[-empyre-] Search, privacy, data

[Ana Valdés]

Thank you Lasse to follow up my thread. I have lived in Sweden for almost
my whole adult life and I am very used to the ways market and corporations
work. Sweden, a very homogeneus society with a strong middleclass composed
of buyers with sure incomes, is often used as "test market". Labels as
Dockers launch often a new model of trousers or shoes in Sweden before they
launch it in the US or worldwide.
The corporations need to target different groups of buyers, they must know
their age range, if they have kids or not, if they live alone or in a
couple, what kind of job they do, which destination they choose when they
are going on holidays, if they are readers, which kind of books they buy,
chicklit, adventures, criminal novels, classic, so on.
If we are using computers what else do we buy, printers, scanners,
software, games, etc. Are we Mac people or PC people? Windows or Linux?
Our data is mined to extract from us our preferences or dreams, the kind of
life we want to live based on the objects we choose to live with, the kind
of selfimage we have, if we choose to travel to a safe destination or if we
are more adventurous...

Depending of the things we exchange in our mails the ads are targetting us
and making us the personal recipient of specific ads.

A real challenge, by the way, did all of you delete Google history? Their
policy is changing from the 1th March, I got a mail from Electronic
Frontier Foundation with suggestions and hints. I went to
www.google.com/history and deleted it, I don't really know if it's going to
help but it made me feel good :)

Ana
On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 4:34 PM, Lasse Scherffig <lscherff at khm.de> wrote:

> Thanks, Tero, for starting this interesting debate. I just want to jump in
> on one point Ana Valdés raised:
>
> Am 27.02.2012 16:42, schrieb Ana Valdés:
>
>  The difference is maybe the aim, the goals. The governments collect data
>> about us to control us and our movements, to be able to track us if our
>> dissent becames too dangerous or too subversive.
>> But the enterprises and corporations want to make profits selling our
>> data to third part.
>>
>
> Quite so. And the recent Wikileaks/Stratfor case has brought to attention
> (once again) that these third parties too can be entities that want to
> enforce control (such as governments or Coca Cola spying on critics). But
> arguably the real profit in selling to third parties is made in
> advertisement (or is this a myth only?). And I really would like to know
> more about that: How is personal data really used for ads, who is using it
> and what are the exact procedures (algorithms and practices) turning my
> Google search queries, the location of my cellphone and my twitter feed
> into "conversion rates" (especially after being fused into one relational
> data set). I somehow cannot imagine this "boring" information to be
> valuable enough to justify a complete makeover of the whole idea of
> privacy. Or: Who is _literally_ buying all the twitter babble? And why?
>
> Best!
> Lasse.
>
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