from Hacker News

Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You

by bsims on 3/18/13, 4:31 AM with 24 comments

• by DanielBMarkham on 3/18/13, 12:43 PM

  One of the sadly funny things about watching the politics of this play out is that the folks that traditionally blame the government are all up in arms about the government tracking you. But they seem fine with corporations tracking you. The other bunch, which traditionally blame corporations are all up in arms about corporations tracking you. But they have no problem with the government tracking you.

  And for all of that fighting, it never really mattered. The fact is it doesn't matter who tracks you, the information is available to all parties. You're being tracked.

  Cross-reference this pile of tracking information to cell phone records, which can locate you within a few dozen meters at all times, and you have a surveillance system Orwell himself could never have dreamed of. It's beyond any state-ran security system ever put into place in the history of the world. Yet we all sit idly around as if none of it matters.

  And for all of that political fighting about privacy and anonymity, it never amounted to anything.

  Amazing.

  Side note: As a movie buff, I've seen lots of dystopian movies set into some far future where the state has taken control over people's lives. Our hero somehow manages to fight the system.

  What they never really cover is what happened. How exactly did people sit around and let this happen? Didn't they see this terrible future approaching?

  Now I have the answer. Yes, some folks saw what was happening, but the vast majority didn't see an immediate negative impact in their lives, so they didn't care. The rest of us were just -- overwhelmed by events. Threats came from multiple and unseen directions and kept coming until we couldn't fight them. People who owned the data were careful not to share the scariness of what they were doing with the common man. Privacy and anonymity advocates were labeled scaremongers.

• by aslewofmice on 3/18/13, 7:32 AM

  And to think that this article doesn't even touch on the ability marketer's have to track you across multiple devices, locations, and other insight that Facebook allows.

  I believe we're at a point where a legitimate proof of concept could emerge where given a first and last name of a person, one could theoretically track a person's location and browsing behaviors for an indefinite amount of time. Granted, it would require that the person not clear their cookies, grant geo-location on their phone and that you have a bit of money to ensure you win enough ad impressions in that time period. The takeaway would show that people aren't as anonymous as they think they are and that with enough money and motivation, someone could gain valuable insight into your behaviors.

• by d23 on 3/18/13, 3:22 PM

  Is it so wrong that I... don't really mind? I feel bad admitting that, but I actually think it's kind of cool. Marketing is moving beyond "generically spam this to millions of people in this 'demographic'" to actually giving me personalized advertisements that I actually might be interested in.

  I treat it the same way as I treat the rest of my online identity: if I'm doing something I want to be anonymous I take steps to make it that way, such as using a throwaway account with cookies disabled. I recognize that when I buy store loyalty cards, I'm giving them access to my purchase patterns.

  It's a trade-off I make, and I don't put the responsibility for that decision on anyone but myself.

• by binarymax on 3/18/13, 1:05 PM

  My first brush with this, was near my 16th birthday, in 1994. Gillette sent me a free razor. I had never bought anything from Gillette, and neither had anyone in my family. Yet somehow they knew I was in prime shaving time, and they were smart enough to send me this birthday gift.

  Their reward? I've been shaving with Gillette for almost 20 years. A back of the napkin estimation is that initial free razor got them about $500 worth of business in blades (and I don't even shave very often).

  I have no idea from where they got this data - but this sort of thing has been going on for a lot longer than people think.

• by racbart on 3/18/13, 6:11 AM

  Would that even be legal in the EU? “Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent "your name, address and what you purchased" to seven other companies, including a data "cooperative" that allows retailers to pool data about customer transactions”

• by summerdown2 on 3/18/13, 8:43 PM

  This is a very American centric view of data where privacy is not written into law. In the EU, the data protection act prevents much of this:

  http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/the_...

  Of course, in our modern world of cloud computing even in the EU people place their data willingly beyond the reach of EU law. However, even cloud companies are sometimes inside its scope because of where their offices exist:

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/21/irish_data_protectio...

• by ams6110 on 3/18/13, 1:38 PM

  The only real way to avoid most of this is to not use loyalty cards (thus pay the marked-up prices) or to give ficticious data when you get them, and change them frequently. Never use a credit card with your loyalty card, they will be linked... pay cash for everything... don't use online services... don't use mobile devices.

  Who among us would want to give up all that?

• by jayfuerstenberg on 3/18/13, 7:48 AM

  I once thought about making a proxy server that would randomly change HTTP request headers (user agent etc...) enough to make you appear to be a different person with each request.

  But I suspect service providers (Facebook etc...) would find a way to adapt and it would just result in an arms race that would leave HTTP in a state of disarray.

• by ixacto on 3/18/13, 10:16 AM

  Health insurance companies could purchase loyalty-card information from grocery stores. Want to know if someone is always eating trans-fats and smoking? There we go.

  Want to know how much booze someone is purchasing per week?

  The possibilities are endless, and I am sure this has already been thought of many years ago.