Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Just found about about Google's Project Beacon. Apparently they've been at it throughout 2018. But a friend who owns a local business just got one in the mail unsolicited. Consider it a Christmas Present from big tech. I'm sure they're just handing them out from the kindness of their hearts... Anyways, they're definately mailing the things out to businesses unsolicited for free at the moment, so they're definitely planning on having this stuff be ubiquitous over the next year

The purpose is to pinpoint smartphone owners' physical location indoors, ostensibly to track google ad conversions, but functionally to know beyond a reasonable doubt which parts of buildings you are in at any given time and then push notifications to people's phones to nudge their behavior. Kind of a way for Google to use your own customer base to sell you more ads.

So I was complaining earlier in this thread about the newer Android versions just pushing notifications to me. Figuring out which sports teams I paid attention to and pushing their scores at me and what not. But the geotracking is getting much more granular. And the example I used was being worried it'd try to nudge me into the pub to watch a game that was on soon enough. And, lo and behold, look at the examples used in their own video.

Anyways, I never thought I'd be at this point, but I'm more and more coming around to the conclusion that the smartphone is a personal and legal liability that they should be paying me to carry, not the other way around. I'm less and less interested in owning one. Android versions for the last number of years have done nothing but get creepier and do automatic things I do not want them to do or try to trick me into reading things I do not want to read or buying things I do not want to buy. The nonsense I didn't ask for has gotten more intrusive. Check out your "voice and audio activity" with google if you have an Android phone. When I checked mine, I'd found they'd used the smartphone to record not just my voice, but friends' and families'. And they're storing it. And if you have a smart speaker, God help you.

What sort of legal liability do you have if somebody in your house gets recorded because of your carelessness in reading EULAs or setting privacy settings and the recording comes back to have negative effects? Can these things be used in slander cases? Should you carry insurance against this sort of thing? Or what if it's working wrong? What if the google beacon in Victoria's Secret picks you up even though you're in Spencer Gifts next door and it's the straw that breaks the camel's back on your marriage. Does they bear any responsibility through falsely reporting your location info through a Google beacon if it's not calibrated right and it picks you up through the wall and reports you as having been in the store? Oh, there's a host of problems just waiting to be tested.

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

i don't understand why/how you're getting all these push notifications. i've been using android phones since my first smartphone- a droid x i bought after drowning my flip phone when i slipped and fell into salt water. anyway, i always decline push notifications when "offered." if i go into the google app itself, it shows articles relating to searches i've done, among other things, but that's hardly a surprise since it's google search sharing info with the google app. the only place i ever see ads is at the end of an article i've looked at via the google app, and - for some reason- in the ny times app. otherwise, nothing.

i keep location/gps turned off unless i'm using it to drive somewhere. i always decline the "high accuracy" location service which also tracks nearby wifi sources even when location is turned off

[shiny!]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Just found about about Google's Project Beacon. Apparently they've been at it throughout 2018. But a friend who owns a local business just got one in the mail unsolicited. Consider it a Christmas Present from big tech. I'm sure they're just handing them out from the kindness of their hearts... Anyways, they're definately mailing the things out to businesses unsolicited for free at the moment, so they're definitely planning on having this stuff be ubiquitous over the next year

The purpose is to pinpoint smartphone owners' physical location indoors, ostensibly to track google ad conversions, but functionally to know beyond a reasonable doubt which parts of buildings you are in at any given time and then push notifications to people's phones to nudge their behavior. Kind of a way for Google to use your own customer base to sell you more ads.

So I was complaining earlier in this thread about the newer Android versions just pushing notifications to me. Figuring out which sports teams I paid attention to and pushing their scores at me and what not. But the geotracking is getting much more granular. And the example I used was being worried it'd try to nudge me into the pub to watch a game that was on soon enough. And, lo and behold, look at the examples used in their own video.

Anyways, I never thought I'd be at this point, but I'm more and more coming around to the conclusion that the smartphone is a personal and legal liability that they should be paying me to carry, not the other way around. I'm less and less interested in owning one. Android versions for the last number of years have done nothing but get creepier and do automatic things I do not want them to do or try to trick me into reading things I do not want to read or buying things I do not want to buy. The nonsense I didn't ask for has gotten more intrusive. Check out your "voice and audio activity" with google if you have an Android phone. When I checked mine, I'd found they'd used the smartphone to record not just my voice, but friends' and families'. And they're storing it. And if you have a smart speaker, God help you.

What sort of legal liability do you have if somebody in your house gets recorded because of your carelessness in reading EULAs or setting privacy settings and the recording comes back to have negative effects? Can these things be used in slander cases? Should you carry insurance against this sort of thing? Or what if it's working wrong? What if the google beacon in Victoria's Secret picks you up even though you're in Spencer Gifts next door and it's the straw that breaks the camel's back on your marriage. Does they bear any responsibility through falsely reporting your location info through a Google beacon if it's not calibrated right and it picks you up through the wall and reports you as having been in the store? Oh, there's a host of problems just waiting to be tested.

You raise some excellent points, dcarrigg. Call me a dinosaur or a Luddite or just ornery (all true), but this is why I carry an old "dumb" flip-phone. I use it to make and receive phone calls, that's all. Battery life is terrific. $15 a month for unlimited minutes and texts. Everyone in my contact list has a special ring, which I answer. Everyone else (including telemarketers) gets the default ring, which I don't answer. They can leave a message instead.

For everything else I use my computer running Linux, and for road trips to unfamiliar places I have a Garmin. I'm a member of several forums but have never had a facebook, twitter or any other social media account. When I walk down the street I actually focus on the world around me instead of having my face in a screen.

[seobook]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Just found about about Google's Project Beacon. Apparently they've been at it throughout 2018. But a friend who owns a local business just got one in the mail unsolicited. Consider it a Christmas Present from big tech. I'm sure they're just handing them out from the kindness of their hearts... Anyways, they're definately mailing the things out to businesses unsolicited for free at the moment, so they're definitely planning on having this stuff be ubiquitous over the next year

The purpose is to pinpoint smartphone owners' physical location indoors, ostensibly to track google ad conversions, but functionally to know beyond a reasonable doubt which parts of buildings you are in at any given time and then push notifications to people's phones to nudge their behavior. Kind of a way for Google to use your own customer base to sell you more ads.

My view on the feature is more cynical than yours. ;)

You can't turn on location services for *ANY* third party service without also turning it on for Google. And even when users had location services turned off, Google was still recording user location until that became an issue in the press. At that point they lied about the reason why they left it on even when turned off, claiming ti was for wireless traffic management across cell towers, but that is something the cellular service provider does & wouldn't outsource to device manufacturers. They couldn't offload such a task to device manufacturers without also letting device manufacturers know how loaded their systems are & so on, which would be a strategic blunder given that networks also lease tower access from some REITs & Google also has their project Fi which aims to eventually displace carriers if possible.

My thinking on location tracking is that it is not just so they can track online to offline conversion funnels for a particular merchant (they can already do this to a large degree with their always on location services tracking & their partnership with the likes of Mastercard). Rather I think they do it so a business can target customers of a competing business, or perhaps customers of a competing business that went under.

But when push comes to shove, the value of extreme tracking is not just to track the conversions an ad network drove, but also to enable ad networks to over-claim their contribution to the conversion funnel.

When Google was mostly just a search engine & their display ad network was tiny their default click attribution setting in their web analytics service was last-click attribution, as users often search for something late in the funnel before buying it (so no matter who or what sparked demand - a TV commercial, a display ad, a news article, etc. ... the search engine used before the conversion got all the credit). They only shifted away from this model & mindset as YouTube started to become a big slice of their revenues. But the whole point of programmatic advertising is to shift budget across from the relevant publishers with touchpoints in the conversion funnel to shifting it across to the central ad networks. Hey the ad showed in the sidebar of an irrelevant YouTube ad so why not take credit for the conversion?

The trend of core Google ads growing far faster than their partner network was a topic discussed over a half-decade ago. And it has only accelerated since.



The same sort of deal exists with Facebook. If you install an app 28 days after clicking an ad on Facebook they'll take credit for the app install, even though almost all app installs that are driven by an ad happen within 24 hours.

If the central networks over-credit themselves they're under-crediting the rest of the ecosystem.

The really cynical view is this: if ad networks are already taking credit for conversions they had no real part in, what prevents them from targeting ads to users *after* they already converted and then claiming those ad units drove the conversions? If they do it on the same day, who has granular enough data to disprove this while also complying with regulations like GDPR & such?

So I was complaining earlier in this thread about the newer Android versions just pushing notifications to me. Figuring out which sports teams I paid attention to and pushing their scores at me and what not. But the geotracking is getting much more granular. And the example I used was being worried it'd try to nudge me into the pub to watch a game that was on soon enough. And, lo and behold, look at the examples used in their own video.

As Facebook has been hit with all the blowback on fake news stuff, Google has moved to make their mobile device homepage not only a search box but also a personalized news feed.

They are far less likely to get blowback for any of that stuff though, because each feed is personalized & then it leaves no trail when it is done. There are no user comments or shares or such to analyze after the fact to see who got pitched what piece of misinformation.

Mix that in with selection bias & constant tracking of what you click on to deliver more of the same & ultimately the more successful they are at creating a habit out of it the more they fracture society by conforming to whatever political biases a person has & showing them that their view of the world is absolutely correct.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

I think we were talking about this before and you were still back on version 5 or 6 or something? Never really started until Android version 8 upgrade, and only getting worse with time.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

For what it's worth, Shiny, I'm coming around to the conclusion that you were right all along. Some of what Reggie was on about too. And of course seobook. A decade ago, I really think it was all more benign. I just refused to see what the seeds they were planting would grow into.

[Ellen Z]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

You raise some excellent points, dcarrigg. Call me a dinosaur or a Luddite or just ornery (all true), but this is why I carry an old "dumb" flip-phone. I use it to make and receive phone calls, that's all.

I use a modern smart phone for travel. I have a two-year old granddaughter on the east coast -- with a smart phone I can call Uber to travel from the hotel to her house. For the past two years I've spent some time in France each summer for a Buddhist meditation retreat -- my Google Fi smart phone will call the US with no fuss, no extra cost.... also it will translate English into French on the fly when I'm shopping.

BUT I used an old fashioned flip phone for many years, and I am still keeping it alive. I have a flat-rate plan that costs me about $100 a year.

The reason I want to keep a flip phone on the shelf is, it's much more likely to function in case of a disruptive emergency (such as the major earthquake predicted for the west coast.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...really-big-one
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annal...-big-one-comes

"Function" as in, let you send a text message to your family to let them know you are fine.

If you have a modern phone, and you want to reach family/friends in an emergency, a text message is much likely to get through than a voice phone call. I forget the technical reasons for this, but I've been part of several community meetings on how to prepare for possible emergencies, and that was one of the interesting take-home messages.

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

I think we were talking about this before and you were still back on version 5 or 6 or something? Never really started until Android version 8 upgrade, and only getting worse with time.

got a new phone. now on oreo, still no push ads. pie is supposed to hit my phone in feb

[seobook]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

got a new phone. now on oreo, still no push ads. pie is supposed to hit my phone in feb

Here is info on their articles for you feature which shows up on new Chrome tabs on many Android phones & they're testing ads in that feed.

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

press "hide" if the "articles for you" are too obtrusive to ignore. or use a different browser.
i wish google ads were my worst problem in life.

[GRG55]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

got a new phone. now on oreo, still no push ads. pie is supposed to hit my phone in feb

My goodness. I am still trying to work through my overindulgence of turkey and mince tarts...

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

press "hide" if the "articles for you" are too obtrusive to ignore. or use a different browser.
i wish google ads were my worst problem in life.

Starting to be obvious to me that they're a bigger problem than you might realize. Most of my concerns are proactive rather than reactive. The way things are going, this type of thing will probably seem quaint in a couple of years.

[jk]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Starting to be obvious to me that they're a bigger problem than you might realize. Most of my concerns are proactive rather than reactive. The way things are going, this type of thing will probably seem quaint in a couple of years.

since i never look at internet ads it's hard for me to see the duopoly as a problem in terms of who serves ads. i'm more concerned with the information profiles they have on everyone, and how that might be used by an authoritarian regime, or less paranoid, by political manipulators. i hope this is all tinfoil hat stuff, but that's the problem i see. as to whether the advertisers are being fleeced by scam artists, caveat emptor. i'm not shedding tears for the advertisers.

[seobook]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

since i never look at internet ads it's hard for me to see the duopoly as a problem in terms of who serves ads. i'm more concerned with the information profiles they have on everyone, and how that might be used by an authoritarian regime, or less paranoid, by political manipulators. i hope this is all tinfoil hat stuff, but that's the problem i see. as to whether the advertisers are being fleeced by scam artists, caveat emptor. i'm not shedding tears for the advertisers.

it is not just advertisers though. it is also publishers which were heavily clipped by the ad funding shifting from a broad network onto being spent mostly on a few core sites. That in turn will lead to a further reliance on paywalls for legit publications & more of the fake stuff remaining openly accessible for everyone else. Public relations puff pieces replace actual reporting. That in turn has a big impact on the function of society.

When people eventually learn to believe nothing other than what conforms to their pre-existing worldview (and can find matching "proof" for anything they believe in & matching proof of fake news for anything they don't) how well does society function?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Thinking of dumping most of my ADRs.

Tech better watch the hell out. Nasdaq headed for bear market. Long way down from the top floor with bloated market caps like these.

Apple with a big whiff.