Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

Popularity or privacy? Part Two: Advertisers and privacy policies

Apart from selling us all out to the security services in return for groovy spying software, and making the world safe from the future crime we might commit one day in the NSA's deranged and suspicious minds, the Collectors' main market for our information, excluding individuals, is for advertisers and 'marketing companies' who also gather and distribute data.

As WP says in their blog; 'Data is the new oil' (SEE LINK 1 WP blog). And they're right, although not sure why they said it =:0).

Selling data is lucrative – it's worth billions of dollars to a lot of different people for many different reasons. Every new website, game, club, product, social network or app is obsessed with getting its user information. It is often funded by advertisers or investors whose sole aim is to compile a database of potential customers. They no longer just want to sell us a product, they want to profile our whole life – from puberty until death, and sometimes even after. The big collectors even go to the extreme of buying companies for their user data.

FB has recently acquired Instagram to add to their other little earners like What's App,while Google already own YouTube, datacollectors Double Click and control a deluge of data coming from the Androiddevices they developed and Microsoft own Skype and recently acquired Linkedin. Although obviously these are popular websites and apps, sound investments with worldwide coverage, the user databases and the personal profiles are the real prize – a honeypot for advertisers. Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn cost them about $60 per user – experts calculate the real value is $140 so we begin to see why companies fall to the big boys. 

Advertisers shape how the world works. They move in mysterious ways. They will tell a network to kill a TV show if it isn't selling their product, they will demand their brand, or portfolio of brands, hits prime time viewing schedules or follows a cliffhanger scene in a show, film or serialised novel. And they will pay millions of dollars for the privilege.

This isn't just Coke, Pepsi and Mackie Ds, it's also a conglomerate of smaller companies – often led by venture capitalists, (very rich men who own many of these companies or are on their boards), who want to sell products on the back of a TV show or a website's popularity.

They will take a successful and well-loved website with millions of users, and redesign it into a vehicle that sells their range of products and brands. They will even tell a website to write its pages to their own design, which will load their products' ads and may include hundreds of buttons, all activating tracking scripts, widgets and beacons that will follow potential customers around the web to see what they are looking at, taking pictures of, or writing about. They use sophisticated data capture technologies to ID a keyword in a comment someone makes on an online forum and trace it back to the person's profile. In return, the CEO and the stockholders get a million dollar investment and the site can continue,although perhaps not in the same way it once did.

Historically, the Advertisers' job is to sell us stuff – often by any means necessary.

Long, long ago, they decided the best way to do this is by working out how we tick, what our habits are, how we live – if we'd buy a product even if we didn't want it.

If an internet user is a vegetarian it's unlikely they'll want to buy meat products; if they vote republican they may not be interested in a news story about poor people using food banks.

But hold on. What if the vegetarian has meat-eating relatives and they might have to cook them turkey at thanksgiving or something? What if the republican invests in food banks as a tax dodge?

The advertisers often needed to know much more about their potential customers than just their age or location – they had to know EVERYTHING! And the collectors were very willing to find ways of doing this.