eli5: how does selling data work? why exactly should i care about wether or not something is selling my data to others?
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Here’s a case for abuse:
You have a specific political opinion, as scrapped from the articles you read online, and what you repost or like.
They know you are into sports because your location data from your phone gps has you wandering through spring goods at a local store (and yes, they can do that).
So you start getting ads with a certain theme targeted at you. Things like sporting equipment.
Seems benign.
The always on Siri or Google assistant overhead she key words, about needing ropes for your trailer or boat..
So you start getting ads for that.
Then you start getting athlete endorsement ads for political issues.
Someone then really wants to float a wild idea, program or opinion…
So they target only a few hundred athletic, outdoorsman with sympathetic opinions with a short series of very satisfying specific ads.
Ads often disguised as Facebook posts, informative articles, popular tweets etc, to disguise that they are ads.
These can (and have) made extreme claims, falsehoods, fear mongering rhetoric etc.
All as an ad campaign, to people they never actually met, disguised as something else.
But because they only sent out a few hundred, to carefully chosen sympathetic people the message isn’t noticed by the populace at large.
It’s only noticed when those targeted individuals start making authentic, independent posts “informed” by the information they saw on other places.
They are righteous, and defensive as to why others are denying reality. After all, they’ve been seeing “information” all over, repeatedly, wherever they go about how x is malicious, greedy, out to get them etc…
So the targeted as now gets amplified, and looks like a grass roots concern.
But really it’s an attempt to gather support by a political faction, is worse mislead and agitate by an entirely foreign power.
No longer are people recruited by chance meetings and transparent open adverts for all to see. But anonymously pushed in a direction with very careful targeting based on huge amounts of data that would, on the past, have required overt spying to obtain.
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