adtech

Wizard Kit: How I Protect Myself from Surveillance

Augustine Fou — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 11:30:00 +0000

Ever since the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick initiative in 2010, I’ve been sensitized to the risks and potential harms that come from adtech’s tracking of consumers. Indeed, in the years since, it has gotten far far worse. People are only now discovering the bad stuff that has been going on. For example, iPhone apps have been secretly recording users' keystrokes (see ZDNet, Feb 8, 2019), and Android apps with more than 2 billion downloads were committing ad fraud on real humans’ devices behind their backs (see BuzzFeed News, Nov 2018). For many more examples of spying on consumers, documented over the years, see Know Who’s Spying on You at All Times.

The popular apps that many humans use continue to track then even if they are logged out, and they also track users who never created an account in the first place (see Facebook tracks both non-users and logged out users). And Google tracks users’ locations even if they turned off location and denied permissions to apps (see Google Tracks Location Even When Users Turn Service Off). Even good apps that never intended to track users may actually be doing so because the SDKs (software development kits) with which they were built may be tracking users and sending data off to others’ servers without their knowledge. Remember the story about the low cost bathroom scale that didn’t work if location was turned off on the smartphone and there was no internet connection? It turns out that the scale was sending data to bare IP addresses that could be traced back to China.

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Privacy, Mine: the Right of Individual Persons, Not of the Data

Augustine Fou — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 13:15:15 +0000

by Augustine Fou

“For true, lasting privacy, we must shift from the ‘privacy policies’ of companies, which spring from data protection laws, to the ‘privacy’ of individual persons, as contemplated by human rights laws.”

How do we accomplish this shift?

TL;DR (in summary)

Privacy pertains to the person; “privacy” is the state of being free from public attention and unwanted intrusion.
Data is not privacy, but data from or about a person can be private or not private depending on how it’s used, who is using it and who has control of it.
In the digital world, a person’s privacy policy is like the clothing that one puts on to signal what data they consider private and what is not private.
The companies (sites, apps and so on) that respect a person’s privacy will build relationships with that person over time.
The accumulation of trust over time incentivizes good behavior by both parties, to preserve value and not lose it instantly.

We live in the age of surveillance marketing, where consumers’ privacy is being violated without their knowledge, consent or recourse. Data from and about consumers is collected en masse by ad-tech companies and traded for profit. But few consumers knew about it until things blow up like the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. Most consumers think they are interacting with the sites they’re visiting or the apps (like Facebook) they’re using, but they aren't aware of the dozens of hidden ad-tech trackers that siphon their data off to other places or the aggressive data collection and cross-device tracking of apps. Not only are they not aware, they also definitely did not give consent to third parties to use, buy and sell their data. They wouldn’t even know who ABCTechCompany was anyway if it asked for consent.

Consent Is Not the Same as Permission, But Consumers Are Tricked Anyway

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A Line in the Sand

Doc Searls — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

There's a new side to choose. It helps that each of us is already on it.

Linux Journal was born in one fight and grew through a series of others.

Our first fight was for freedom. That began in 1993, when Phil Hughes started work toward a free software magazine. The fight for free software was still there when that magazine was born as Linux Journal in April 1994. Then a second fight began. That one was against all forms of closed and proprietary software, including the commercial UNIX variants that Linux would eventually defeat. We got in the fight for open source starting in 1998. (In 2005, I got a ribbon for my own small part in that battle.) And last year, we began our fight against what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger call re-engineering humanity.

This new fight is against actual and wannabe corporate and government overlords, all hell-bent on maintaining the caste system that reduces each of us to mere "consumers" and "data subjects" in a world Richard Brautigan described perfectly half a century ago in his poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace". You know, like The Matrix, only for real.

They'll fail, because no machine can fully understand human beings. Each of us is too different, too original, too wacky, too self-educating, too built for gaming every system meant to control us. (Discredit where due: we also suck in lots of ways. For example, Scott Adams is right that we're easy to hack with a good con.)

But why wait for nature to take its course when surveillance capitalists are busy setting civilization back decades or more—especially when we can obsolesce their whole business in the short term?

Here at Linux Journal, we're already doing our part by not participating in the surveillance business that digital advertising has mostly become, and by doing pioneering work in helping the online publishing business obey the wishes of its readers.

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What Is “Surveillance Capitalism?” And How Did It Hijack the Internet?

Augustine Fou — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 14:08:08 +0000

by Augustine Fou

Shoshana Zuboff's new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism goes into gory details of how companies collect, use, buy and sell your data for profit, often without consent or even the consumer knowing it was happening, until disasters reveal some of the dark underbelly—like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But, I’m a marketer, so I will focus on the subset of “surveillance marketing”—also known as “digital marketing”—where companies profit off of you, because they are set up to do so. Digital ad-tech companies were built to extract as much value as possible from the trust transaction that used to be the user going to a publisher’s site that carries an advertiser’s ad.

Surveillance Marketing Was Built on the Foundation of Three Myths

Digital marketing as we know it today can be traced all the way back to Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail, published in 2006. Before that, digital media was primarily purchased from large sites that had large human audiences. The Long Tail promulgated the idea that collectively a large number of small sites could rival the scale of a small number of large sites. This simple premise alone led digital marketing down a dark and dangerous path to the hell we now know is surveillance marketing. But most marketers don’t even know they are in this hell. They were looking for scale in digital—and they got it. They were looking for data in digital—and they got it. And, they were looking for more granular targeting in digital—and they got it. But how?

Herein lies the three myths: 1) the long tail, 2) behavioral targeting and 3) hypertargeting.

The Myth of the Long Tail

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Is Privacy a Right?

Doc Searls — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Good question.

That's what people say when they don't have an answer yet.

And such is the case with the question in the headline.

I started wondering about it following a tweeted response by Raouf Eldeeb (@raouf777) to Privacy is Personal:

It is also a fundamental right, not a privilege to be bestowed on anyone. The individual should have the right to determine the extent of his privacy.

While I agreed automatically with both of Raouf's points, I began to wonder about all kinds of rights, including privacy. That's because I was haunted by what Yuval Noah Harari says about rights in his book Sapiens—A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2011, 2104):

Sapiens rule the world, because we are the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers….We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money and no human rights—except in the common imagination of human beings….

That's in Chapter 2. In Chapter 6, he also challenges the concept of equality, which informs much of our thinking and lawmaking around rights:

Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? Are all humans equal to one another biologically? … Equally, there is no such thing as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings.

And yet, while Harari says rights are a collection of stories we tell ourselves, he also credits the role of belief in rights for holding civilization together and for advancing it. He points out, for example, that the story of rights America's founders told in the Declaration of Independence was a helluva lot more civilized than the Code of Hammurabi, which applied the death penalty to a huge roster of crimes (including lying), and codified women and slaves as forms of property. Harari also adds that the United States "would not have lasted 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights".

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Advertising 3.0

Doc Searls — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 13:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

First came branding through sponsorship. Then came eyeball-chasing through adtech. Now comes sponsorship again, this time supporting a mission as big as Linux.

This editorial is my first and only sales pitch. It's for brands to sponsor Linux Journal.

I'm also not just speaking as a magazine editor. I've studied advertising from inside and out for longer than most people have been alive.

During my inside years, I was a founder and creative director of one of Silicon Valley's top advertising agencies, with my name emblazoned on a building in Palo Alto.

In my outside years, I've been one of the biggest opponents of adtech: tracking-based advertising. And I've been just as big a proponent of advertising that builds and maintains brands while sponsoring the best journalism.

What we bring to the table are the smartest and most savvy tech readers in the world, plus a mission for advertising itself: to turn away from eyeball-chasing and back to what builds brands and sells products—but in ways that aren't bullshit. Tall order, but it can be done.

Our readers can help with that, because they have the world's best bullshit filters—and the world's best appreciation of what's real and works. They are also influential without being what marketers call "influencers". In fact, I'm sure most of them would hate being called "influencers," because they know "influencer marketing" actually means "using experts as tools".

Advertising that isn't bullshit starts with sponsorship. That means you advertise in a magazine because it's valuable to the world, has readers that are the same, and you know it will help those readers and the world know about the goods you bring to the market's table.

The biggest reason our readers are valuable is that the whole tech world runs on Linux now. They had something to do with that, and so did we.

Another fact: sponsors made Linux Journal a success no less than our writers and other employees did.

Now is also the right time for brands to walk away from the disaster that tracking-based advertising, aka adtech, has become. The General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR, is just one sign of it. Another is that a $trillion or more has been spent on tracking-based ads, and not one brand known to the world has been made by it. Many have been harmed.

We may be small as magazines go, but our ambitions are not. We wish to be nothing less than the best technology magazine on Planet Earth. If you sponsor us, you're on for that ride too.

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Let's Solve the Deeper Problem That Makes Facebook's Bad Acting Possible

Doc Searls — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 14:16:07 +0000

by Doc Searls

Finding that Facebook has "data sharing partnerships" with "at least sixty device makers" is as unsurprising as finding that there are a zillion ways to use wheat or corn. Facebook is in the data farming business.

Remember that the GDPR didn't happen in a vacuum. Bad acting with personal data in the adtech business (the one that aims advertising with personal data) is the norm, not the exception.

This is why the real fight here is not just for privacy. It's for human agency: the power to act with full effect in the world. The only way we get full agency is by operating as first parties at scale across all the entities we deal with online. THEY have to agree to OUR terms.

For that we need standard ways to signal what's okay and what's not okay, and to reach agreements on our terms, as first parties. It is as second parties that we click "accept" dozens of times every day, acquiring cookies with every one of those clicks, each recording certifications of acquiescence rather than of consent.

With full personal agency, the whole consent system goes the other way, at scale.

This is both long overdue and totally do-able, with work already started.

If you're interesting in doing it, let me know.

Bonus link: https://youownitdownloadit.com/, which I was briefed about this morning.

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A Brand Advertising Restoration Project

Doc Searls — Thu, 31 May 2018 14:36:14 +0000

by Doc Searls

The GDPR is breaking advertising apart.

Never mind the specifics of the regulation. Just look at the effects. Among those, two are obvious and everywhere: 1) opt-back-in emails and 2) "consent walls" in front of websites. Both of those misdirect attention away from how an entire branch of advertising ignored a simple moral principle that has long applied in the offline world: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong.

That branch of advertising is adtech. As I put it here a year ago:

Let's be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It's adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It's adtech that's full of fraud and a vector for malware. It's adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It's adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn't do any of those things, because it's not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

The GDPR won't make adtech go away, but it will separate the advertising wheat from the adtech chaff. Or at least try. (We won't know until after the GDPR takes effect, and we see how it is enforced. Meanwhile...)

The question then is whether advertisers and publishers can recover their lost taste for wheat. Lots of brands still like to advertise on the broadcast and print media that operate in the physical world. In fact, advertising there is still how most brands are made and sustained. In the online world, however, advertisers' appetite for data far outweighs their interest in branding there—with the exception of podcasting. Advertising on podcasts is growing rapidly. While there is data to be gained there, the main reason brands advertise on podcasts are old-fashioned sponsorship ones: brands supporting brands.

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Cookies That Go the Other Way

Doc Searls — Mon, 21 May 2018 14:39:31 +0000

by Doc Searls

[24 May 2019: A year after I wrote this post, Global Consent Manager an indirect descendant of the work described below, is in the world and doing the job. Check 'em out.]

The web—or at least the one we know today—got off on the wrong hoofs. Specifically, I mean with client-server, a distributed application structure that shouldn't subordinate one party to an other, but ended up doing exactly that, which is why the web today looks like this:

Clients come to servers for the milk of HTML, and get cookies as well.

The original cookie allowed the server to remember the client when it showed up again. Later the cookie would remember other stuff: for example, that the client was a known customer with a shopping cart.

Cookies also came to remember fancier things, such as that a client has agreed to the server's terms of use.

In the last decade, cookies also arrived from third parties, some for site analytics but mostly so clients could be spied on as they went about their business elsewhere on the web. The original purpose was so those clients could be given "relevant" and "interest-based" advertising. What matters is that it was still spying and a breach of personal privacy, no matter how well its perpetrators rationalize it. Simply put, websites and advertisers' interests end at a browser's front door. (Bonus link: The Castle Doctrine.)

Thanks to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into full force this Friday, that kind of spying is starting to look illegal. (Though loopholes will be found.) Since there is a world of fear about that, 99.x% of GDPR coverage is about how the new regulation affects the sites and services, and what they can do to avoid risking massive fines for doing what many (or most) of them shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

But the problem remains structural. As long as we're just "users" and "consumers," we're stuck as calves.

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How Wizards and Muggles Break Free from the Matrix

Doc Searls — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 15:32:29 +0000

by Doc Searls

First we invented a world where everyone could be free. Then we helped build feudal castles on it, where everyone now lives. Now it's time to blow up those castles by giving everybody much better ways to use their freedom than they ever would enjoy in a castle.

I'm going to mix movie metaphors here. You'll see why.

In April 1999, a few weeks after The Matrix came out, the entire Linux Journal staff watched it in a theater not far from our headquarters at the time, in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. While it was instantly clear to us that the movie was geek classic (hell, its hero was an ace programmer), it also was clear that the title subject—a fully convincing fake world occupied by nearly the whole human species—was an allegory (which Wikipedia calls "a metaphor whose vehicle may be a character, place or event, representing real-world issues and occurrences").

One obvious interpretation was religious. Neo was a Christ-like savior, resurrected by a character named Trinity, who played the Holy Spirit role after Neo got killed by the Satan-like Agent Smith—all while the few humans not enslaved by machines lived in an underground city called Zion.

When the second and third installments came out in the years that followed, more bits of the story seemed borrowed from other religions: Buddhism, Gnosticism and Hinduism. Since the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the films, have become the Wachowski sisters, you also can find, in retrospect, plenty of transgender takes on the series.

Then there's the philosophical stuff. Prisoners in the Matrix believe the world they inhabit is real, much as prisoners in Plato's Allegory of the Cave believe the shadows they see on a wall are real, because they can't tell the source of light is a fire behind them. In Plato's story, one prisoner is set free to visit the real world. In The Matrix, that one prisoner is Neo, his name an anagram for "The One" whose job is to rescue everybody or at least save Zion. (Spoiler: he does.)

But I didn't buy any of that, because already I saw marketing working to turn the free and open online world into a commercial habitat where—as in the fictional Matrix—human beings were reduced to batteries for giant robotic machines that harvested human attention, which they then processed and fed back to humans again.

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