the course of our Thanksgiving family dinner, I took pictures of my gathered family. During the after-dinner lull, I uploaded a number of those photos to my Facebook page. I did not tag anyone else present, I did not caption any of the photos, I named no names. Yet when I checked in an hour later, to respond to some comments from distant relatives, I found that my post had been tagged with other names – the post read “Skipsul, with Mrs. Skipsul and Dave Carter”. Yes, according to Facebook, our own @DaveCarter was somehow at my parents’ house to share in our feast. How did he manage this? Facebook had tagged a photo of my father as Dave Carter. Why? Because I follow Dave on Facebook, and Facebook, in its clear desire to record the faces of anyone in any photo, just assumed that my Dad was Dave. Facebook had added my wife simply because she had opened up Facebook at the same location as me, at roughly the same time.
This should give us all pause.
There are zero controls available to Facebook users to prevent this automatic tagging of others in your own posts. The best you can do is to request that no one else can tag you from one of their posts (useful defense against some persons here who have sent me funny but inappropriate videos at times), but apparently, they’re busy linking events behind your back anyway. Oh, Brave New World indeed.
About 10 years ago, when I got my first iPod, I dove headfirst into listening to a wide variety of podcasts, and one such I found was the TWIT (This Week In Technology) network, started by Leo Laporte, formerly of Tech TV. Leo was an early advocate for facing this new reality head-on, and he championed the notion that, unless you take definitive steps to “stay off the radar” (and these steps would include making certain to never have any credit or debit cards, frequent shopper cards, and so forth), you will, in one form or another, be defined anyway by “big data,” by social media, or by some other collection of online metadata. If that is the reality we all must face, according to Leo, then you might as well take the steps necessary to define your own profile: create and maintain a social media presence that you can control (as much as possible), and even buy your own domain names if you think you have even a moderate shot at needing name recognition (either for personal advocacy or defense) later in life. Looking back now, was this wise advice?
I would call it mixed. Yes, there is value in controlling your own social media presence, but Facebook does not want to give you that control. Unless you rigorously police your Facebook account (and I do), the ever-shifting sands of their rules and practices will eventually reveal all, truth and untruth alike (like Dave being at my parents’ house). Why are they doing this? I can only speculate, but they must be doing it either for money or for control. My own experience with ad-buys suggests that the money cannot flow forever for them, unless their ad placement accuracy has improved (and Claire’s experience suggests that it has not), I suspect ad buyers are increasingly finding what I found, that it doesn’t pay to buy ads except for a few select types of businesses. Twitter’s reputation has turned horrid, what with their mercurial awarding and revocation of “verified” accounts, and their ghosting of posts by people they don’t seem to like. We cannot truly control how we appear online, and the ad buyers who pay for all the “free” services we use seem not to be getting their money’s worth.
What, then, should we do? I have no answer. Perhaps the market will sort things out? Perhaps it is time to call in the heavy hand of government regulators? Either way, this is all still new, this is all quite novel, and no one can really claim they’ve figured any of it out.
Published in Technology
Interesting, I didn’t know that. I dropped facebook years ago.
My understanding is that direct mail ads are considered a success if they hit 1%-2%. So in Claire’s case, they may be hoping for one or two people out of a hundred to really fit the ad. But these ads need to get that same kind of buy rate to be competitive, or businesses will go elsewhere.
As many of you know, my father Roger Easton Sr. is one of three people generally credited with inventing GPS. My brother RE Jr’s picture is frequently substituted for my Dad’s as the inventor.
A few days ago, I saw this article about sex-workers on Facebook. A lady had her ‘professional’ acquaintances being co- mingled with her vanilla life. Even though her vanilla profile had no link to her professional profile.
The article:
https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-outs-sex-workers-1818861596
I’m sure @davecarter is happy to know he suddenly has four granddaughters to buy Christmas presents for.
He’s right, you know. And we are rapidly approaching December, where the theme will be “Holiday Traditions and Treats.” With holidays coming up, are you thinking about treats your mama used to make, like divinity, fudge, or fruitcake? Or perhaps you’re a Sikh or member of another religious group that find themselves not well-represented in the United States and would like to tell us about your Holy Days, even if they don’t occur in December? Well, we’ll take all comers in Group Writing, and the first 31 claimants get the prize spots. Why not sign up right now?
Well, there’s a tug between, I think, generations, in America. Older Americans have not raised their children to understand privacy. Tech is exploiting this weakness & turning younger people into a version of themselves they never wanted. This ties up, I think, with the social crises that have more or less invisibly followed up on every catastrophe since at least dot com bubble, if not before. Younger Americans don’t ever come to the question, do I like reality better than the virtual world? There would be no contest, if it came to that. As things stand, we’re going in that direction by a series of tactical retreats & willfully blind steps.
Not that it’s inevitable. But we don’t know what will cause Americans to decide the real world beats the virtual world where tech corporations promise you, through big data, that they can know you better than you know yourself–&, at the same time, that they’re learning you’re worth knowing, which real people might not concede…
Owning your own domain is valuable advice, even if you aren’t tech-minded. Having it hosted is also pretty easy, even if you don’t want your own complete virtual server, like I do. And cheap. I pay about $150/year for domain and VPS, and shared hosting can be much cheaper. Since I own it, the content can’t be taken down or seized on a whim. A warrant or DMCA paperwork would have to be duly filed, at a minimum. Not that I put much content there, but it is an outlet available in a pinch.
Recently, I posted a number of very old law school photos to a reunion page. One of my classmates has not aged a bit. Every time I uploaded a photo with him in it, the photo was automatically identified as being a photo of him.
Facebook did not tag me or any other classmate in any of the photos I uploaded.
A month or two ago, a friend was looking at leasing a Lincoln Continental. I did a google search to find the specs. Thereafter I got inline fake news ads from Amazon along the lines of “Buy 1985 Lincoln Continental on Amazon Prime”. Where it got the 1985 from, who knows?
A few weeks later same thing when a friend asked me when the new Mercedes G-Class was coming out. After a search, I got ads “Buy G Class on Amazon Prime”.
Makes me think Amazon is buying whatever words I search for.
Thus, one has to think there are a lot of people getting ads like “Buy Taylor Swift sex tape on Amazon Prime”
I know I can’t keep big brother and it’s private partners from collecting info on me. So I don’t. I corrupt the data, regularly tagging my pictures with others names. Regularly seeding my private info with incorrect stuff. Facebook offers 56 genders and I identify as every one. It manifests itself in odd ways. I get security questions on my bank sites insisting I lived in places I have never lived and never inputted. Ditto for relatives and work history.
What gives me a giggle is seeing ads for books I have written on web pages I bring up. What are the odds I am going to buy my own books retail? Zip.
Why does this happen? Because like many authors I periodically check Amazon to see how sales are and to look at new reviews.
Seawriter
Brave New World, indeed. Your interesting article helps me better understand why our son won’t use Facebook and will not have an Echo Dot eavesdropping in his living room.
Your son is right about the Echo. Or any other “smart home” device that listens for commands. I don’t trust corporations enough to let them hear what’s going on inside my house. And I don’t trust corporations enough to believe their claims they don’t listen to what’s going on inside my house.
Don’t be silly. They have AI to do that. They aren’t doing it personally.
Wasn’t there something about one (or more) of the smart phones where people realized they were getting advertising where they had only been talking about something in the presence of their phone?
I remember @franksoto telling about a friend who, due to a traffic backup, killed time at a sporting goods store. When he got home his browser was full of ads for fishing gear.
Why do people have servants? Or had. Did people with servants have privacy? Did they worry about it? Sure, but not enough to give up their help. Same difference with technology.
Now that we can all have digital servants we worry? Humbug.
Clearly you were raised different than the rest of us. I’ve never had servants.
Mama always said that’s why she had kids.
I use Signal for private texting. My phone thinks I am someone else (a dummy google account belonging to a fictional person). I use an obsolete operating system on a virtual machine in part because you’d have to be quite odd to target such an obscure OS. No Echo or equivalent for me. I disabled Whatsapp access to my microphone, etc.
I cannot stop my local ISP from knowing all the activity from my address. ATT similarly knows what my phone does, even if it does not know it is me. And I have resigned myself to the fact that my location is tracked anywhere I bring my phone (when I go to the range, the phone is turned off and the battery removed miles before I get there).
But in our family the private conversations happen with NO computers or phones in the room. @kidcoder has shared too many horror stories.
I really couldn’t care less what some corporate computer thinks of me. The only point seems to be so that they can thrust ads in my face, which I either block or ignore. Problem solved.
I tend to think of it as a diminishing returns curve. I don’t put all my data on Facebook, I pay cash whenever possible, and I install almost nothing on my phone, which is of a sort which is less likely to spy on me. Odds are they still know entirely too much about me, but it’s going to cost them more to assemble that data.
They could assemble all kinds of information about me if they were willing to pony up the price of a large coffee every month…
Well, let me say at the outset that dinner was fabulous, and I really appreciated the invitation. I don’t get around as much as I did when I was driving cross country, but it’s nice to know Facebook is there to assist me. As our much loved and terribly missed Kennedy Smith once said, “I didn’t know I had touched so many lives. Good luck suing.”
Good thing this news arrives on my desk on Cyber Monday, no?
My only question is why anyone here is still using Facebook or Google searches? We’ve made the compromise of using Amazon Prime and I still make selective use of Gmail but that’s about it. It would not be a big deal to ditch those if necessary. Seeding the interwebs with conflicting information is also a worthwhile strategy.
The analogy of personal servants with Facebook displays a profound innumeracy. There is a difference of many orders of magnitude in having a servant (for those few who can afford one) and a few acquaintances know some private things about you versus almost anyone anywhere on the planet knowing many private things about you. Given that almost nothing can be deleted from the cloud, the hazard is far greater and more durable. A total lack of concern for privacy is undoubtedly the reason @valiuth uses his/her real name and photo on Ricochet.
I don’t really care about the targeted ads thing. If a site is going to display ads, I guess I’d rather they were ads for cowboy boots, Mustang accessories, science fiction novels, USB flash drives, or the latest Big & Rich CD than ads for adult diapers, reverse mortgages, or baby food. But the ads I see tend to be very random. I’m not on Facebook, though, so maybe I would be more properly targeted if I were a Facebook member.
Hi Dave, hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving with your newly acquired granddaughters.
About ready to give FB the heave-ho. One can no longer hide its in-house “People you may know.” adds. HAL is knocking at my door, and won’t leave. Yikes!
With respect to servants I guess I was thinking more of Alexa or such devices, and various services like Amazon. Facebook, I guess is more like being a mini celebrity. You put stuff out there hoping to be noticed and to have people comment. Technology is fulfilling our deep desires to be waited on and be famous. All of these come at the cost of personal privacy, they always have. Technology just extends access to more people.
In the interest of diversity, I’m available for adoption also.