Your relationship with social media
- Thread starter Bullgrit
- Start date
Same thing happens in the Meta forum here on EN World. Someone will complain about the content of Google ads, not realising only they can see them and they've just announced to the world what they like to search for in private.
Ryujin
Legend
Yeah, I did the $200 lamp is now $40 fix for my old Sony LCD rear projection as well..
Oddly enough, I find the customized advertising less concerning. Perhaps as a tech guy, to me it's "well, what did you expect" and "duh, it's inherently obvious to associate identity and search patterns to customized preferences for ads." To me, that's what us programmers do. We interconnect and use data to get stuff done. If my job is to show you ads and provide a search engine, I'm gonna use the data to show you more relevant ads. Technically, that's better than me showing you ads for feminine hygiene products that you don't want to see or ever click on.
I hate ads in general. But that's because I don't like shopping. I don't like buying things. I guess the count has gone up, but for the last 10 years, I could count the number of online purchases I've made on my fingers. One of my co-workers used to tease me about that. It's not from paranoia, my credit card had been plugged into my wife's amazon account for ever. It's just I prefer to be less consumerist. My bank account also wishes me to be less consumerist.
There's a problem with that sort of search 'optimization' though. As a desktop/network tech I end up doing a lot of research on issues. In my non-work life I also do legal, political, and historical research. Google and Yahoo have become all but useless to me because they first show me sites they think might be able to sell me stuff related to my non purchase related research and then a series of links that are tied to what they think I'm looking for, based on previous searches, when I'm looking for something unlreated to any of my previous searches.
On you previous post stating "it doesn't work that way", that's because of us. We've allowed things to progress to the point where cell phones, texting, and email have made employers believe that we are available to them 24/7/365. I'm off work today and that means I'm off work today. My work cell is sitting in my desk drawer at work, I won't be checking my work email (unlike many of my co-workers I still maintain separate email accounts), and my voicemail is set to a vacation alert message (that many people will ignore to leave an immediate message).
Briefly and sketchily presented:
There are some cases floating around the USA that are addressing the issue of whether the way ISP providers handle the emails entrusted to them violates privacy rights, especially and most importantly, the various legal privilege rights: doctor-patient priest-penitent, lawyer-client, etc.
Because the ISP providers have designed their programs to peek into your emails to look for keywords in order to help target advertising. It is one way in which they keep your email service "free". They argue this is a good thing, and no humans ever see the data in question. Others argue this "peeking" violates privacy and privilege, and that their correspondence transmission service should be legally considered the same as the post office or phone companies' business models.
If the latter position- which I agree with- wins out in courts, it will mean an increase in prices because they can't "peek" into your data anymore. At the very least, anyone wanting to communicate privately and/or with privilege will have to use a communication service that is not free, as opposed to one with this offset due to targeted advertising.
I know it doesn't work 100% based on that, because I get ads for stuff I have ZERO clue about. I recently had a rash of ads in Spanish...a language I don't speak. Not THAT well, anyway. Even my emails don't mention that language much.
I tried to explain the email "peeking" thing to my mom years ago, but I gave up. So every once in a while, I get a rash of political advertising that largely reflects her biases...including, unfortunately, stuff from really vile sites that espouse ultra-right wing/racist stuff.
Not that she's racist or ultra right-wing- it's just that she sees these teasers for stories that fit her inarticulated inner narrative against certain politicians and she clicks on them and sends them to me. Which then leads me to spending time illustrating WHO those views are coming from and how there been debunked...or at least thoroghly criticized with facts.
It's pretty thankless, but I do it for my own sanity, mainly.
Ah. I could see, at the least, that any carrier who wanted to peek would have to pretty visibly enable some form of encryption (PGP, or the like) so the end user can make it so they cannot peek.
Or, more simply, folks start having to pay google a few bucks for gmail...
Bullgrit
Adventurer
It's kind of funny how we (online humanity) makes this embarrassing when it really shouldn't be.Morrus said:
I know I have searched/researched some very odd things that would be very embarrassing if taken out of context. For instance, I'm sure I've looked up gay or other "embarrassing"* information at one time or another. I have no doubt that a complete history of my open (not incognito mode
internet usage would reveal some very strange stuff. I know everyone -- including *gasp* my wife and my mother -- have gone to some weird web sites either out of curiosity or for serious research or completely by accident. But I also know that everyone would chuckle at finding out that I or anyone else had visited embarrassing pages.And there are plenty of non-embarrassing pages that an ad algorithm can match with an embarrassing ad to display. I once was getting dating site ads for a week because I had read a single blog post by a woman whose main blog topic was dating. The post I read was about a hotel near Disney World, and nothing on that page had anything to do with dating. But the ads picked up info from the overall blog code and so assumed I was interested in online dating.
Bullgrit
* Gay is not embarrassing on the face of it**, but you know what I mean.
** Phrasing!
We struggle with the privacy issue. The next generation has a different expectation of and view of privacy. The generation after that probably won't have any expectation of it at all.
Along with that, of course, will be vastly less embarrassment or shame at activities when everyone can see everyone does it. Same old, same old.
We find that idea horrific. Our grandparents probably found some of our ideas horrific.
Peoples' views on these things change, and that's OK. The 40-something crowd always has been and always will be alienated by many things the kids take for granted.
Along with that, of course, will be vastly less embarrassment or shame at activities when everyone can see everyone does it. Same old, same old.
We find that idea horrific. Our grandparents probably found some of our ideas horrific.
Peoples' views on these things change, and that's OK. The 40-something crowd always has been and always will be alienated by many things the kids take for granted.
This issue hits me from the opposite side in my line of work. I deal with a lot of clients who tend to form networks of providers. Many of those providers are small practices using yahoo or some other free email service and have no IT staff to speak of.
HIPAA requires online communication to be encrypted in transit. SSL for web sites is trivial. Email is the ugly duckling. If you don't set up TLS on your email server and confirm TLS is setup on the destination, then HIPAA say you can't email those medical records because the data is not encrypted in transit. Yahoo and Google are adding TLS, but prior to last year for sure, none of these populat free email sites had TLS and thus everybody using them for medical work was violating HIPAA.
Furthermore, HIPAA requires Business Associate Agreements with the entities you transfer data with. To get a BAA means reviewing the other guy's security and signing paper that you accept their good or crappy level of security. In the instances where a BAA is not literally required, the same level of dilligence is expected, even without a formal BAA. Thus, when you put your medical records onto gmail, you put Google at risk of violating HIPAA because they didn't specifically know you were using them for that (and thus setup controls to better protect that data).
So from my vantage point, court cases aside, these users had no business using Gmail or Yahoo because they were invoking an unwitting 3rd party into handling Protected Health Information (PHI). Thus, it was never an issue about the snooping by google's bots, because it was inappropriate to run your medical business through an email system you didn't control or have contracts with.
I have researched homosexuality, poisons, bombs, melee weapons, hate groups, alcohol, political candidates, religious fringe groups, mainstream religions, countries, conspiracy theories, rare flora & fauna, bible passages, Sci-Fi/fantasy/horror fiction, guitars amps, pedals, laws of many jurisdictions, music of all genres...and so much more.
Anyone trying to take my search history and making a coherent picture of me for investigative or advertising purposes is in for a real struggle.
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