How Well Do They Know Us?

In the olden times, we used to hear about the evil DoubleClick digital advertising company and its ubiquitous cookies, watching us as we go from one web site to another. We seem to have defeated third party cookies now, but the enemy has some new weapons - weapons that are a lot harder to defeat. I am a strict amateur in this area, but browser fingerprinting seems to be the tracking method of choice these days. Basically, it is a way of identifying a browser instance uniquely among the billions of browser instances worldwide. In the hands of a company like Google, whose trojan horse analytics functions run on great many web sites, it can be used to track a browser across the web. And if you ever log in to Google using that browser, Google is now able to tie that browser's fingerprint to a real, live user, and all the data it amassed and associated with that browser fingerprint is now tied to you, a user.

If you use Google to search the web, then Google, of course, saves all the search terms and associates them with you too. (They let you look at and delete the information that they collected about you, but I have my doubts about if they really delete all copies.) Facebook has its little agent running on a lot of web sites, so it can track you too. What do they do with all this information? Google claims it uses it to show more relevant search results to you, but I think that is BS. Google is primarily an advertising company. If it knows you very well, it can show you relevant ads, ads that you are likely to click on. When it makes its pitch to its customers (the companies that advertise through Google), Google uses the vast amount of data it collected on its users as a selling point. Facebook does the same thing.

There is a book by Shoshana Zuboff called Surveillance Capitalism that apparently goes into depth on this subject. I didn't read it, but I heard Cory Doctorow's commentary on it. According to Doctorow, even if some companies collect a vast amount of data on us, it is all for nothing, because they do a terrible job when it comes to showing us relevant ads. They don't really know us as well they pretend to do. My own experiences support this view. In years of browsing, I don't remember ever seeing a relevant ad. (The ads that Google shows when you search the web through Google are tied to the search terms. Those ads are, of course, very relevant. They are not based on any data that Google collected on you, AFAIK. I don't use Google for web searches - not to avoid being tracked but because Google is a dishonest company that distorts search results to favor Democrats and to support liberal causes.)

Sooner or later, clients of Google and Facebook should figure out that web advertising based on knowing the customer is a fiction. I hope that happens, and these insane data collection practices cease. As it stands, data collection doesn't help the collectors - the machines seem to be unable to derive usable intelligence from the data for showing good ads. (So much for Artificial Intelligence!!) But it could hurt us - if a human rummages through the data of a specific user, he may be able to get something out of it that can be abused.