If that's all you got from it then I should really do my best to write better. One of the key parts - to me - is that the data silos start trading your data as if it is theirs to whoever pays for it, and that goes a lot further than a real time bidding on ad space, even if that was the initial drive to collect that data.
The sad part is: It doesn't even matter what I do about privacy. I'm obviously in someone's address book. That someone wants to play some stupid game that asks for all contacts. Maybe that someone used an app like Cobook, which pulls data from their social network sites (and I'm friends with them there).
In the end, they get my data, along with a picture and whatnot and I personally wasn't even involved. Heck, I could even use a dumb phone and my phone number would be all over the place.
Recently, Facebook asked me once again to add a phone number "to protect my account". One time, my real phone number was prefilled in the box! They pretend that they don't have it, but since some of my friends use messenger, they surely have it somewhere in my shadow profile (a download of "all my data" obviously didn't contain it).
This concept of "your data as if it is theirs" is strange to me. Deciding who owns what information is difficult and not so obvious. I once heard a man on the radio saying that he "owned his face" meaning his likeness. Celebrities own their likenesses in that they can block people from using their likenesses to imply endorsement, but they can't block photographers from publishing a photo taken in a public area.
Ownership is much more nuanced than you're making it seem. It depends on where and how the data was collected and further, how the data is used.
Take car ownership. The department of motor vehicles tracks who owns what car, including non-dealership title transfers. That information gets sold to companies like Experian. Anyone can buy it (https://www.autocount.com/). So a company like Yelp, who knows where you live (you do like restaurant reviews from "current location", right?) can cross-reference that with AutoCount data to figure out what car you own. Is that weird? Sure. Is that wrong? Maybe. But it's been going on from before the internet, so I don't understand what's so different now.
It is their data. What they sell is essentially their http access logs, the ip address and time of every page request. While that information may pertain to you, it's not yours. They own it and can do what they want with it, including selling it to the highest bidder. That's true for any website that keeps access logs.
If the idea that some websites sell their access logs really disturbs you, don't request pages from websites that do that. Just like someone who is afraid of heights can't go to high places, people averse to ad tracking won't be able to go to most websites. Most people don't want to give up their favorite websites, so ad tracking persists.
Many companies that produce or aggregate content do so with the expectation that their efforts will be rewarded with money from ads. When you use an ad blocker, you reap the benefits of their work while knowingly depriving them of what they expected to earn in return. It would be better if you just didn't read their content, effectively voting against their behavior with your feet. Blocking the ads is having your cake and eating theirs too. It's rather benign, there are much worse things, but it isn't really right either.
No company sells their http access logs, please don't talk nonsense. The data that is sold is sold to marketeers and is the highest grade profile data that you could get. See the 'schober' link on the page and try to at least be a little bit informed before you start throwing around such opinionated stuff. Schober is an easy target for me because they actually list what they sell, they are also a very old company (they were in business long before the web was born). But they are not the only ones. If you feel like reading a bit on what kind of information is being made available a good place to start would be the RTB spec:
What do you think RTB is? There are websites that will sell demographic information from user profiles, but that's relatively rare. The overwhelming majority of the billions of RTB impressions are based only on location and website audience demographics. Those are things you get from cookies and ip addresses, information that comes entirely from access logs. No, companies don't sell their logs directly, but the vast majority of targeted impressions are sold solely on what is contained in a standard server log.
You seem to be knowledgeable about online advertising and forthcoming with sources. Do you have any evidence that anything near 50% of online ad data sold is based on the highest grade profile data? Because I'm certain that is not the case. I think you're confusing the business of selling profile data on individuals, which is indeed very old, with modern ad targeting. It's hard to persistently match that up with an ip address and cookie, you see. Which is why major ad buyers prefer to buy cookies that tag large demographic buckets like "young males in the midwest with an interest in cars" instead of the names and profiles of individual people. It's common sense more cost efficient, and access log data is much more prevalent and reliable than profile data.
I don't think that any of this works in the way that you think it does. Yes, re-targeting is creepy, cookies are rampant and the average page loads way too many external files. But companies do all of these things for a reason, whether you understand the details or not. If you don't like how they do business, you can just stop going to their websites.
> You seem to be knowledgeable about online advertising and forthcoming with sources.
You'd think?
Only a small fraction of the actual bids will ever be on 'high grade data', but what you are missing is that all of the data is available all of the time.
So no, I'm not confusing anything. The advertising industry will use the data available to determine the value of an impression, if the value isn't there they will pass. But they still use the data in that decision, so whether it gets sold or not is not the key element.
> If you don't like how they do business, you can just stop going to their websites.
No, you can't. See there are these little things called widgets that pop up on websites that have absolutely nothing to do with the attempt to sell you something later and since you have absolutely no idea where you will be hit next you can only 'stop going to their websites' after you've been bitten.
There is a giant difference between a site-specific tracker that helps a site owner understand her own visitors and ad networks that share cookie data. analytics != ads.
But: (1) the number of parties that only use site specific trackers is relatively small to the number of parties that use networks, (2) even those parties usually carry facebook/google and other embedded resources, effectively still leaking your data and (3) in the end, you can't be sure that they don't combine that data on the backside with data procured elsewhere.
I'm not sure whether we're talking about the same thing, but plenty of the web is people running sites tracking analytics on sites that have nothing to do with ads. Of those, Google Analytics would be the most common, and yes, Google is in the ads business.
But there are numerous services that provide analytics and have no part in tracking you elsewhere. Is Mailchimp involved in cookie trading? Segment? Intercom? Mixpanel? To my knowledge, no, there is nothing there -- they only know you via session cookies in the browser, and those businesses do not make data available to third-party ad networks.
Even in cases where they do bring in data, such as Intercom using FullContact to merge an email address with social data from Twitter, it's a one-way API call from Intercom, with nothing identifying the actual sites that will make use of it.
I 100% agree with you on trackers/beacons like "Scorecard Research", and to a lesser extent, Google Analytics, but "you can't be sure" seems like weak ground on which to take a strong categorical stance against any use of analytics tracking. There are real differences to the value they provide and the ability they have to do beyond that even if the incentives are there.
Well, the 'you can't be sure' in practice translates into 'everybody does it' but I'd rather leave enough room for those that do not engage in these practices. Absolutes simply don't cut it.
And the 'value they provide' is never provided to the users, always to their clients at the expense of those users.
Maybe an allegory about how, based on the tracking data, the price you pay for something (say airline tickets) changes. Or the availability of health insurance for your kids? I don't have any facts on which to base the latter, however, but I suspect it's either happening or only a matter of time.
Health insurance is regulated way beyond what you would expect. At least for the individual market, many plans are standardized across all carriers as mandated by the ACA. And in New York (if not elsewhere), rates are proposed in advance to the state and either approved or rejected (and forced to adjust), which can happen for being too high or too low compared to other players. The rates are then set for the year. This is not something subject to real-time bidding.
