Tag: Advertising

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Location Data Used to Drive Anti-Abortion Campaigns

It can be remarkably easy to target communications to individuals’ based on their personal location. Location information is often surreptitiously obtained by way of smartphone apps that sell off or otherwise provide this data to data brokers, or through agreements with telecommunications vendors that enable targeting based on mobile devices’ geolocation. 

Senator Wyden’s efforts to investigate this brokerage economy recently revealed how this sensitive geolocation information was used to enable and drive anti-abortion activism in the United States:

Wyden’s letter asks the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Near Intelligence, a location data provider that gathered and sold the information. The company claims to have information on 1.6 billion people across 44 countries, according to its website.

The company’s data can be used to target ads to people who have been to specific locations — including reproductive health clinic locations, according to Recrue Media co-founder Steven Bogue, who told Wyden’s staff his firm used the company’s data for a national anti-abortion ad blitz between 2019 and 2022.

…

In a February 2023 filing, the company said it ensures that the data it obtains was collected with the users’ permission, but Near’s former chief privacy officer Jay Angelo told Wyden’s staff that the company collected and sold data about people without consent, according to the letter.

While the company stopped selling location data belonging to Europeans, it continued for Americans because of a lack of federal privacy regulations.

While the company in question, Near Intelligence, declared bankruptcy in December 2023 there is a real potential for the data they collected to be sold to other parties as part of bankruptcy proceedings. There is a clear and present need to legislate how geolocation information is collected, used, as well as disclosed to address this often surreptitious aspect of the data brokerage economy.

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Photography

The State of Instagram

(Rise Up! by Christopher Parsons)

I owe a lot to Instagram. Starting in January 1, 2017 until October 2017 I began a project of uploading a photo a day (or thereabouts) and, in the process, I learned an awful lot about how to use my cameras, shots that I tend to prefer taking, and the cool stuff you could do by looking at other photographers’ shots.

It was pretty great.

But for reasons I’ve previously written about I’ve drifted away from regular postings to Instagram or even taking photographs with the regularity of the last year. Specifically, I wrote:

… something is changing in how I approach photography itself, at least right now: I don’t want as many amber memories, and instead want to enjoy the development and unfolding of certain memories, and feel more comfortable in the knowledge that the ‘final’ memories I’ll have will be even more subjective than those associated with photographs. Some will even vanish in their entirety.

In fact, from November 2017 – April 2018 I didn’t post a single photo to Instagram and only logged in once or twice.1 But my not uploading photos has been nagging me because I know that part of why I was taking shots — and getting good ones! — was because I had been actively trying to upload stuff on a regular basis. Instagram was a method for pushing me to practice my own skills and, occasionally, receiving feedback on the shots I was getting.

So I dipped my toe back in, with a fresh upload, and then started to browse my feed. As usual, there were great photographs from the photographers that I follow.2 But there were also a lot of ads. I mean, every 5-7 images was another ad. That really, really, really sucked because it made the platform a lot less enjoyable to browse and look at; it was less a network of people, and more an ad network that was interspersed with real people’s photographs.

So what I’m going to do is upload a photo a week, or so, to Instagram because I’d like to keep my profile alive. But I’m not going to invest the time in the platform that I did in the past. And, instead, I’m going to reflect on where I want to put my content, why I want it there, and with what regularity I want to upload photos to the public Internet. That’s part of an activity I’ve been undertaking over the past year but I’d honestly thought that Instagram might remain a fun place to interact with people. Sadly, it looks like that might not be the case after all.

  1. I was, however, taking photos during that period though not with daily-regularity. ↩
  2. I don’t tend to follow people, including friends and family, unless they take shots I find aesthetically pleasing. So there aren’t a lot of family photos, breakfast shots, or other site such material that make their way onto my feed very often. ↩
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Links

How to Debug Your Content Blocker for Privacy Protection

Via the EFF:

Millions of users are trying to protect their privacy from commercial tracking online, be it through their choice of browser, installation of ad and tracker blocking extensions, or use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This guide focuses on how to correctly configure the blocking extension in your browser to ensure that it’s giving you the privacy you expect. We believe that tools work best when you don’t have to go under the hood. While there is software which meets that criteria (and several are listed in the final section of the guide), the most popular ad blockers do not protect privacy by default and must be reconfigured. We’ll show you how.

Definitely a helpful guide to help you get the most out of your Ad/Tracker Blocker.

As a note: you don’t just want to block ads and trackers for privacy reasons (linked to being surveilled as you travel around the Internet) but also for security reasons: online ads are a vector for dropping malicious payloads and even the biggest networks are periodically affected.

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Aside Links

Exploited for Advertising

As part of a long-feature for The Guardian:

The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.

Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.

Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.

The problems facing many Internet users today are predicated on how companies’ services are paid: by companies doing everything they can to capture and hold your attention regardless of your own interests. If there were alternate models of financing social media companies, such as paying small monthly or yearly fees, imagine how different online communications would be: communities would likely be smaller, yes, but the developers would be motivated to do whatever they could to support the communities instead of advertisers targeting those communities. Silicon Valley has absorbed many of the best minds for the past decade and a half in order to make advertisements better. Imagine what would be different if all that excitement had been channeled towards less socially destructive outputs.

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Aside Links

The Dangers of Political ‘Marketing’

‘Politics’ by Samuel Thorne (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) at https://flic.kr/p/kAgBCR

From n+1:

Given that some of the major players involved in Trump’s campaign effort have obsessions with war tactics and strategy, it’s easy to imagine that weaponized targeting may not only be a pre-election phenomenon. Such efforts could be employed as part of an ongoing campaign to weaken any resistance to the Trump Administration and thwart political opposition through ratcheting up in-fighting and splintering. It’s not an overstatement to suggest that the infrastructure of mass consumer surveillance enables new kinds of actors to take up the work of COINTELPRO on a mass scale. Former Cambridge Analytica employees have said the company internally discusses their operations as psychological warfare.

Cambridge Analytica may not be alone in pursuing these types of psychological warfare tactics. In response to the recent revelations of Russian-bought Facebook ads, Senator Mark Warner told the Washington Post that the aim of the ads was “to sow chaos.” Yet, rather than promoting general chaos, some ads may have been specifically designed to fuel infighting among the Trump opposition. Earlier this year, The Intercept showed that TigerSwan, a shady mercenary firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners to combat communities opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, used knowledge gleaned from surveillance as part of their own strategy to splinter their opponents. A leaked TigerSwan document declared, “Exploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts between peaceful and violent elements is critical in our effort to delegitimize the anti-DAPL movement.”

What our current digital environment affords are opportunities for efficient, large-scale use of such tactics, which can be refined by data-rich feedback loops. Manipulation campaigns can plug into the commercial surveillance infrastructure and draw on lessons of behavioral science. They can use testing to refine strategies that take account of the personal traits of targets and identify interventions that may be most potent. This might mean identifying marginal participants, let’s say for joining a march or boycott, and zeroing in on interventions to dissuade them from taking action. Even more worrisomely, such targeting could try to push potential allies in different directions. Targets predicted to have more radical inklings could be pushed toward radical tactics and fed stories deriding compromise with liberal allies. Simultaneously, those predicted to have more liberal sympathies may be fed stories that hype fears about radical takeover of the resistance. Such campaigns would likely play off divisions along race, gender, issue-specific priorities, and other lines of identity and affinity.

We’re reaching the pinnacle of what online advertising can do: identify persons of interest, separate specific persons from others to discretely target them, and motivate targets to change their emotional states and act based on those states. It’s bad enough this is done to push products but, now, the same activities are seeping into the political systems and damaging democratic undertakings in the process. Such activity has to be regulated, if not stopped entirely.

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Links

Millions exposed to malvertising that hid attack code in banner pixels

From Ars Technica:

Despite targeting only people using IE and unpatched versions of Flash, Stegano is noteworthy for its concealment of exploit code in the pixels of the banner ads. There’s no reason future campaigns—or possibly ongoing ones that have yet to be discovered—couldn’t exploit zero-day vulnerabilities that infected a much larger base of people. Until ad networks get much better at detecting malvertising campaigns, the scourge is likely to continue.

The lesson, again, is that the advertising that is scattered throughout the web should be generally regarded as hostile and that ad blockers aren’t just a privacy tool but a security tool as well.

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Aside Links

Google’s latest IM client, Allo, isn’t ready for prime time

Ars Technica:

It’s no secret that Hangouts was poorly supported inside Google, so will Allo be any different? I’ve heard that Google Hangouts was never given resources because Google felt it would never be a money-maker. In instant messaging, you talk to your friends and send pictures back and forth, and an ad-powered Google service is never involved. With Allo, that changes because the Assistant is a gateway to search. Every question to the Assistant is a Google Search, with in-app answers coming for questions and links to generic Web searches for everything else. With search comes the possibility for ads, both from the generic search links and in the carousels that answers often provide. I’ve yet to see an advertisement inside Allo, but since it seems possible for Allo to make money, maybe it will receive more support than Hangouts did.

Setting aside the basic privacy issues of Google having access to unencrypted, plaintext, chats you have with friends and colleagues, the fact that Google is apparently unwilling to support its own products if they can’t be used to empower Google advertising is just gross. Google has impressively wasted the skills and talents of a generation of developers: imagine what might exist, today, if people were empowered to write software absent the need to data mine everything that is said for advertising purposes?

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Links

Bait and Switch: The Failure of Facebook Advertising — An OSINT Investigation

Facebook is preventing their users from blocking ads while, at the same time, promoting links that are (at best) linked to fraudulent websites and (at worst) ultimately serving up some kind of malware. But those of use who insist on blocking ads are somehow being ‘irresponsible’ in our activities?

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Links

Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything

Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything:

The implications of this go far beyond P&G: fewer Gillette razors also mean less TV advertising and no margin to be made for retailers, who themselves are big advertisers; this is why I argued last month that the entire TV edifice is not only threatened by services like Netflix, but also the disruption of its advertisers, of which P&G is chief.

The importance of looking at secondary consequences of product disruption – in this case with regards to men’s razors – is key to mapping out the still-developing Internet-inflected economy. If it’s razors today, what might it be tomorrow?

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Humour Videos

Jerry Seinfeld’s Clio Acceptance Speech

Probably the best award speech I’ve heard in years; how often is the advertising industry held captive by a speaker who proceeds to tell them they traffic in meaninglessness and lies?