The Dark Side of Advertising Profiles: A Threat to Privacy and Security

The world of advertising is built on complex algorithms and data analysis, but at what cost to our privacy? The use of fake profiles has become a significant issue, with advertisers often relying on numbers that may not accurately reflect real individuals. This creates a catch-22 situation where advertisers cannot improve the efficacy of their ads without compromising the integrity of the advertising profile, while also risking exposure to malicious actors.

One counterargument to this is that the data collected from these profiles is anonymized, but in reality, it's impossible to completely anonymize data with each new column added to a database. This creates a scenario where one person's information becomes increasingly identifiable as more data points are combined. Furthermore, the use of advertising profiles has far-reaching implications beyond just advertising. For example, employment and financial transactions will also be affected by the presence of these profiles, potentially impacting job prospects and access to loans.

The potential for AI-powered hiring systems to review these profiles is a terrifying prospect, as it could lead to inaccurate or discriminatory assessments based on incomplete information. The idea that an employer might view someone's advertising profile and decide they're not suitable for a position because of their age or other factors is unsettling, and highlights the need for greater regulation and transparency in the use of personal data.

Despite these concerns, there are efforts underway to develop better systems and technologies to protect individual privacy. One approach is obfuscation, which involves using browser plugins and other tools to mask one's online activity and make it harder for advertisers to collect valuable data. However, this approach has its limitations, as malicious actors can also use these tools to inflate their numbers or create fake traffic.

Another issue with advertising profiles is that they are not unique to the individual, but rather can be copied or replicated by others. This makes it difficult to stop bad actors from using them for nefarious purposes. The use of cryptocurrencies and online transactions has also raised concerns about anonymity, as these systems are increasingly being used to track individuals.

Ultimately, protecting one's privacy in the digital age requires a combination of individual action and systemic change. Simple measures such as encrypting DNS data, avoiding certain websites or services, and using browser plugins can help mitigate the risks associated with advertising profiles. However, these efforts alone may not be enough to prevent exploitation by malicious actors.

The problem is further compounded by the growing sophistication of advertisers' tactics, which often rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in our online behavior. The use of fake profiles is just one example of this, and highlights the need for greater awareness and education about online security and data protection. By working together, we can develop better systems and technologies that prioritize individual privacy and security, rather than perpetuating a system that exploits our personal data for profit.

In the end, it's a cat-and-mouse game between advertisers seeking to collect valuable data, and individuals who want to protect their online presence. While there is no easy solution, by understanding the risks and taking steps to mitigate them, we can begin to build a better digital future that prioritizes privacy and security over profit and convenience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enuh we're here to destroy surveillance capitalism we've had it with advertisers and advertising and all your profiles there's a lot to unpack here and that might seem ambitious but when you're taking on a titan like targeted advertising and you know the industry that we find ourselves in uh the best time to attack is when they are wounded and boy the targeted advertising world is showing some wounds recently gdpr the california consumer law leaks like the equifax leaks this is finally top of mind for a lot of the regular people but let's talk about it because we we think there's enough of us that we can actually affect a positive change for the future well i do i don't but we'll talk more about that and the other big thing the other uh achilles heel perhaps that is showing is that there might be some fraud going down there might be a lot of fraud in the advertising world the uber article about a hundred million dollars of click fraud that's just the tip of the iceberg we've worked on big data systems some agencies get it someday it's you know some agencies definitely do not get it it's like you know your data your advertising profile is like crack cocaine they don't know they have a problem they can't put it down and it is probably killing their business model so we're going to talk about just in case you guys don't know the scope of it we're going to talk about what the advertising profile is how it affects you how it's built why it is a time bomb essentially and what can we do about it so in order to understand this you got to look at what is your advertising profile now a lot of our audience has some idea of what the advertising profile is but i'm willing to bet there's gaps and holes in exactly what that is advertising got to start it was edward bernays it was like let's manufacture uh what was it desire manufacturer consent that's chomsky well yeah well the news was famous for propaganda in those days it wasn't a bad word and uh you know it he was what sigmund freud's nephew and uh some relations you know he founded like the it's a whole other video to talk about advertising and how that goes but women's smoking yeah bacon and eggs uh i had another really big one it was like we the pork industry's like we're not selling these pork bellies what can we do and he's like let's make bacon a thing and you know i don't know i like bacon but you know is that do i really like bacon or is it is it a glitch in the matrix i don't know the promise of the advertising profile was to bring that into the 21st century you know in the past if you wanted to reach the audience of a particular newspaper you advertised in that newspaper well the promise of an advertising profile that is built for you not by you and that you have no control over is that it will show you ads that are relevant to you things that you might possibly be interested in things that could possibly improve your life now at a very basic level it could be what websites you visit let's say that i want to advertise to you but man i can't afford the banner ad fees on the level one website ah but but i also know that you go to 4chan and 4chan is a lot cheaper than level one so because i've got your advertising profile and i know two websites that you visit i can advertise to you on a website that costs less you know the the service in the middle that's providing that service you know they drift a little bit on the top and and everything works well theoretically but the reality is a lot different from that the reality of the advertising profile and if you've ever gone to a website that had a gdpr warning or you know manage cookies or something like that you'll kind of see where it's like hey we want to make sure that we show you the ads that mean something to you and that's why we do this that is always a lie because the advertising profile is not about you at all in terms of the customer and a lot of people have said this before but you know with facebook for example you are not the customer you are the product your cattle and what we mean by that is the customer is the advertising industry and the product that they're buying is the views and the way that they're buying that the way that they're shopping online is through that advertising profile so they want to advertise to somebody who makes a quarter million dollars a year how do you do that uh do you put your ad in forbes magazine well that was the old way the new way is you go on facebook and you say hey i wanna know who makes a quarter million i don't wanna show them this ad now in order to get that data you gotta you know hoover up a bunch of data and you may be thinking oh it's just the website forms that i fill out i'm really good about clearing my cookies yeah google and facebook have noticed that that's why companies like that have been purchasing like your credit card purchase history they also purchase your voter history which is public information technically a lot of dmvs we've done news stories where dmvs are literally selling your information so all of a sudden they know what car you drive what your you know registration information is your physical address even if you're using a po box your purchase history from your your credit cards which will give you you know some idea of how fiscally responsible you are maybe even how much income you have because if you're buying five thousand dollars of crap and then paying that credit card off every month chances are you get a lot of disposable income all of that data any data they can get is you know hoovered up and put in your profile gmail looking at things like receipts and it's like oh let me just hopefully group these emails that look like receipts into this receipts thing you better believe machine learning is going through those purchases and getting a lot more out of that than it is for you that wasn't done for your convenience that was done to mine data one of our favorite examples is uh for twitter for example when we first started doing this we were looking at our twitter followers and twitter will let you drill down into who drinks milk who buys milk once a week so it also lets you drill down into who's lactating which is surprising the the number of things that the profile knows about you is near limitless but it's also never enough for them they will never stop invading your life to get these details because the more details they have the better their product is you also can't see your profile at all or make changes to it or corrections or just hide information that you don't want to be a part of your profile or get rid of it unlike your credit report i mean even your credit report you have some control over at least but you're online your online advertising profile you got nothing there is no dispute yes you just you're stuck with it there's also multiple competing companies some companies knowing that this is a little bit of a game of hot potato in the gdpr world are even now just selling you the tools to allow companies to collect data themselves that's a landmine because eventually that data is going to leak but we'll talk more about that this creates a situation we always knew that advertising was annoying it was kind of a necessary evil i mean all of our tv that we watched growing up that was ad driven it funds the internet a lot of stuff is ad driven this is ad driven in a lot of ways yeah but we're getting to the point where ads are no longer an annoyance i mean they're still an annoyance but they're actually a huge danger now because the amount of data that is known is a very i mean identity theft and stuff like that and the problem is we have seen time and time again they cannot secure it no it's it's super easy to take the advertising profile and do a convincing spearfish or to do a convincing thing to steal from you i mean we know that these types of data leaks have led to spies getting killed which is you know a big deal okay maybe that was a counterintelligence operation you know joe citizen doesn't have anything to worry about that no the recent ledger leak you know just ordinary people dealing in cryptocurrency getting emails and threats from criminals because in that leak was their full name and their address and all of the stuff that the government requires for people that are dealing with cryptocurrency which is maybe perhaps a bit short-sighted those people got really threatening emails like i know you trade this much in this much cryptocurrency i know where you live here's your exact address you can just pay me off and you'll never hear from me again or you know live in the threat that i could break into your house and make you turn over your cryptocurrency or anything like that there's a lot of really detailed information going into your advertising profile in your your mortgage your credit card transactions as we said this is exceptionally dangerous this is why these kinds of things must not be built in the first place this is why we see laws like the gdpr law in california but a lot of companies are you know desperate to hang on to this uh you know crack cocaine they're addicted to it and they just they can't put it down they think that it's doing something good for them and every time this thing leaks i mean you got to think about in the early days of your advertising profile they knew very little about you they might have known your age maybe your gender or whatever but it just kept growing and the problem is that leaks and when it leaks it's out there forever so all i have to do if i'm a facebook is like oh let's let's take a look at this leak let's use this leak to build our profile so it's kind of a snowball effect and you have to wonder how many rotations of the snowball before all privacy is just gone not only that but again you have no control over it i mean right now it thinks ryan is an octogenarian i get a lot of retirement related stuff in the in my you know physical mail somehow my profile has been set at a high age i don't know how uh oops yeah it totally doesn't make sense and then we see these new articles coming out about like oh uber stopped their online advertising you know they cut it by a hundred million dollars and they didn't see any change ebay cut all of their google advertising they didn't see any change in their revenue or site traffic or click throughs anything like that now i'll contend that the kind of advertising that we do at level one it's very different than what is being done through ad profiles and click you know click agencies and things like google ads but um yeah it's uh it it seems like it's all rotten rotten to the core and it's all just a grift it's like look at this big data we're able to correlate it to these sales there's some really big numbers here but but that is perhaps the silver lining because there is probably nothing that will stop this juggernaut unless it turns out that the advertisers are not getting what they're paying for and this could be the time to strike so if the big advertisers learn that this is fraudulent and we have some pretty good evidence that these this targeted advertising is not targeting who it should be then maybe we can do something else but the question is what do you replace it with now here's just a run-of-the-mill website let's look at the cookies it generated and session traffic all you got to do here is just right click inspect go to your network tab look at your cookie session oh my gosh look at this dozens and dozens of cookies it's like oh yes we control consent they make it easy to accept all but if you want to reject these cookies you got to click them one at a time nobody wants to do that so the alternative to this can only be an advertising profile that you control i mean look how long it took for your credit report to become a thing that wasn't you know a backroom deal you imagine like you know business owners like the mob in a room playing poker and they're all smoking cigars and it's just really terrible and that was where your credit report was basically well it's like that now with your advertising profile there's no reason that it has to be locked behind closed doors you should be able to see it you should be able to make corrections to it you should be able to hide parts of it that you don't want people to see if you don't want to show your political affiliation or your voting history or your income or anything like that turn it off but you should be able to control it you should also be able to add to it you're in the market for a lawn mower you know you're willing to accept advertisements about lawn mowers or you just bought a new house and it's like oh yeah i did i did just buy a new house advertising advertisements about that that would be really interesting and then after you've bought a lawnmower you can say no i'm not interested in seeing that anymore because have you ever bought anything on amazon and in the next three weeks every website you go to is an amazon ad for something that you already bought that's how dumb this stuff is if you wanted to be effective advertising you're going to need some kind of a mechanism like this otherwise it's just fraud it's just it's just grifting it's just stealing money from the advertisers you need some kind of functionality about this you've got to have you know control over maybe you know through your smartphone or you know maybe something for uh that's a centralized non-profit maybe it's maybe it's a group of companies i mean we kind of have a group of companies now for your credit report it's not a great system but it's better than what we have right now for your online advertising profile now you might be thinking uh this is not a new idea was it honey the browser plug-in honey yes it did not exactly but similar to what we're talking about and what happened to honey they got bought by paypal somebody bought it and turned it into an advertising profile so we we strongly believe this needs to be you know open for sure because we need to know how it works and we need to not have any horrible group in charge of it but beyond that even it's such a utopian dream the advertising world is not going to give up their model unless they have a gun to their head and the gun that's where we come in i think the guns look like legislation like gdpr yeah we can't really control that you can sort of affect it but not really you know yeah democracy and capitalism it also gives us an opportunity to forbid certain kinds of information from being on your profile things like your unionization stuff because we see amazon using their customer profile data in their anti-unionization efforts against their own employees blatantly illegal the other gun to their head will be that the current system doesn't work i think the best chance we have are these headlines about unilever turning it off and noticing no difference in sales and uber and ebay and a whole bunch of other companies see they see nothing they see that advertising is a waste of money and could a better model usurp that i think it could another thing that i think has to be a part of it is that the customer has to be rewarded for interacting with their profile in some way yeah and i think companies would go with that yeah if you get a motivated consumer that's worth something that's worth a discount or a freebie or something like that and that's where things like honey sort of excelled speaking of honey one way that we can control this technologically is with honey pot profiles we can create fake people that if something happens with them we know that an advertiser has used that data incorrectly kind of like honey pot phone numbers before the fcc was highly ineffective there were phone numbers that when you called if a robocaller called it or something like that it might result in a fine or an investigation because it's like hey no one is supposed to get you know automated calls at this number we supplied this number to such and such company and then we got a robocall we know who leaked it it's basically a sting operation this technology could also give consumers some power in terms of grouping them together and letting them create little subcultures which is kind of what influencer advertising is now yes but with a structure the good kind of influence or advertising not the bad kind well you'd get both kinds but hopefully this sort of open environment would filter the best to the top yeah and eliminate the bad yeah i mean some of the really early bernays advertising was basically hey we're going to pay you uh to smoke on cameras like you just won the olympics you know what would you say to uh smoking when you're being interviewed would you take ten thousand dollars to do that it was the suffragettes marching i was doing suffrage marches that's how bad it was yeah so uh that's a you know that's kind of a return to the roots of advertising but you know that's okay everybody's online is already jaded to advertising anyway nobody sees the ads because they're all in the same place and in this system you know what's coming up front yeah you know it's an ad you know it's going to be a part of your life yeah maybe you're not crazy about it but you get some control and i think that will make consumers a lot more accepting of them yeah now i think it can work i don't yeah well it could work but it's going to take an absolute catastrophe in the current advertising world and perhaps i'm on the cusp of that perhaps with the current global situation where we're getting just such a catastrophe yeah i don't i think the lessons have already been lost in in terms of like the advertising end of it because a lot of like when you read propaganda and you read some of the stuff that the bernays did it makes a lot of sense and when you look at what advertisers are doing today it doesn't make as much sense advertising essentially if you want to boil it down advertising uh creates a desire that you didn't know you had and in this system that's one of the big problems with this system that i see because uh i use the example of bagel bites when i was a kid bagel bites were on tv between like five times during every cartoon you remember that yeah i mean they were everywhere would you ever even realize that bagel bites existed if not for those commercials no but i am aware of bagel bites and i'm also aware that they're awful they are terrible they're god awful i think the advertising's the only thing that sold them but uh we're you know like companies that have brand new products or companies that want to try to sell you something that you don't want remains a problem that this doesn't solve or the infomercial styles like do you have this problem it's like oh yeah i totally do have this problem buy this product that only marginally improves your situation with that problem what about the uh the sam wow yeah it's totally lost here so there's definitely some blind spots that need to be filled in but again compare this utopian solution to the reality that's probably worth fighting for yeah and also some of the stuff that we said is definitely citation needed so there are references to everything that we said there's a lot of reading that you can do you know destroy surveillance capitalism i'm not the first person to say that but now is as good a time as any and especially if you're aware of it and i think a lot of our audience is at least on a subconscious level aware of this kind of thing but if we can if we can you know uh put a little flourish on it and point it out maybe we'll be more effective in uh dealing with it head on if you want to do a fun experiment on your own to find out how much data you have go to your google profile and download your own data and then take a look at that file because oh boy it's surprising another dark thing about the targeted advertising world is it's not just used inclusively to say that hey i want to advertise to this group of people it can also be used exclusively to say that i don't want to do business with for example hispanics and i'm not talking out of turn there that happened at facebook there were some real estate people who wanted to exclude by ethnicity now that's not legal but it was definitely going on it's not legal and yet there haven't been any real repercussions no not really kind of a slap on the wrist just how valuable is your advertising profile really well the fates of billion near trillion dollar companies hang in the balance look at the apple versus facebook feud so if you don't know about that uh you may have seen some full-page ads i think it was the new york times that facebook took out not cheap to do and what were they saying they were saying oh apple is evil because apple wants to give the consumer the option to opt out of the facebook tracking and facebook when they're talking to their investors which is when they're telling the truth has admitted that could be an existential danger to them because without all the iphones feeding back they lose an amazing amount of money but not only that the actual efficacy of this kind of advertising is highly in question a lot of facebook engineers there were some there was more leaked documents a lot of internal facebook engineers say you know our advertising stuff is really not that good at picking out individuals and part of the reason for that is a lot of facebook profiles have noisy data not from people trying to obfuscate their their traffic or anything like that it's from people that are not real people but that are part of ad bot and fraud networks so there's enough fake data there and facebook is not really incentivized to do anything about the fake profiles because the numbers look good to advertisers so it's kind of a catch-22 they can't do it they can't improve the efficacy of the advertising because there would be less of it now one counter argument that comes up a lot when you're looking at this is well we get the data but it's anonymized data there is no such thing as anonymized data every new column you add to that table focuses more and more on a combination that can only be one person yeah and once you the size of these tables it is impossible that this data is anonymized another thing to keep in mind about your advertising profile is that moving forward is not just going to be for advertising now if you're thinking about getting a home loan for example this could factor into that if you're thinking about doing a variety of things and one of the bigger the more terrifying ones is employment because ai is doing a lot of the hiring these days and they might have a data set to look at that includes a lot of your advertising profile and there might be some things in there that you don't want your employer to know or that are inaccurate like you know we can't hire him because he's an octogenarian exactly that's an insurance risk i don't think it really works like that but yeah no it totally does work like that it could now having said all that we do have sort of this high level idea for a better system and we would certainly be willing to try and build it and you know like get help from the community it would be a great thing i mean what a great thing to go down in history for right but the harsh reality is that no matter how good the replacement is and no matter how many people use it if people can track you they will and just look at robocalling robocalling is illegal right are you getting robocalls it would be the same thing so ultimately no matter what happens you have to be in charge i mean ultimately your advertising profile is not a significant amount of data it's super easy to copy it even just you know providing a screenshot of it people would do that there's not there's not really a lot that you can do to stop bad actors from acting badly it's like oh they got fined yeah robocallers get fined too so in the spirit of okay what are some alternatives beyond that obfuscation obfuscation techniques there's a lot that you can do electronically they're browser plugins that will let you sort of visit websites constantly 24 hours a day following a profile it'll generate believable seeming traffic now fraudsters have been using this to inflate their numbers for their commissions for click-throughs and things like that you can run a fake website with lots of fake traffic and it's very hard to tell that traffic apart from real traffic you have browser plugins that essentially do the same thing with real people that makes it really really hard for the advertising profile to be valuable in the first place so that's one you're protecting your own privacy but two you're devaluing the overall data set i mean this is sort of the subprime mortgage crisis of data databases it's like there's good profiles bundled with bad profiles and the whole thing's basically melting down obfuscation is one great way to really really accelerate that the problem is with things like financial transactions your bank and your credit card companies have gone out of their way to make sure that you can't really do much anonymously and the anonymity in things like cryptocurrencies is also going away yeah i think more and more we are moving into a world where there is no privacy unfortunately and this is a big reason why but there are little things that you can do and you should actually go through with those as annoying as they are for example netflix i've never given them my credit card because you can buy gift cards just go get a gift card yeah it's annoying but netflix doesn't know anything about me i don't think they know your real name do they i think i did put it in there where it's like who's watching i know my first name but there are a lot of little things that you can do and uh you know like we talked about the browser plug-in there's a lot of little technologies uh encrypt your dns if you're not encrypting your dns guess what your isp is building an amazing profile it's incredible what they know and unfortunately you don't get to look at it so things like that encrypt everything try to avoid just always be thinking about you know the eye of sauron and and what it's seeing because it's not going away yeah hopefully these tools will help you do that but hopefully we've given you something to think about because uh there's a lot you can do there's a lot of little things that you personally can do that will contribute to a better overall situation for all of usuh we're here to destroy surveillance capitalism we've had it with advertisers and advertising and all your profiles there's a lot to unpack here and that might seem ambitious but when you're taking on a titan like targeted advertising and you know the industry that we find ourselves in uh the best time to attack is when they are wounded and boy the targeted advertising world is showing some wounds recently gdpr the california consumer law leaks like the equifax leaks this is finally top of mind for a lot of the regular people but let's talk about it because we we think there's enough of us that we can actually affect a positive change for the future well i do i don't but we'll talk more about that and the other big thing the other uh achilles heel perhaps that is showing is that there might be some fraud going down there might be a lot of fraud in the advertising world the uber article about a hundred million dollars of click fraud that's just the tip of the iceberg we've worked on big data systems some agencies get it someday it's you know some agencies definitely do not get it it's like you know your data your advertising profile is like crack cocaine they don't know they have a problem they can't put it down and it is probably killing their business model so we're going to talk about just in case you guys don't know the scope of it we're going to talk about what the advertising profile is how it affects you how it's built why it is a time bomb essentially and what can we do about it so in order to understand this you got to look at what is your advertising profile now a lot of our audience has some idea of what the advertising profile is but i'm willing to bet there's gaps and holes in exactly what that is advertising got to start it was edward bernays it was like let's manufacture uh what was it desire manufacturer consent that's chomsky well yeah well the news was famous for propaganda in those days it wasn't a bad word and uh you know it he was what sigmund freud's nephew and uh some relations you know he founded like the it's a whole other video to talk about advertising and how that goes but women's smoking yeah bacon and eggs uh i had another really big one it was like we the pork industry's like we're not selling these pork bellies what can we do and he's like let's make bacon a thing and you know i don't know i like bacon but you know is that do i really like bacon or is it is it a glitch in the matrix i don't know the promise of the advertising profile was to bring that into the 21st century you know in the past if you wanted to reach the audience of a particular newspaper you advertised in that newspaper well the promise of an advertising profile that is built for you not by you and that you have no control over is that it will show you ads that are relevant to you things that you might possibly be interested in things that could possibly improve your life now at a very basic level it could be what websites you visit let's say that i want to advertise to you but man i can't afford the banner ad fees on the level one website ah but but i also know that you go to 4chan and 4chan is a lot cheaper than level one so because i've got your advertising profile and i know two websites that you visit i can advertise to you on a website that costs less you know the the service in the middle that's providing that service you know they drift a little bit on the top and and everything works well theoretically but the reality is a lot different from that the reality of the advertising profile and if you've ever gone to a website that had a gdpr warning or you know manage cookies or something like that you'll kind of see where it's like hey we want to make sure that we show you the ads that mean something to you and that's why we do this that is always a lie because the advertising profile is not about you at all in terms of the customer and a lot of people have said this before but you know with facebook for example you are not the customer you are the product your cattle and what we mean by that is the customer is the advertising industry and the product that they're buying is the views and the way that they're buying that the way that they're shopping online is through that advertising profile so they want to advertise to somebody who makes a quarter million dollars a year how do you do that uh do you put your ad in forbes magazine well that was the old way the new way is you go on facebook and you say hey i wanna know who makes a quarter million i don't wanna show them this ad now in order to get that data you gotta you know hoover up a bunch of data and you may be thinking oh it's just the website forms that i fill out i'm really good about clearing my cookies yeah google and facebook have noticed that that's why companies like that have been purchasing like your credit card purchase history they also purchase your voter history which is public information technically a lot of dmvs we've done news stories where dmvs are literally selling your information so all of a sudden they know what car you drive what your you know registration information is your physical address even if you're using a po box your purchase history from your your credit cards which will give you you know some idea of how fiscally responsible you are maybe even how much income you have because if you're buying five thousand dollars of crap and then paying that credit card off every month chances are you get a lot of disposable income all of that data any data they can get is you know hoovered up and put in your profile gmail looking at things like receipts and it's like oh let me just hopefully group these emails that look like receipts into this receipts thing you better believe machine learning is going through those purchases and getting a lot more out of that than it is for you that wasn't done for your convenience that was done to mine data one of our favorite examples is uh for twitter for example when we first started doing this we were looking at our twitter followers and twitter will let you drill down into who drinks milk who buys milk once a week so it also lets you drill down into who's lactating which is surprising the the number of things that the profile knows about you is near limitless but it's also never enough for them they will never stop invading your life to get these details because the more details they have the better their product is you also can't see your profile at all or make changes to it or corrections or just hide information that you don't want to be a part of your profile or get rid of it unlike your credit report i mean even your credit report you have some control over at least but you're online your online advertising profile you got nothing there is no dispute yes you just you're stuck with it there's also multiple competing companies some companies knowing that this is a little bit of a game of hot potato in the gdpr world are even now just selling you the tools to allow companies to collect data themselves that's a landmine because eventually that data is going to leak but we'll talk more about that this creates a situation we always knew that advertising was annoying it was kind of a necessary evil i mean all of our tv that we watched growing up that was ad driven it funds the internet a lot of stuff is ad driven this is ad driven in a lot of ways yeah but we're getting to the point where ads are no longer an annoyance i mean they're still an annoyance but they're actually a huge danger now because the amount of data that is known is a very i mean identity theft and stuff like that and the problem is we have seen time and time again they cannot secure it no it's it's super easy to take the advertising profile and do a convincing spearfish or to do a convincing thing to steal from you i mean we know that these types of data leaks have led to spies getting killed which is you know a big deal okay maybe that was a counterintelligence operation you know joe citizen doesn't have anything to worry about that no the recent ledger leak you know just ordinary people dealing in cryptocurrency getting emails and threats from criminals because in that leak was their full name and their address and all of the stuff that the government requires for people that are dealing with cryptocurrency which is maybe perhaps a bit short-sighted those people got really threatening emails like i know you trade this much in this much cryptocurrency i know where you live here's your exact address you can just pay me off and you'll never hear from me again or you know live in the threat that i could break into your house and make you turn over your cryptocurrency or anything like that there's a lot of really detailed information going into your advertising profile in your your mortgage your credit card transactions as we said this is exceptionally dangerous this is why these kinds of things must not be built in the first place this is why we see laws like the gdpr law in california but a lot of companies are you know desperate to hang on to this uh you know crack cocaine they're addicted to it and they just they can't put it down they think that it's doing something good for them and every time this thing leaks i mean you got to think about in the early days of your advertising profile they knew very little about you they might have known your age maybe your gender or whatever but it just kept growing and the problem is that leaks and when it leaks it's out there forever so all i have to do if i'm a facebook is like oh let's let's take a look at this leak let's use this leak to build our profile so it's kind of a snowball effect and you have to wonder how many rotations of the snowball before all privacy is just gone not only that but again you have no control over it i mean right now it thinks ryan is an octogenarian i get a lot of retirement related stuff in the in my you know physical mail somehow my profile has been set at a high age i don't know how uh oops yeah it totally doesn't make sense and then we see these new articles coming out about like oh uber stopped their online advertising you know they cut it by a hundred million dollars and they didn't see any change ebay cut all of their google advertising they didn't see any change in their revenue or site traffic or click throughs anything like that now i'll contend that the kind of advertising that we do at level one it's very different than what is being done through ad profiles and click you know click agencies and things like google ads but um yeah it's uh it it seems like it's all rotten rotten to the core and it's all just a grift it's like look at this big data we're able to correlate it to these sales there's some really big numbers here but but that is perhaps the silver lining because there is probably nothing that will stop this juggernaut unless it turns out that the advertisers are not getting what they're paying for and this could be the time to strike so if the big advertisers learn that this is fraudulent and we have some pretty good evidence that these this targeted advertising is not targeting who it should be then maybe we can do something else but the question is what do you replace it with now here's just a run-of-the-mill website let's look at the cookies it generated and session traffic all you got to do here is just right click inspect go to your network tab look at your cookie session oh my gosh look at this dozens and dozens of cookies it's like oh yes we control consent they make it easy to accept all but if you want to reject these cookies you got to click them one at a time nobody wants to do that so the alternative to this can only be an advertising profile that you control i mean look how long it took for your credit report to become a thing that wasn't you know a backroom deal you imagine like you know business owners like the mob in a room playing poker and they're all smoking cigars and it's just really terrible and that was where your credit report was basically well it's like that now with your advertising profile there's no reason that it has to be locked behind closed doors you should be able to see it you should be able to make corrections to it you should be able to hide parts of it that you don't want people to see if you don't want to show your political affiliation or your voting history or your income or anything like that turn it off but you should be able to control it you should also be able to add to it you're in the market for a lawn mower you know you're willing to accept advertisements about lawn mowers or you just bought a new house and it's like oh yeah i did i did just buy a new house advertising advertisements about that that would be really interesting and then after you've bought a lawnmower you can say no i'm not interested in seeing that anymore because have you ever bought anything on amazon and in the next three weeks every website you go to is an amazon ad for something that you already bought that's how dumb this stuff is if you wanted to be effective advertising you're going to need some kind of a mechanism like this otherwise it's just fraud it's just it's just grifting it's just stealing money from the advertisers you need some kind of functionality about this you've got to have you know control over maybe you know through your smartphone or you know maybe something for uh that's a centralized non-profit maybe it's maybe it's a group of companies i mean we kind of have a group of companies now for your credit report it's not a great system but it's better than what we have right now for your online advertising profile now you might be thinking uh this is not a new idea was it honey the browser plug-in honey yes it did not exactly but similar to what we're talking about and what happened to honey they got bought by paypal somebody bought it and turned it into an advertising profile so we we strongly believe this needs to be you know open for sure because we need to know how it works and we need to not have any horrible group in charge of it but beyond that even it's such a utopian dream the advertising world is not going to give up their model unless they have a gun to their head and the gun that's where we come in i think the guns look like legislation like gdpr yeah we can't really control that you can sort of affect it but not really you know yeah democracy and capitalism it also gives us an opportunity to forbid certain kinds of information from being on your profile things like your unionization stuff because we see amazon using their customer profile data in their anti-unionization efforts against their own employees blatantly illegal the other gun to their head will be that the current system doesn't work i think the best chance we have are these headlines about unilever turning it off and noticing no difference in sales and uber and ebay and a whole bunch of other companies see they see nothing they see that advertising is a waste of money and could a better model usurp that i think it could another thing that i think has to be a part of it is that the customer has to be rewarded for interacting with their profile in some way yeah and i think companies would go with that yeah if you get a motivated consumer that's worth something that's worth a discount or a freebie or something like that and that's where things like honey sort of excelled speaking of honey one way that we can control this technologically is with honey pot profiles we can create fake people that if something happens with them we know that an advertiser has used that data incorrectly kind of like honey pot phone numbers before the fcc was highly ineffective there were phone numbers that when you called if a robocaller called it or something like that it might result in a fine or an investigation because it's like hey no one is supposed to get you know automated calls at this number we supplied this number to such and such company and then we got a robocall we know who leaked it it's basically a sting operation this technology could also give consumers some power in terms of grouping them together and letting them create little subcultures which is kind of what influencer advertising is now yes but with a structure the good kind of influence or advertising not the bad kind well you'd get both kinds but hopefully this sort of open environment would filter the best to the top yeah and eliminate the bad yeah i mean some of the really early bernays advertising was basically hey we're going to pay you uh to smoke on cameras like you just won the olympics you know what would you say to uh smoking when you're being interviewed would you take ten thousand dollars to do that it was the suffragettes marching i was doing suffrage marches that's how bad it was yeah so uh that's a you know that's kind of a return to the roots of advertising but you know that's okay everybody's online is already jaded to advertising anyway nobody sees the ads because they're all in the same place and in this system you know what's coming up front yeah you know it's an ad you know it's going to be a part of your life yeah maybe you're not crazy about it but you get some control and i think that will make consumers a lot more accepting of them yeah now i think it can work i don't yeah well it could work but it's going to take an absolute catastrophe in the current advertising world and perhaps i'm on the cusp of that perhaps with the current global situation where we're getting just such a catastrophe yeah i don't i think the lessons have already been lost in in terms of like the advertising end of it because a lot of like when you read propaganda and you read some of the stuff that the bernays did it makes a lot of sense and when you look at what advertisers are doing today it doesn't make as much sense advertising essentially if you want to boil it down advertising uh creates a desire that you didn't know you had and in this system that's one of the big problems with this system that i see because uh i use the example of bagel bites when i was a kid bagel bites were on tv between like five times during every cartoon you remember that yeah i mean they were everywhere would you ever even realize that bagel bites existed if not for those commercials no but i am aware of bagel bites and i'm also aware that they're awful they are terrible they're god awful i think the advertising's the only thing that sold them but uh we're you know like companies that have brand new products or companies that want to try to sell you something that you don't want remains a problem that this doesn't solve or the infomercial styles like do you have this problem it's like oh yeah i totally do have this problem buy this product that only marginally improves your situation with that problem what about the uh the sam wow yeah it's totally lost here so there's definitely some blind spots that need to be filled in but again compare this utopian solution to the reality that's probably worth fighting for yeah and also some of the stuff that we said is definitely citation needed so there are references to everything that we said there's a lot of reading that you can do you know destroy surveillance capitalism i'm not the first person to say that but now is as good a time as any and especially if you're aware of it and i think a lot of our audience is at least on a subconscious level aware of this kind of thing but if we can if we can you know uh put a little flourish on it and point it out maybe we'll be more effective in uh dealing with it head on if you want to do a fun experiment on your own to find out how much data you have go to your google profile and download your own data and then take a look at that file because oh boy it's surprising another dark thing about the targeted advertising world is it's not just used inclusively to say that hey i want to advertise to this group of people it can also be used exclusively to say that i don't want to do business with for example hispanics and i'm not talking out of turn there that happened at facebook there were some real estate people who wanted to exclude by ethnicity now that's not legal but it was definitely going on it's not legal and yet there haven't been any real repercussions no not really kind of a slap on the wrist just how valuable is your advertising profile really well the fates of billion near trillion dollar companies hang in the balance look at the apple versus facebook feud so if you don't know about that uh you may have seen some full-page ads i think it was the new york times that facebook took out not cheap to do and what were they saying they were saying oh apple is evil because apple wants to give the consumer the option to opt out of the facebook tracking and facebook when they're talking to their investors which is when they're telling the truth has admitted that could be an existential danger to them because without all the iphones feeding back they lose an amazing amount of money but not only that the actual efficacy of this kind of advertising is highly in question a lot of facebook engineers there were some there was more leaked documents a lot of internal facebook engineers say you know our advertising stuff is really not that good at picking out individuals and part of the reason for that is a lot of facebook profiles have noisy data not from people trying to obfuscate their their traffic or anything like that it's from people that are not real people but that are part of ad bot and fraud networks so there's enough fake data there and facebook is not really incentivized to do anything about the fake profiles because the numbers look good to advertisers so it's kind of a catch-22 they can't do it they can't improve the efficacy of the advertising because there would be less of it now one counter argument that comes up a lot when you're looking at this is well we get the data but it's anonymized data there is no such thing as anonymized data every new column you add to that table focuses more and more on a combination that can only be one person yeah and once you the size of these tables it is impossible that this data is anonymized another thing to keep in mind about your advertising profile is that moving forward is not just going to be for advertising now if you're thinking about getting a home loan for example this could factor into that if you're thinking about doing a variety of things and one of the bigger the more terrifying ones is employment because ai is doing a lot of the hiring these days and they might have a data set to look at that includes a lot of your advertising profile and there might be some things in there that you don't want your employer to know or that are inaccurate like you know we can't hire him because he's an octogenarian exactly that's an insurance risk i don't think it really works like that but yeah no it totally does work like that it could now having said all that we do have sort of this high level idea for a better system and we would certainly be willing to try and build it and you know like get help from the community it would be a great thing i mean what a great thing to go down in history for right but the harsh reality is that no matter how good the replacement is and no matter how many people use it if people can track you they will and just look at robocalling robocalling is illegal right are you getting robocalls it would be the same thing so ultimately no matter what happens you have to be in charge i mean ultimately your advertising profile is not a significant amount of data it's super easy to copy it even just you know providing a screenshot of it people would do that there's not there's not really a lot that you can do to stop bad actors from acting badly it's like oh they got fined yeah robocallers get fined too so in the spirit of okay what are some alternatives beyond that obfuscation obfuscation techniques there's a lot that you can do electronically they're browser plugins that will let you sort of visit websites constantly 24 hours a day following a profile it'll generate believable seeming traffic now fraudsters have been using this to inflate their numbers for their commissions for click-throughs and things like that you can run a fake website with lots of fake traffic and it's very hard to tell that traffic apart from real traffic you have browser plugins that essentially do the same thing with real people that makes it really really hard for the advertising profile to be valuable in the first place so that's one you're protecting your own privacy but two you're devaluing the overall data set i mean this is sort of the subprime mortgage crisis of data databases it's like there's good profiles bundled with bad profiles and the whole thing's basically melting down obfuscation is one great way to really really accelerate that the problem is with things like financial transactions your bank and your credit card companies have gone out of their way to make sure that you can't really do much anonymously and the anonymity in things like cryptocurrencies is also going away yeah i think more and more we are moving into a world where there is no privacy unfortunately and this is a big reason why but there are little things that you can do and you should actually go through with those as annoying as they are for example netflix i've never given them my credit card because you can buy gift cards just go get a gift card yeah it's annoying but netflix doesn't know anything about me i don't think they know your real name do they i think i did put it in there where it's like who's watching i know my first name but there are a lot of little things that you can do and uh you know like we talked about the browser plug-in there's a lot of little technologies uh encrypt your dns if you're not encrypting your dns guess what your isp is building an amazing profile it's incredible what they know and unfortunately you don't get to look at it so things like that encrypt everything try to avoid just always be thinking about you know the eye of sauron and and what it's seeing because it's not going away yeah hopefully these tools will help you do that but hopefully we've given you something to think about because uh there's a lot you can do there's a lot of little things that you personally can do that will contribute to a better overall situation for all of us\n"