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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Let’s say you are a milk company, and you want people to see your new promotion of buy 1 get 1 free. You know that there exist people that do not drink milk, either by choice or because of a lactose intolerance.
You want to make as many people as you want aware of your promotion but you know that some people even if they see the ad, they will not be interested at all because of what I said earlier, and ads are not free.
Therefore, if there is a way for the advertising agency to only show the ad to people that still drink milk, you can save some money by only paying to show your ad to those people.
Now, how to know that someone drinks milk ? Well maybe that person joined a “I don’t drink milk” Facebook group, or maybe he never bought milk at his or her favorite grocery store, or maybe he or she told a company that he or she did not drink milk via survey or something else.
Companies that have this kind of milk data can sell it to advertising agency that will use this information to only display the ad to the people for which it is relevant so that when a company want to advertise their product, they can target it to specific people
It is problematic for privacy because you might not want the website you visit that you are yourself, and that you don’t drink milk, like video games and have an onlyfan account for example. It becomes even more problematic when targeting people with ads based on their gender, race, believe, or even age.
Also, since advertising agencies are present on multiple website at once, they can “log” the fact that you saw their ad on jewelrystore.com when you are trying to load an ad on facebook, and can therefore use that information to show you jewelry ads, might be problematic if you were looking up wedding rings on your fiancee’s computer for example. This last part is part of the cookie privacy problematic
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