
Political groups use “deeply spooky” protester location data, report finds - walterbell
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/political-groups-use-deeply-spooky-protester-location-data-report-finds/
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randomdude402
These kinds of pieces are _sort of_ accurate. I have run a lot of ad campaigns
on Google and Facebook (I don't do this kind of work today), and if this kind
of thing comes up in conversation, I like to say that anybody can set up an
ads account with Facebook or Google and see how it actually works.

Yes, you can create an ad and set it up to target people live within a certain
area or have visited a certain area (and/or a number of quite creepier feeling
criteria), but that's it.

They are not "selling your data" to advertisers. As an advertiser, all you get
is some statistics about who your ads got served to, and they are pretty
shitty and vague.

"You said you were willing to pay $10.00 USD per click for people who have
been within (LAT,LNG of XYZ hospital) within the last 30 days. We declare that
150 of the 200 ad clickers have indeed visited that location. That will be
$1,500 USD plus some lesser amount for the other clickers that we somehow
served your ad to. Let's call it $1700, we'll take it out of the prepaid
account you had to set up before we even ran the campaign. Thanks for
advertising with us, and if you don't like it, good luck finding another ad
network with anything approaching the same exposure."

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andyv
The article didn't really say how the private companies were obtaining the
geolocation data. Sure, people can give apps permission for location data, but
I think it unlikely that people install apps from political consulting firms.
Anyone know who or what is the third party who sells the location data to the
political consultants?

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randomdude402
The advertisers don't obtain the data. The articles that discuss this are
always careful to use phrases like they "use" the data.

They set up an ad campaign in Facebook or Google or another similar network,
and they have to decide who to "target."

Google and Facebook, and other networks to a much lesser extent and perhaps
through other apps that people wouldn't expect to be related, have tremendous
data troves about people.

This includes phone location data and history, and data from partners about
things like what types of purchases a person makes on their credit cards,
whether they are a homeowner and their home value, income... things like that.

All the advertisers actually get is the ability to say something along the
lines of "This ad should show to people who were at or near X location and
make less than X amount of money."

They don't "get" the data or have it "sold" to them. They are able to "use"
the data in a very indirect way.

