A few months ago The Washington Post reported that Facebook collects ninety-eight data points on each of its nearly two billion users. Among this ninety-eight are ethnicity, income, net worth, home value, if you are a mom, if you are a soccer mom, if you are married, the number of lines of credit you have, if you are interested in Ramadan, when you bought your car, and on and on and on.
How and where does Facebook acquire these bits and pieces of one’s personal life and identity? First, from information users volunteer, like relationship status, age, and university affiliation. They also come from Facebook posts of vacation pictures and baby pictures and graduation pictures. These do not have to be photos one posts oneself: Facebook’s facial recognition software can pick you out of a crowd. Facebook also follows users across the Internet, disregarding their “do not track” settings as it stalks them. It knows every time a user visits a website that has a Facebook “like” button, for example, which most websites do.
The company also buys personal information from some of the five thousand data brokers worldwide, who collect information from store loyalty cards, warranties, pharmacy records, pay stubs, and some of the ten million public data sets available for harvest. Municipalities also sell data—voter registrations and motor vehicle information, for example, and death notices, foreclosure declarations, and business registrations, to name a few. In theory, all these data points are being collected by Facebook in order to tailor ads to sell us stuff we want, but in fact they are being sold by Facebook to advertisers for the simple reason that the company can make a lot of money doing so.
Not long ago I dug into the depths of Facebook to see what information it was using to tailor ads for me. This is a different set of preferences and a different algorithm—a set of instructions to carry out an operation—than the one Facebook uses to determine which stories it is going to display on my so-called news feed, the ever-changing assortment of photos and posts from my Facebook friends and from websites I’ve “liked.” These ad preferences are the coin of the Facebook realm; the company made $2.3 billion in the third quarter of 2016 alone, up from about $900 million in the same three months last year.
And here is some of what I discovered about myself according to Facebook:
That I am interested in the categories of “farm, money, the Republican Party, happiness, gummy candy, and flight attendants” based on what Facebook says I do on Facebook itself. Based on ads Facebook believes I’ve looked at somewhere—anywhere—in my Internet travels, I’m also interested in magnetic resonance imaging, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and thriller movies. Facebook also believes I have liked Facebook pages devoted to Tyrannosaurus rex, Puffy AmiYumi, cookie dough, and a wrestler named the Edge.
But I did not like any of those pages, as a quick scan of my “liked” pages would show. Until I did this research, I had never heard of the Edge or the Japanese duo Puffy AmiYumi, and as someone with celiac disease, I am constitutionally unable to like cookie dough. I did “like” the page of the Flint, Michigan, female boxing sensation Claressa Shields, whose nickname is “T-Rex.” And that is as close as Facebook got to matching my actual likes to the categories it says—to advertisers—that I’m keen on.
And this is odd, because if there is one incontrovertible thing that Facebook knows about me, it’s the Facebook pages that I have actively liked. But maybe I am more valuable to Facebook if I am presented as someone who likes Puffy AmiYumi, with its tens of thousands of fans, rather than a local band called Dugway, which has less than a thousand. But I will never know, since the composition of Facebook’s algorithms, like Google’s and other tech companies’, is a closely guarded secret. (...)
Advertisements show up on our Internet browser or Facebook page or Gmail and we tend to think they are there because some company is trying to sell us something it believes we want based on our browsing history or what we’ve said in an e-mail or what we were searching for on Google. We probably don’t think they are there because we live in a particular neighborhood, or hang out with certain kinds of people, or that we have been scored a particular and obscure way by a pointillist rendering of our lives. And most likely, we don’t imagine we are seeing those ads because an algorithm has determined that we are losers or easy marks or members of a particular ethnic or racial group.
As O’Neil points out, preferences and habits and zip codes and status updates are also used to create predatory ads, “ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises.” People with poor credit may be offered payday loans; people with dead-end jobs may be offered expensive courses at for-profit colleges. The idea, O’Neil writes, “is to locate the most vulnerable people and then use their private information against them. This involves finding where they suffer the most, which is known as the ‘pain point.’”
We have known for years that Internet commerce sites like Amazon and travel companies like Orbitz and Expedia price items according to who they say we are—where we live, our incomes, our previous purchases. And often, paradoxically, the rich pay less. Or in the case of Asian high school students signing up for Princeton Review college testing courses, or Orbitz patrons logging in on Mac computers, they pay more. Such dynamic pricing is getting more sophisticated and even more opaque. A British retailer, for example, is testing electronic price tags that display an item’s price based on who is looking at it, which it knows from the customer’s mobile phone, just as it knows that customer’s previous spending habits, also from the phone. Facebook may have ninety-eight data points on each user, but the data brokerage Acxiom has 1,500, and they are all for sale to be aggregated and diced and tossed into formulas beyond our reach.
We give our data away. We give it away in drips and drops, not thinking that data brokers will collect it and sell it, let alone that it will be used against us. There are now private, unregulated DNA databases culled, in part, from DNA samples people supply to genealogical websites in pursuit of their ancestry. These samples are available online to be compared with crime scene DNA without a warrant or court order. (Police are also amassing their own DNA databases by swabbing cheeks during routine stops.) In the estimation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this will make it more likely that people will be implicated in crimes they did not commit.
Or consider the data from fitness trackers, like Fitbit. As reported in The Intercept:
Meanwhile, every time you hail an Uber car or use Google Maps, to name two mobile applications, you are revealing your location and leaving a trail for others—certainly the police, possibly hackers and other criminals, and definitely commercial interests—to follow and exploit. Not long ago I was at a restaurant in New York when I got a message congratulating me for my choice of dining venues and informing me of the day’s specials. Though I hadn’t used Google Maps to get there, just by having location services activated on my phone I was fair game—a sitting duck.
Aside from the creepy factor, does it matter? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves and one another.
Chances are, if you query most people who use Facebook or Google products or ride in Uber cars or post selfies on Twitter if they mind that their personal information is being sold like the commodity it is, they will tell you that this is a small and largely inconsequential price to pay for the convenience of free turn-by-turn directions or e-mail or staying in touch with old friends. Chances are they will tell you that handing over bits and pieces of personal information is the cost of doing business, even when the real business is not what they are getting but what they are handing over.
If it is true, as Mark Zuckerberg has said, that privacy is no longer a social norm, at what point does it also cease to be a political norm? At what point does the primacy of the individual over the state, or civil liberties, or limited government also slip away? Because it would be naive to think that governments are not interested in our buying habits, or where we were at 4 PM yesterday, or who our friends are. Intelligence agencies and the police buy data from brokers, too. They do it to bypass laws that restrict their own ability to collect personal data; they do it because it is cheap; and they do it because commercial databases are multifaceted, powerful, and robust. (...)
It would be naive to think that there is a firewall between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. There is not.
How and where does Facebook acquire these bits and pieces of one’s personal life and identity? First, from information users volunteer, like relationship status, age, and university affiliation. They also come from Facebook posts of vacation pictures and baby pictures and graduation pictures. These do not have to be photos one posts oneself: Facebook’s facial recognition software can pick you out of a crowd. Facebook also follows users across the Internet, disregarding their “do not track” settings as it stalks them. It knows every time a user visits a website that has a Facebook “like” button, for example, which most websites do.
The company also buys personal information from some of the five thousand data brokers worldwide, who collect information from store loyalty cards, warranties, pharmacy records, pay stubs, and some of the ten million public data sets available for harvest. Municipalities also sell data—voter registrations and motor vehicle information, for example, and death notices, foreclosure declarations, and business registrations, to name a few. In theory, all these data points are being collected by Facebook in order to tailor ads to sell us stuff we want, but in fact they are being sold by Facebook to advertisers for the simple reason that the company can make a lot of money doing so.Not long ago I dug into the depths of Facebook to see what information it was using to tailor ads for me. This is a different set of preferences and a different algorithm—a set of instructions to carry out an operation—than the one Facebook uses to determine which stories it is going to display on my so-called news feed, the ever-changing assortment of photos and posts from my Facebook friends and from websites I’ve “liked.” These ad preferences are the coin of the Facebook realm; the company made $2.3 billion in the third quarter of 2016 alone, up from about $900 million in the same three months last year.
And here is some of what I discovered about myself according to Facebook:
That I am interested in the categories of “farm, money, the Republican Party, happiness, gummy candy, and flight attendants” based on what Facebook says I do on Facebook itself. Based on ads Facebook believes I’ve looked at somewhere—anywhere—in my Internet travels, I’m also interested in magnetic resonance imaging, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and thriller movies. Facebook also believes I have liked Facebook pages devoted to Tyrannosaurus rex, Puffy AmiYumi, cookie dough, and a wrestler named the Edge.
But I did not like any of those pages, as a quick scan of my “liked” pages would show. Until I did this research, I had never heard of the Edge or the Japanese duo Puffy AmiYumi, and as someone with celiac disease, I am constitutionally unable to like cookie dough. I did “like” the page of the Flint, Michigan, female boxing sensation Claressa Shields, whose nickname is “T-Rex.” And that is as close as Facebook got to matching my actual likes to the categories it says—to advertisers—that I’m keen on.
And this is odd, because if there is one incontrovertible thing that Facebook knows about me, it’s the Facebook pages that I have actively liked. But maybe I am more valuable to Facebook if I am presented as someone who likes Puffy AmiYumi, with its tens of thousands of fans, rather than a local band called Dugway, which has less than a thousand. But I will never know, since the composition of Facebook’s algorithms, like Google’s and other tech companies’, is a closely guarded secret. (...)
Advertisements show up on our Internet browser or Facebook page or Gmail and we tend to think they are there because some company is trying to sell us something it believes we want based on our browsing history or what we’ve said in an e-mail or what we were searching for on Google. We probably don’t think they are there because we live in a particular neighborhood, or hang out with certain kinds of people, or that we have been scored a particular and obscure way by a pointillist rendering of our lives. And most likely, we don’t imagine we are seeing those ads because an algorithm has determined that we are losers or easy marks or members of a particular ethnic or racial group.
As O’Neil points out, preferences and habits and zip codes and status updates are also used to create predatory ads, “ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises.” People with poor credit may be offered payday loans; people with dead-end jobs may be offered expensive courses at for-profit colleges. The idea, O’Neil writes, “is to locate the most vulnerable people and then use their private information against them. This involves finding where they suffer the most, which is known as the ‘pain point.’”
We have known for years that Internet commerce sites like Amazon and travel companies like Orbitz and Expedia price items according to who they say we are—where we live, our incomes, our previous purchases. And often, paradoxically, the rich pay less. Or in the case of Asian high school students signing up for Princeton Review college testing courses, or Orbitz patrons logging in on Mac computers, they pay more. Such dynamic pricing is getting more sophisticated and even more opaque. A British retailer, for example, is testing electronic price tags that display an item’s price based on who is looking at it, which it knows from the customer’s mobile phone, just as it knows that customer’s previous spending habits, also from the phone. Facebook may have ninety-eight data points on each user, but the data brokerage Acxiom has 1,500, and they are all for sale to be aggregated and diced and tossed into formulas beyond our reach.
We give our data away. We give it away in drips and drops, not thinking that data brokers will collect it and sell it, let alone that it will be used against us. There are now private, unregulated DNA databases culled, in part, from DNA samples people supply to genealogical websites in pursuit of their ancestry. These samples are available online to be compared with crime scene DNA without a warrant or court order. (Police are also amassing their own DNA databases by swabbing cheeks during routine stops.) In the estimation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this will make it more likely that people will be implicated in crimes they did not commit.
Or consider the data from fitness trackers, like Fitbit. As reported in The Intercept:
During a 2013 FTC panel on “Connected Health and Fitness,” University of Colorado law professor Scott Peppet said, “I can paint an incredibly detailed and rich picture of who you are based on your Fitbit data,” adding, “That data is so high quality that I can do things like price insurance premiums or I could probably evaluate your credit score incredibly accurately.”Consider, too, that if you take one of the random personality quizzes that consistently show up on Facebook—“What your handwriting says about you”—there’s a good chance it will be used by a company called Cambridge Analytica to gain access not only to your OCEAN score but to your Facebook profile, including your name. (According to The New York Times, Cambridge Analytica was advising the Trump campaign.)
Meanwhile, every time you hail an Uber car or use Google Maps, to name two mobile applications, you are revealing your location and leaving a trail for others—certainly the police, possibly hackers and other criminals, and definitely commercial interests—to follow and exploit. Not long ago I was at a restaurant in New York when I got a message congratulating me for my choice of dining venues and informing me of the day’s specials. Though I hadn’t used Google Maps to get there, just by having location services activated on my phone I was fair game—a sitting duck.
Aside from the creepy factor, does it matter? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves and one another.
Chances are, if you query most people who use Facebook or Google products or ride in Uber cars or post selfies on Twitter if they mind that their personal information is being sold like the commodity it is, they will tell you that this is a small and largely inconsequential price to pay for the convenience of free turn-by-turn directions or e-mail or staying in touch with old friends. Chances are they will tell you that handing over bits and pieces of personal information is the cost of doing business, even when the real business is not what they are getting but what they are handing over.
If it is true, as Mark Zuckerberg has said, that privacy is no longer a social norm, at what point does it also cease to be a political norm? At what point does the primacy of the individual over the state, or civil liberties, or limited government also slip away? Because it would be naive to think that governments are not interested in our buying habits, or where we were at 4 PM yesterday, or who our friends are. Intelligence agencies and the police buy data from brokers, too. They do it to bypass laws that restrict their own ability to collect personal data; they do it because it is cheap; and they do it because commercial databases are multifaceted, powerful, and robust. (...)
It would be naive to think that there is a firewall between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. There is not.
by Sue Halpern, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux
