
Oracle Data Marketplace - auslander
https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/data-cloud/dsmkt/oracle-data-marketplace.html#GUID-5F2FD071-6C43-4804-902A-7026AD180EAB
======
jsonne
It's also hilariously inaccurate. I'm a freelance media buyer of sorts, and it
think I works in either manufacturing or HR at a company of 500. The
hilariously awful levels of inaccuracies this contains is the reason why the
Facebook/Google advertising empires chug on. They have the data you need to
target ads correctly.

Check for yourself (This link also deletes your data from them if you're so
inclined.):
[https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry/](https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/registry/)

~~~
SAS721
Datalogix data (now part of Oracle Data Cloud) is what powers the creation of
Facebook advertising segments. So I don't think its that inaccurate.

~~~
mpeg
Datalogix is just one of several third parties that were allowed to push
matching data to Facebook for the creation of segments (partner categories),
as well as Experian, Epsilon, Acxiom, etc.

The way it works is not very different from custom audiences, but they are
syndicated to every FB marketing api user instead of private to your account
and there's a revshare with FB based on usage.

So the matching has to be based on one (or more) of the keys listed here:
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-
api/audiences...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-
api/audiences-api) plus a few extra ones like IDFA/IDFP, probably cookie
matching, etc.

It's not hard to create a massive audience on Facebook if you're matching on
public data like postcodes, but ultimately your understanding of that audience
is based on how accurate your data is. Whether you believe that data companies
have accurate data or not, it has nothing to do with their segment size on FB.

PS. the partner categories program has actually been discontinued as of April
2018, so these third parties will no longer be able to syndicate their data to
all FB ads users in the future.

~~~
cosmie
> PS. the partner categories program has actually been discontinued as of
> April 2018, so these third parties will no longer be able to syndicate their
> data to all FB ads users in the future.

One thing to point out is that it's true that the Partner program itself has
been discontinued, which gets rid of all the 3rd party targeting categories
within the self-service interface using Facebook-managed data integrations
with those firms.

 _But_ the ToS[1] rewrite effective 5/25/18 goes out of it's way to ensure
that they don't outright prohibit the use of third party data. They just
effectively decentralized the usage of it and require ad buyers and the data
brokers to have a direct relationship now, and leverage the custom audience
functionality you mentioned to do the targeting. And in so doing allowed
themselves to become willfully blind to the usage of 3rd party data plus
shifting liability onto the advertiser for usage of it.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos](https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos)

------
auslander
The Oracle Data Marketplace is the world's largest third-party data
marketplace and the standard for open and transparent audience data trading.
... data providers offer more than 30,000 data attributes to power your
branding ... actionable audience data on more than 300 million users.

That's over 80% of the entire US internet population at your fingertips. ... a
range of data ... some of which are exclusive and not available anywhere else.
... Eighty percent of the top 20 ad networks, portals, trading desks, and
creative optimizers leverage data from the Oracle Data Marketplace platform to
run high-performance ad campaigns.

Equifax? They were kids.

------
pdkl95
> Users who have demonstrated intent through ... searches

I know marketing always makes exaggerated claims, but to claim that a search
implies _intent_ is such blatant nonsense. At least later on they make claims
about "interest", which at least _could_ be true, for very broad definitions
of "interest".

(As auslander already said, aggregating personal data into huge databases like
this invites Equifax-like data theft.)

------
reilly3000
I've probably spent $50K on media over the past 9 years on media that was
targeted using BlueKai data, and worked on the publisher side where their
pixel fired billions of times. I remember the early days when its founder Omar
was running around the globe selling this data as "Stamps" because they were
charging so much for it reaching a single person cost as much as direct mail,
printed and delivered.

AFAIK, a web request is sent from a consumer's browser with some form of
identity, ie cookie ID, fingerprint etc. The hash of it gets sent to BlueKai
when there is a bid request, and it then queries for keys associated with that
hashed ID. The bidder (a service that makes purchase decisions on bid
requests) returns a value for that data, and if its the highest value among
all advertisers bidding on that slot the ad is shown.

The advertiser never sees any of the underlying data. They are able to see how
many bids they won against the pool of data. Say you wanted to sell some
organic sausages via banner ads- you would purchase impressions from a
publisher, ad network, or agency, and pay an extra $2 CPM (mind you most media
clears around $1) to BlueKai to show ads against an Organic Food Buyers
audience. That audience is most likely derived from grocery store club card
data which include things like recent purchases, brand preferences and more.
I'm amazed that more people don't care about that form of data collection...

How often do you have to buy organic products to be entered into the targeting
pool? 50% of your shopping cart, or 1 item ever? Literally nobody except for
BlueKai knows. There is no oversight, and as such the data is almost certainly
low quality.

I came to the conclusion after all of that spend against at least 100
different audiences that its almost universally more efficient to buy cheaper
banner ads in bulk. It was often the case that media targeted with 3rd party
data would perform twice as well as untargeted media, but for 5 times the
cost.

Still, I think the concept of audiences, not raw pii, has been a decent
compromise for the sake of privacy, and the net effect of all of it is that
some marketing budgets got blown on ads that could have been otherwise
targeted.

That is one hell of a security risk though to have all of that data sitting
out there.

I got so fed up with the inequity of digital marketing I've done my best to
move myself away from it. If I were building an advertising business today,
the consumer would be an equal partner in all data transactions, for two
reasons: 1. Fairness 2. Data quality.

~~~
auslander
> move myself away from it

I stop approaches from ad-tech companies myself.

> the consumer would be an equal partner in all data transactions, for two
> reasons: 1. Fairness 2. Data quality

why would a consumer be interested in cooperating? No one likes ads, right? :)
The businesses milk data out any way they could, and share it. People defend
themselves and share the knowledge. Its how it is now, and looks like will be
in future.

Browser companies may be on either side, today I'd stick with Firefox and
Safari.

~~~
c2h5oh
> why would a consumer be interested in cooperating? No one likes ads, right?

Let's assume I can't block ads or choose not to block them to support
site/service I'm using.

If that was the case I'd rather see relevant ads as long as they were targeted
based on a subset of information about myself I've decided to provide, to the
parties of my choosing and with usage restricted to that single purpose only.

~~~
auslander
Yeah, but you talking about supporting a website/service. I replied to the 'If
I were building an advertising business today ...'

------
product50
This is where the scum of the adtech industry lies. While Google and FB
collect a lot of user data, they only keep it to themselves and use the data
BOTH for better advertiser targeting as well as for customizing user
experiences.

Oracle BlueKai, which was an acquisition, collects data from various sites
users visits (via cookies and their SDK) and explicitly sells that data to
other ad networks. Ad networks, outside a few of them, don't have a lot of
data to target and thus rely on 3rd party data brokers such as BlueKai to
fulfill this need. BlueKai also have tie ups directly with the advertisers,
especially brand advertisers such as Unilever etc., where these advertisers
require the ad networks who are advertising for them to use BlueKai customer
segments (which they created using user data) for targeting purposes. And all
of this is completely invisible to the user.

~~~
gowld
Why specifically is it worse than FB? If all those ad networks merged into
BlueKai aka Oracle, so the data was kept "internal", would that be better?

~~~
auslander
Its unclear. I guess his idea was that FB collects only data you put into FB,
while BlueKai collects data from many trackers embedded into majority of
websites.

Unclear because Google and FB have its hand (trackers like Like button and
pixels) in many websites as well. In uBlock Origin, enable advanced mode and
will see tens of tracking domains on pages like newyorker.com online stores et
cetera.

~~~
bbulkow
Facebook has share buttons on all the world's media. Each one of those views
is almost certainly recorded by Facebook, even if you don't have an account.
The only way to stop it is put a DNS block ( hosts entry ) on your machines.
If you think Facebook records less data than bluekai, I think that is very
very unlikely.

------
auslander
... still digging ... FAQ:

\- On average, how many categories does a unique user belong to?

\- We see 750 million unique users per month with an average of 10-15
attributes per user.

\- How long after a user qualifies for a category will that category last in
their cookie?

\- Categories are stored per user for 90 days. This is the legally allowed
time limit. It is also a rolling 90 day period ... if the user is back online
on day 2 then the activity counter resets.

It was last addition to my defences - private browsing tabs only, closing tab
clears cookies and storages.

~~~
manigandham
Is this a new discovery for you? Third-party cookie data is everywhere, and
usually very messy if not completely inaccurate.

~~~
auslander
No, but what about first-party cookies? And all sorts of local storages? I
don't need them too.

~~~
manigandham
1st-party data is different from 3rd-party data, regardless of how it's
physically stored.

I'm not sure what your question is though, are you asking how to protect
yourself? It seems you already have it covered if you delete cookies.

~~~
bbulkow
Facebook's collection system is through share buttons. Those share buttons do
cookie share because the domain is Facebook, but the technology is certainly
there to track by ip address and device fingerprint, even if you are not a fb
user, and a single fb login redropps the cookies and allows association of
your internet media behavior with your FB account and behavior.

------
auslander
HN mods changed title. Original title was:

Oracle BlueKai, audience data on 300+ million users, over 80% of the US

~~~
suyash
The new title seems inaccurate, why did MODS change the title to be vague and
less specific? Seems shady practice to me.

~~~
xhedley
The guidelines say to use the original title of the link, unless that title is
misleading or click bait. The original title was expressing an opinion.

~~~
auslander
The original is direct quotes from the top of the page.

What opinion?

------
tannhaeuser
Is this new? Because Oracle couldn't possibly choose a worse release date
directly following GDPR-day/-week, underlining its relevance. But maybe
they're on to something because they're able to sell data when it's getting
scarce?

~~~
rsmets
Not new at all. Not sure why this was posted today though. Here is a similar
marketplace / solution from one of their biggest competitors, Neustar
[https://www.marketing.neustar/identity-data-management-
platf...](https://www.marketing.neustar/identity-data-management-platform)

Adobe is also very much in this space.

------
redorb
Where can I get a link that does what I'm reading in the comments. The link
sends me to a doc page / what link for them to share their guesses about me
please?

