The language is indirect and the issue is overstated.
She gives no examples really of how such activities are menacing, just spooky language concerning it i.e. 'monitoring' /'actualisation'.
In fact it's surprising how little Google et. al. are able to do with 'all my data'. Google fails to show me relevant ads 99% of the time, and I miss all the cool stuff I want do find out about.
That said, this: " To this end, the company unilaterally declares that all public and private experience occurring within this experimental zone would be deemed “urban data” available for monitoring and actuation."
Is obviously problematic, and the issue in general, is real.
Most people are not hugely worried that Google has some magic power to control us due to data capture, at the same time, a lot of this does represent a material invasion of privacy.
Just because Google does not use their data to show better ads does not mean they don't know what to do with the data. Maybe more relevant ads would mean fewer ads and less revenue?
The data is there and can be used at any time, for any purpose.
"Maybe more relevant ads would mean fewer ads and less revenue?"
Definitely not :)
Empathetically ... it's the opposite.
I see there's a bit of misunderstanding here about Google's, or any other platform's ability and willingness to show relevant ads.
Google is absolutely trying to maximise relevance for ads. That's not to say they won't take your money anyhow, but the unconditionally want your ads - all of them if possible - to be effective.
The economics of marketing are such that when a spend is effective, it's followed by considerably more spend. It shouldn't surprise anyone that when companies find a positive ROI, that they're willing to invest much more heavily in this.
Google is a business which is powered by ads, and relevance is the most core and effective measures of value of their product by their customers.
Again, in 2019, with all of the data they have, it's still really hard to target in a consistently efficient manner for almost all product categories.
Have you ever wondered why at the bottom of ostensibly respected entities like CNN you see clickbait for so many ridiculous, innocuous products? It's because the value of click-bait style targeting still transcends our ability to do meaningful targeting.
To anyone who's never worked in Marketing or bought any ads, I'd suggest popping $20 into Facebook ads and just running a couple ads for anything. Just like 'Music' seems to be one of those subjects that goes hand in hand with 'Computer Science', my hunch is that the human behavioural issues surrounding ads are one of those subjects as well. It's really fun. It's one of those amazingly complicated and interesting pockets of curiosity.
So I spend a lot on ads, I'm a little bit familiar:
Most 'search' ads are 'relevant' to the search, but they're not necessarily relevant to me.
In particular, banner ads, which are very crudely targeted, tend to be of 'low relevance' in marketing lingo, but in real terms, extremely low relevance.
For example, I don't live in the US, and I see an astonishing number of ads for US-centric content, and for products that are not even available where I live.
Consider the ad in the article itself: it's for a special night at the 'ROM' (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto. But I don't live anywhere near Toronto!
Scrolling down I see an add for the IDS 'Interior Design Show' in Toronto. Not only do I have absolutely no interest in the subject, but I don't live in Toronto.
I don't know if those are Google ad displays or not, but the it's basically the same, ad nauseam: the ad market is an astonishingly inefficient marketplace.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for 'relevance' might be on Facebook - because they have such a massive base, and a real means to captured nuance behaviour. I run ads on that platform which score way above average in terms of relevance and performance, but I know for certain I'm not getting the kind of material relevance that I want.
Honestly it's a strange paradox to me: Google has everything at their fingertips and can't figure out who wants to buy a lawn mower and who has definitely no interest.
Because google doesn't sell lawnmowers. It sells advertising space. That space doesnt have to be actually effective so long as it sounds convincing enough to you.
Yes but they seldom know /which/ ads are successfully the source and barring coupon codes and immediate click theough direct purchases most customers will be repelled by constant irrelevant to them probing about where they saw the ads first.
Advertisers technically only need to sell to those with a sustainable revenue stream and/or a sustainable stream of new customers who cannot indefinitely sustain advertised.
The odds are low but it is entirely possible for a very successful advertiser to be successful on pure "superstition" wrongly attributing the sales to them. Ironically the reverse is also possible where a successful advertiser is wrongly believed to not be doing anything and their prior boosts mere coincidences.
The Pokemon "Press B to boost catch chance" urban legend was widely believed for instance until discredited by data mining and testing as people saw a pattern not truly there.
Yes, absolutely, there's a lot of grey around marketing campaigns, but a lot of them are direct as well. To the extent Google can provide direct value, they want to do that.
Google is not 'selling ad space' - they are trying to help you sell your product.
Hence the fact they punish low-quality ads.
The very nature of Google ads, and the reason they make so much money relates to the 'relevance' of search terms. It's not great, but it's better than nothing.
If Google could do more for direct conversions, they would because the value of their product would rise quite a lot.
It's also been shown empirically that 'nerds', 'geeks' tend to be ad-resistant (not just tech-nerds, the general psych profile regardless of domain).
It's not that ads are that irrelevant to nerds compared to most people (no stat outliers), it's apparently related to something in the brain that just responds less to ads. Whether that be conscious filtering, unconscious pattern recognition training which lets one discard irrelevant stimulus, .. take your pick.
I am a geek too but Instagram and Facebook ads have been on point much more.
The creepy thing to me is sometimes they are a little too good. I suspect anyone with FB Messenger installed is also letting Facebook crawl texts. They were showing me ads about crap I only texted my mom about. Its just a little too sketchy.
Oh that's not new and expected that they would read your data, like gmail scans your mails, cloud drives scan your non-encrypted files, etc.
While I'm at it, let's spread the good word.
I use Signal personally, it's really convenient enough that I can convince most people to use it and then they usually prefer it to other chat apps (you can customize colors, send docs securely, it's simple and easy, that's it!)
I actually don't even mention the privacy usually (most people don't care, it's noise to them); the simple fact that it does SMS too and is much nicer than stock apps for this makes it convenient: it's not a new app, it's a better SMS replacement that also does chat a-la messenger/whatsapp/etc.
But yes, it's also recommended by Snowden and most security experts if you care about your security and privacy. (just be careful with SMS, these remain unsecure as ever)
Facebook annoys me I have to say. And yes they are getting good at ads as I was recently trying to buy a used vehicle and kept searching the marketplace. Of course this starts Facebook's gears and I get more and more suggestions about cars people are selling more frequently. One picture really caught my attention, I forget why, so I clicked it only to realize a moment later it was a sponsored ad by Facebook.Oops
What annoys me about Facebook is now I have purchased a new car (and a phone a month back while we are talking about this) and I am constantly being bombarded with car financing ads and suggestions to phones I should buy. If only they could tell when to move on from an ad because I do not need multiple car/phones at this time.
Not my field, and I'll admit a confirmation bias (this idea fits my subjective view of nerds/geeks) so I remembered the idea and didn't fact proof it much back then. I can't find anything on a quick Google.
I'll give you the community-side rundown:
Most "experts", veterans and passionate people in a field are not easily swayed by classic marketing because they have a 10,000 feet view, they can usually tell you right away who ads are targeted at, what's the catch, what's their recommendation of a better product or method altogether...
Like security experts know well the limits of a "VPN company" selling "privacy and security and ease of mind".
Cue any field, any domain.
It also doesn't mean nerds and geeks don't buy (obviously, and they rather spend more than the average) but they have their own opinions and that of their community, and ads are really just a distant noise in the background. Think of that guy who laughs at memes on ads and then goes to reddit or their Discord/Slack/whatever to make a purchase decision.
So you have to use different kinds of approaches, usually much more substantial, to win over these people. You can't really fake it, it's more of a virtual negociation by ways of company image and community response in trust and $.
> In fact it's surprising how little Google et. al. are able to do with 'all my data'. Google fails to show me relevant ads 99% of the time, and I miss all the cool stuff I want do find out about.
Perhaps showing you relevant ads is not the primary purpose of collecting your data after all?
I never cease to be impressed by how effortlessly humanities academics are able to write hundreds of words while saying literally nothing at all. The entire essay could be replaced with "Google wants to measure things in Toronto." Would this be a bad thing? Quite possibly! But there needs to be an argument as to why, and Zuboff doesn't have one.
Broadly speaking, measuring things is good. The previous Canadian government tried to kill our long form census, and this was met with widespread public disapproval. How is the government supposed to draft evidence-based policy if they don't have any evidence? The current government brought it back, and we all spent an afternoon filling it out.
Obviously it's different when the body doing the measuring and optimizing is a private entity, and there are legitimate concerns about a misalignment of incentives. But instead of offering a single concrete example, the author leans on the tired CAPITALISM == BAD trope, content in the knowledge that there's enough unnuanced leftists out there that she can hit solid sales numbers without even trying.
I'm grateful for the article, because I was on the fence about reading her book. Toronto Life just saved me $35.
Everyone acts as if "evidence-based policy" is a good way to govern, but I actually don't think it is.
Laws should be decided based on principles, not evidence. There's a great Mitchell and Webb sketch to this effect: Kill the Poor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg
I mean, the evidence is meant to be used to back some principles. For example, I am proponent of evidence based policy and I am also an advocate of mental health help. There is a lot of pseudo science and easy feel good stuff but there is also a lot of really good behaviour therapy out there. One works, one is muck, and I think tax dollars should be used to fund the one that works because people deserve to not be depressed
I agree laws should be based on principles, but I do wonder where to draw the line. I've noticed that any system that is built up from axiomatic principles and reasoning usually ends up out of touch with reality as well. It's likely we need to have evidence feeding back into a principled-based system.
I think principles decide what you do about the evidence (and even what evidence needs to be collected) to accomplish your goals. The goals themselves derive from principles.
Evidence-based governance can give you gas chambers or head-start pre-K programs depending on what you're trying to accomplish.
> Laws should be decided based on principles, not evidence.
Agree 100%. It has become my recent understanding that "evidence-based policy" is a more sanitised, technocratic way of carrying out good old-fashioned eugenics policies.
The problem with principles is they don’t tell you much about consequences. We might all agree that we should help very poor people in region X, but what will actually help most? Micro loans, micro loans with coaching, unconditional lump sum cash at random, unconditional lump sum cash to targeted promising candidates, free schools, schools with small fees?
We can’t know how the different effects of these things compare from a principled argument. That’s where evidence is useful.
Broadly speaking, measuring things good, measuring people sometimes good, sometimes very bad.
There are two things I would very much like to avoid. One, weaponized behavioral models that allow bad actors to cheaply, anonymously and pervasively manipulate people, groups and societies.
Two, having my life, or my children's life, become an exhausting and soulless rat race of conformance to the behavioral models deployed by various gatekeepers in society.
She gives no examples really of how such activities are menacing, just spooky language concerning it i.e. 'monitoring' /'actualisation'.
In fact it's surprising how little Google et. al. are able to do with 'all my data'. Google fails to show me relevant ads 99% of the time, and I miss all the cool stuff I want do find out about.
That said, this: " To this end, the company unilaterally declares that all public and private experience occurring within this experimental zone would be deemed “urban data” available for monitoring and actuation."
Is obviously problematic, and the issue in general, is real.
Most people are not hugely worried that Google has some magic power to control us due to data capture, at the same time, a lot of this does represent a material invasion of privacy.