
Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks - cloud_thrasher
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/07/twitter-fesses-up-to-more-adtech-leaks/
======
move-on-by
There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer
exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and
selling you- even if you never interact with them.

Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do
that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond
Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments, and other
small public interests that use their Facebook page as a sole means of
announcements. They shouldn't be - but it doesn't change the fact that they
are. The Ad industry needs strong and enforceable regulation, and quickly.

~~~
jpollock
Blocking ads won't stop your info from being shared during the auction. That's
a back end data transfer.

~~~
dylan604
Depends on the block really. If you are using a blocker that just removes it
from the UI, then yes the auction is still occurring. If you are blocking the
JS code from even executing, then no data is transmitted. Unless I'm totally
misunderstanding things, if the code doesn't run, then nothing happens.

~~~
x0x0
For 3rd party ads, that is sometimes correct. What blocking js does is prevent
cookie stitching, ie the joining of the first party id with the 3rd party
cookie id. This is necessary for external ad networks.

Twitter runs mostly their own ads afaik, so they don't face this problem.

------
userbinator
"We are committed to providing you meaningful privacy choices" -> "We are
committed to selling your data if you let us"

I hate this sort of pseudo-friendly weasel-wording that's getting increasingly
popular these days.

~~~
tfha
My favorite is from Amazon, when selling Prime.

"We are sorry to hear that you do not want FREE two day shipping."

It really agitates me. I wish it didn't bother me so much but it cuts pretty
deep sometimes.

~~~
_jal
I think there's a linguistic study in there somewhere, tracking how US
commercial culture ended up settling on stilted, awkward, passive-aggressive
delivery mixed with robotic Gee-Golly Isn't Everything So GREAT phrasing for
all communication with the cattle.

I mostly find it ridiculous. Reminds me of stock phrases used by grubby
bureaucrats asking for a bribe. But then just about everything about Amazon
(and related automate-everything customer service shops) reminds me of the
worst sorts of governmental dysfunction. If what you want is what they want or
they have some reason to care about you, things are great. Otherwise, you
don't even get indifference; you're literally arguing with a machine.

------
DarwinMailApp
So there are essentially remnants of our browsing history linked to our
devices shared among numerous ad companies.

They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they
are being paid to display relevant ads.

Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows
Facebook is at it too.

I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was
our locally running Alexa only to see ads relating to our specific
conversation 10 minutes later on the web.

Can anybody think of a technological approach to flagging this behavior?

~~~
lonelappde
Amazon's code is not secret internally. If Alexa was targeting ads on your
speech, someone from Amazon present or past would have confirmed it by now.
Your conversation was probably influenced by the web ads campaign, or it was a
coincidence, there are a lot of people seeing a lot of ads every 10 minutes.

~~~
DarwinMailApp
I like your point as I can relate to that opinion. However my outlook has
changed in the last year or so.

There has been several occasions where my conversation somehow turned into
relevant web ads. I don't think I'm making a mistake here.

A friend of mine told me of his good friend who left Amazon recently as his
job was to listen to what users say to Alexa and ensure Alexa responded
correctly. FYI that's both when users say Alexa first and also when they do
not. More on that here [1].

I would love some more clarity into what's going on here.

[1] [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/tech/alexa-amazon-
human-v...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/tech/alexa-amazon-human-voice-
review/index.html)

~~~
dangero
Alexa does not send data unless you say “Alexa”. This happens at a hardware
level. This is confirmed by hardware schematics and by security researchers
who have sifted through every piece of data that leaves the device.

What you are saying isn’t true. It cannot be.

~~~
majewsky
How reliable is the keyword detection? Last week we had this story about Apple
where Siri heard the word "Siri" out of random noise like creaking furniture.

~~~
DarwinMailApp
My point exactly.

Just last night myself and my girlfriend were talking and Alexa decided to
activate itself without us saying Alexa first.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Alexa rarely, but quite regularly activates from my TV in the same room.

------
ignoramous
Reminds me of an ex-Amazon ad exec, Kivin Varghese, 'fessing up about the
wrongs in the business dealings there and eventually getting the boot [0]. The
only difference is that perhaps Twitter, as a company, is 'fessing up and not
any individual working against the interests of a company.

Seems like all sides of the ad-industry is a giant cess pool, and no one's
playing it fair.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716)

------
driverdan
There's a way to nearly eliminate all Twitter ads from your feeds. Whenever
you see one tap / click the drop down arrow on the top right of it and select
"I don't like this ad."

After you do it enough Twitter will drastically reduce the volume of ads it
shows you. I see one every day or two and it's usually Twitter's "you've been
selected to fill out a survey" ad.

------
olivierduval
For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words
here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the
net, at least regarding the Big Players.

Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto
monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)

~~~
Cthulhu_
It's super effective and is making all companies pretty damn privacy conscious
all of a sudden - except they also still violate it. The problem is that they
will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible - or
straight violate it in the hopes that nobody will find out.

~~~
bad_user
> " _The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the
> GDPR as much as possible_ "

Many companies like to believe that, however the GDPR is pretty strict in
certain regards. And such companies continue to operate only because no data
protection authority has targeted them yet.

There's also the matter that many US companies have ignored GDPR due to not
having a legal entity in the EU, but unfortunately for them there are trade
agreements in place between the US and the EU, which makes the GDPR
enforceable for companies having EU users / customers, even without a legal
entity in the EU.

Give it time. And send complaints to your local DPA about violations that you
see, because it does help.

------
pbecotte
With the way the internet works and the tech they have built, it's harder not
to collect stuff. All of these companies have all sorts of stuff they
shouldn't, and I wouldn't trust anything they say about opting out.

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oneepic
"Confesses"? I'm not a fan of everything Twitter does, but this headline is so
biased. I'm actually angry now. Twitter is "disclosing" these on their own,
afaik, and I take that as a morally good thing. Also, it's a bug, not intended
behavior in the first place. So if I understand this whole thing correctly,
they never had to tell anyone they fixed these bugs, but they did anyway and
people are still writing articles trying to drum up anger at Twitter for it.
_Please._

~~~
pron
The article says:

> It suggests this leak of data has been happening since May 2018 — which is
> also the day when Europe’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, came into force.
> The regulation mandates disclosure of data breaches (which explains why
> you’re hearing about all these issues from Twitter)

So, at least according to the article, they _did_ have an obligation to
disclose this.

~~~
oneepic
Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe this is moving the goalposts, but I'm
still happy they're at least disclosing the issues and following the mandated
procedure, instead of trying to hide it and save face.

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dabei
GDPR is a huge win for user privacy. All these have been going on and getting
worse for years and finally getting surfaced.

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ycombonator
they need to asked to shut up with pi-holes !

------
bernardlunn
Regulation is not the answer. GDPR has not done much good. A way to pay for
content without relying on ads is the only way

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phoe-krk
> 'fesses up

Can we have proper English at least in the HN submission titles? I know that
this is a direct quotation of the original, but "confesses" is much clearer
and more readable than the original slang term.

~~~
jasode
_> Can we have proper English [...] , but "confesses" is much clearer and more
readable than the original slang term._

I can't speak for non-native English readers' difficulties but as an fyi... _"
confess"_ is not an exact replacement for _" fess up"_ because both have
different _connotations_.

Therefore, if the (USA) writer is deliberately using connotations to shade the
text, then the more informal _" fesses up"_ is also _proper English_. E.g.
respectable publications such as The New York Times have had writers and
editors using the the phrase "fess up" for decades:
[https://www.google.com/search?q="fesses+up"+site%3Anytimes.c...](https://www.google.com/search?q="fesses+up"+site%3Anytimes.com)

~~~
dub
Both "confesses" and "fesses up" seem like improper English here. The article
does not provide any evidence to suggest that Twitter was reluctant about
sharing this information or lied about it previously.

"Disclosed" seems like a more sensible and less sensationalist word to
describe an entity sharing new information. The writer knows this: "Twitter
has disclosed" are the first words of the article.

Twitter also apologized, said they're taking steps to avoid making this
mistake again, and provided a way to contact their Office of Data Protection
for questions. That part didn't make it into the headline, though.

------
tictoc
Here's an idea. Stop using twitter.

~~~
Cthulhu_
You don't need to use Twitter (or Facebook, google, etc) for them to collect
your data. Any site with a Twitter embed, a FB Like button, and/or Google
Analytics will gather and process your data.

~~~
lostlogin
You can block that, though I’m sure some gets through. Pihole and an add
blocker work pretty well for me, and it’s really surprising to me that people
tolerate browsing without some form of protection.

~~~
52-6F-62
I use the DDG extension for Firefox and it does a decent job as well. It
regularly catches Google's and FB's trackers for me.

