Andy Hayes Socia l Impact o f Technology Sect ion 70 Apr i l 2014

TECHNOLOGY MAKES US A MARKETING TOOL,

DEMOGRAPHIC, AND TARGET

¡ The Paradigm of “Free”

¡ The Value of Your Information

¡ You as a: • Marketing Tool • Demographic • Target

¡ Google

¡ Facebook

¡ Astroturfing

¡ Your ISP too?

¡ Conclusions

¡ Sources

TOPICS

On the internet, if you’re not the paying customer, you are the product.

¡  Users have come to expect web-based content and services to

be provided for free. ¡  Since the proliferation of the internet and the resulting dot-com

boom, free access to search engines, webmail, and social networking have been provided for free.

¡  More recently, mobile apps and cloud storage have offered free basic offerings, with modest cost for heavier/extended use.

¡  It is the need to monetize these services, given to the end user for free, that drives companies to collect, analyze, and sell information from users.

¡  This information-based market makes every internet user a marketing tool, a demographic, and a target.

THE PARADIGM OF “FREE”

How do advertisers know what you like? Every Facebook post, Google search, and iPhone app of yours

tells them for you.

¡  Every product has a target market – the people most likely to buy based on their demographics and interests.

¡  Advertising campaigns can be extremely expensive. Online advertisements are paid by number of clicks and views. Targeting the exposure of these ads ensures that every click or view is coming from someone most likely to buy.

¡  Nearly every advertisement you see online is tailored to you because of your demographic. Manufacturers have a profile of their ideal customer. Advertisers have a profile of you, based on your information. When you see advertisements, it’s because these two profiles have aligned for the advertised product and you.

THE VALUE OF YOUR INFORMATION

¡  Marketing Tool • The inf ormation that you give out to any website, knowingly or not , is used to market to you more ef f ect ively. This inf ormation can also be extrapolated to others who f i t your demographics. You’re helping marketers sel l to you and your fr iends.

¡  Demographic • While we al l have personal demographics, every piece of technology you own, every website you vis i t , and every blogger’s opinion you adopt puts you in a demographic. The more you browse, the more boxes you t ick. 18-24 years old, OSX user, Reddit member, Facebook addict with lots of Photoshop quest ions: Google knows what I ’m up to, and they know exact ly how to market to me.

¡  Target • You are a target market. Always have been, even i f you existed bef ore the web. That shouldn’t be news to you, but what’s new is the sheer number of people, organizat ions, and companies who have a vested interest in gett ing your at tent ion. The more technology embedded in your l i f estyle, the more avenues there are to market to you. • As wil l be touched on in the Astroturf ing and ISP sect ions, there’s the oppor tuni ty f or those tracking you on the web to commit egregious breaches of your pr ivacy, making you a target of hackers and overzealous law enf orcement. Whether the NSA gets your inf ormation from Facebook i l l ic i t ly, or your Inter net provider hands over your f i les to the OPP without a warrant , your r ights are reduced when your inf ormation is col lected.

YOU AS A…

Google isn’t a search engine anymore, they’re an advertising company. Their public-facing products serve to collect information to market with or sell.

¡  Google products are ubiquitous on the web. They’re often the

best or most popular of their kind: Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, Android OS, and the Play Store.

¡  Google tracks a user’s activity across their various services on the web. Your Gmail messages are tied to your searches, recently watched YouTube videos, and (through your Android device and Maps) your phone number and location.

¡  The aggregated information you provide gives Google an extremely accurate picture with which to advertise to you.

GOOGLE

You took your videos off YouTube, migrated your email, and closed your G+ account. Google is still

tracking you. Here’s how. ¡  Google Analytics is a paid Google product, targeted at website

owners. ¡  Analytics can be added to any website you own, including those

based around a CMS such as Squarespace or Wordpress.org. ¡  Analytics uses tracking cookies to follow a user around the web

after they visit a website. The website’s owner can see anonymized information about visitors including: time spent on website, repeat visits, pages viewed, advertisements clicked, links followed, device, browser, and referring Google searches.

¡  PS, Google still reads every email you send to a Gmail user.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

GOOGLE

Google Analytics report showing visitors’ web activity.

News at Eleven says Facebook is a privacy threat, and they’re more r ight than they know – The largest threat is not on Facebook, it is

Facebook.

¡  Facebook’s pr imary collection of data comes from what we’re intending to share with our fr iends – ful l name, email , phone number, address, and of course what we l ike.

¡  Facebook’s collection does not end on their website or app. Every visi t adds a tracking cookie to your computer that catalogues your activity on the web and reports i t to Facebook. This cookie never expires, not even i f you log out – i t must be manually deleted.

¡  Instal l ing the Facebook app on your mobile device allows Facebook full access to your text messages and contacts. Their new Messenger app can place calls directly from the app – keeping an eye on all your social interactions.

¡  “Login with Facebook” feature al lows Facebook to not only see other si tes you’re visi t ing (they can anyway), but see exactly what you’re doing on any si te they sign you into.

FACEBOOK

Facebook realized that savvy browsers pay no attention to ads, but let their guard down for posts.

So they started selling posts as ads. ¡ Any given post from a page only reaches ~10% of

subscribers. Page owners must pay to promote further. ¡  Facebook gives page owners the option to promote based

on demographics and interests. The targeting metrics will astound you – nearly every piece of data that Facebook mines can be put to use.

MARKETING WITH FACEBOOK

FACEBOOK

Targeting an ad for a Wedding planner looking for clients. 6.4 million active users in Ontario, narrowed to a target market of 56,000 – less than 1 in 100.

On the Internet, nobody can see who signs your paycheque.

¡  Astroturfing is when a paid representative posts online in support of their company or organization under the guise of an unaffiliated individual posting their opinion.

¡  Astroturfers are common on blogging platforms such as Tumblr, Wordpress, and Twitter. They may comment on Disqus threads, post on Reddit, or even edit Wikipedia articles about their companies (all more commonly than you may think).

¡  Etymology: The term was coined to describe a fake grassroots movement. Astroturfing is often political in nature: PACs, religious groups, and the US Military (Operation Earnest Voice) are known for using it.

ASTROTURFING

What happens when the Pres ident o f Rwanda’s PR rep f orgets to change

accounts :

Reddi t commenters on an unusua l ly obvious sh i l l pos t f rom McDonald ’s , upvoted

(ana logous to FB “ l ikes”) by bots be f ore being downvoted by the communi ty.

ASTROTURFING

When the service is free, you’re the product. When the service is paid…well, you’re still the product.

¡  Bell Canada rolled out a program in mid-November 2013 that tracks customers’ television, web browsing, calling, and cellular usage. In a press statement, i t was explained that this data was used specif ically for targeted advertising to customers, as well as sale to third party companies. All existing and new customers are enrolled, unless an opt-out request is given.

¡  Bell’s collected information can be cross-referenced with the customer’s account information to provide similarly comprehensive profiles for marketing as giants Facebook and Google do.

¡  “The scope of Bell’s intended personal data usage is remarkable…For law enforcement, Bell is ef fectively of fer ing one of the most detailed profil ing services in Canada, which the company can disclose without a court order as part of an investigation under Canadian pr ivacy law” – Michael Geist, a technology law expert.

¡  NB: Rogers Communications maintains a similar program, though customers are opted out by default. I ’ve found no evidence of data collection/aggregation by Telus in my research.

YOUR ISP TOO?

It’s simple: if you’re a web user, it’s hard not to lose a little privacy.

¡  In researching this project, I was astounded by the depth and breadth of information collected by most major tech companies. It’s unsurprising that the NSA chose to precipitate leaks from them, rather than directly collecting citizen data.

¡  Focusing on Facebook and Google was a choice to give two prime examples of companies who aggregate huge amounts of user data. They are by no means exclusive. Apple, for example, collects through their devices heavily.

¡  Skepticism on the web is necessary. Advertisements are no longer on the banners and borders – they’re the video you’re watching or the blog post you’re reading. And it’s no accident that you found them.

¡  There is a need for greater public awareness, and greater industry regulation. The internet is maturing faster than social constructs and policy can be formed to reign it in.

CONCLUSIONS

Oboler, A., Welsh, K., Cruz, K. (2012) “The danger of big data: Social media as computational social science”. First Monday. Accessed from: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3993/3269 Fisher, D. (2014) “Government Requests for Google User Data Continue to Climb”. Threatpost. Accessed from: http://threatpost.com/government-requests-for-google-user-data-continue-to-climb/105066 Johnson, C. (2013) “Facebook is tracking what you don’t do on Facebook”. ArsTechnica. Accessed from: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/facebook-collects-conducts-research-on-status-updates-you-never-post/ Edwards, J. (2014) “See All the Companies That Are Tracking You on Facebook”. Business Insider. Accessed from: http://www.businessinsider.com/block-companies-tracking-you-on-facebook-2014-1 del Castillo, M. (2013) “6 Kinds of Your Information Google Openly Admits to Collecting”. Upstart Business Journal. Accessed from: http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news/technology/2013/08/15/6-data-categories-google-collects.html?page=all Unknown (2014) “Analytics Set Up (Web)”. Google Support. Accessed from: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1086338?hl=en Geist, M. (2013) “The Great Canadian Personal Data Grab Continues: Bell Expands its Consumer Monitoring and Profiling”. Michael Geist. Accessed from: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6977/125/ Krashinsky, S. (2013) “Bell planning to use customers’ data to target ads”. The Globe and Mail. Accessed from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/bell-customer-phone-and-internet-data-will-be-used-to-target-ads/article14984876/ Fielding, N., Cobain, I. (2011) “Revealed: US Spy operation that manipulates social media”. The Guardian. Accessed from: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks Blue, V. (2012) “Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia”. CNET. Accessed from: http://www.cnet.com/news/corruption-in-wikiland-paid-pr-scandal-erupts-at-wikipedia/ Taylor, A. (2014) “A stray tweet may have exposed Paul Kagame’s Twitter ghostwriter, and maybe much more”. Washington Post. Accessed from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/03/07/a-stray-tweet-may-have-exposed-paul-kagames-twitter-ghostwriter-and-maybe-much-more/ Horrocks, I. (2014) “Astroturfing and Sockpuppetry: Governments are paying people to fake support”. Planet Ivy. Accessed from: http://planetivy.com/dogma/91697/astroturfing-sockpuppetry-governments-paying-people-fake-support/ Henry, A. (2011) “Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here’s How to Stop It”. LifeHacker. Accessed from: http://lifehacker.com/5843969/facebook-is-tracking-your-every-move-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-it

SOURCES