OT: Why Do Companies Need All That Personal Data They're Collecting?

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Reply to
Winfield Hill
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The article says that it lets advertisers target their ads more accurately.

The article is sceptical about how effective this is, but advertisers don't seem to be.

Google and Facebook get a great deal of money from advertisers, which the print media don't get any more.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Good point on online vs. printed media !

I don't find all this fancy and technical knowhow and AI to be all that effective on me. I have gotten Facebook ads that come up on for Digikey, a new FET driver from TI and usually just items that I have already bought or clicked but rarely is it something that I really want or need. Lots of stuff that I just don't care about. What gets me is the ads that will come up for something I just bought ! They don't know that evidently. They also don't have a good decision on people I know that would be a good choice for one of the many technical groups I am part of. Almost always get that wrong.

Their data and AI might be good for the normal Joe, I don't know ? But it seems to miss the mark for me about 95% of the time (a guesstimte of course).

Reply to
boB

the not-too-distant-future purpose (probably already happening to some degree) is to e.g. track your location to relay that information to insurance and credit companies, who can adjust your insurance rates and credit score in real time based on your activities.

Go to a bar on Friday night and stay there past 10 pm according to your Wal-Mart app that runs a background location tracker that you agreed to when you didn't opt out of sending information to the developers "to improve user experience"? it relay data to auto insurer about increased DUI risk and double that for sure if your car manufacturer's GPS data corroborates that you used your own vehicle. You agreed to your car's data connection relaying that stuff back too whenever it wants to when you signed your auto financing agreement by the way it's in the fine print on page 24.

Enter a high-end retailer or car dealership but the AI algorithm that analyzes your spending habits to very accurately determine your annual income and approximate total assets says these products are out of your budget? adjust credit score accordingly, simply being in those places is analyzed to be a credit default risk for your wealth-tier gradation.

No, it's not all for advertisers they can't really utilize all that information at all effectively to sell products, it's for health insurance/credit/mortgage/Barclay's Capital Group/Goldman Sachs etc. to construct better individualized risk-analysis metrics and update them in near real-time.

If you don't ever need a cell phone or a home or a car or loan or health care or to buy anything or ever be friends with or date or marry etc. anyone who does then you can get by with opting out

Reply to
bitrex

On 4 May 2019 19:39:01 -0700, Winfield Hill wrote as underneath :

Advertising is the only tip you can see of a really well hidden iceberg as to what the tech giants (Google, Facebook etc.) are really up to. If you have access this is a very worthwhile listen: about 40 mins right on the topic. C+

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Reply to
Charlie+

Well, Usenet is not generally thought of as social media, but clearly it is a form of it. There's a rich seem of data we share about ourselves here should anyone care to harvest it. One way you can largely avoid this is by adopting a nym to post under. Think about it.

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Reply to
Cursitor Doom

If you are silly enough to post here, the advertisers will probably decide that you don't have enough money to be worth advertising at.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

That presumes advertisers have even heard of usenet.

Milennials look blank when usenet is mentioned.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

They probably don't know what a BBS is (was) either.

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 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

If they work in the tech industry or software, and are in their 20s or

30s, they often know what it is but consider it a dusty dead protocol and historical footnote, like COBOL (for anything but legacy bank software) and Betamax video cassettes. Certainly never used it themselves.

As for millennial in the general population you will get blank stares but to be fair nobody in the general population of any age probably knows what Usenet is. how many random 60 year olds would you have to ask until you found one like a hundred or a thousand?

Reply to
bitrex

I'm Gen X and work/have worked with younger software and hardware engineers they generally do have a decent understanding of their industry's history but a bit fuzzy on details as they didn't experience it firsthand. Some late 20s and early 30s kids did use BBSes because they got started very early and messed with them a bit as pre-teens in the mid-90s.

At 40 I'm probably one of the last generation that used BBS and Usenet in their 90s heyday as a teenager, not for long though before they were eclipsed by the Internet and web forums respectively. There was one called Argus up in Waltham IIRC that was one of the larger boards in the New England area back in the day that was ok.

Most BBSes were kind of lousy and poorly run and a number of them were hangouts for child predators and other such low lifes.

Reply to
bitrex

Far too many of them participated in Eternal September :(

Bah, humbug.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Well, for one thing, marketing is now using customer-specific pricing. In o rder to do this they need to know a lot about you in order to make an educa ted estimate of how much you're willing to pay for a particular product. Th ere should be times when you can search a product online and all the pricin g is consistently high as living hell. That must be the time of day the big data analytics tells them you're drunk.

Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

As has been said before; you are not the customer, you are the product.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Depends entirely on who you are and what your bankroll is.

That is to say if you're not sure immediately if you're a customer or a product - you're a product. Customers play golf with the CEO.

Reply to
bitrex

Worse, in many cases you're both. You get to pay to have your privacy invaded.

Reply to
krw

I disagree. It turns out that people who purchase a particular set of steak knives are more credit-worthy than folks with 780+ FICO scores. Why bother with the credit bureaus at all? (And as a bonus, you get to sidestep all that pesky fair credit / truth in lending nonsense.)

Reply to
mpm

t

s

e more credit-worthy than folks with 780+ FICO scores. Why bother with th e credit bureaus at all? (And as a bonus, you get to sidestep all that pes ky fair credit / truth in lending nonsense.)

Correlation doesn't imply causation.

There's no guarantee that the next batch of people who buy that particular set of steak knives are going to be as uniquely credit-worthy as the last l ot. You can't step into the same market twice.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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