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I don't think people understand just how much "data-driven advertising" is a fucking scam. For example, Facebook has known my date of birth for about 15 years, and pretty much every ad it serves is for activities explicitly for under 30s. I'm 38. It knows this.
Facebook knows I live in London, and has known this fact for more than a decade. It just loves to serve me ads for businesses in Birmingham, where it knows I don't live.
Google and the brand I bought it from know that I own a specific type of mattress. They know this because I googled it and came into the website and bought it. And yet, I get advertised that specific mattress, from that specific supplier.
This is going to be one of those threads that I wish Mastodon had a "turn off replies" features, so anyway before replying, please thoroughly read this and also know that I work in marketing so I have a decent grasp on how advertising works, which is how I can confidently say the entire thing is a fucking scam run by the stupidest people in the world. https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/01/18/how-to-give-advice-on-the-internet-without-being-an-utter-menace/
I ended up blogging about this in much more detail because I think it's important we talk about this https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/07/05/scams-upon-scams-the-data-driven-advertising-grift/
(not a rickroll, I promise)
A couple of people have been asking about how the whole ~stealing elections~ thing works in the context of this scam and I'm probably going to have to write a follow up working through that, but where I'm at is pretty much that Cambridge Analytica, etc, are very much in the category of their product is making people think they *could* and that the "microtargeting" was wildly, wildly overstated.
OK here we go, why the "stealing elections with microtargeting" thing is probably a grift, too https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/07/06/can-you-steal-an-election-with-targeted-ads/
@stavvers@masto.ai I think that this could be more the advertiser's fault more than anything else but who knows. You maybe should contact the agency and ask
#sometimes-its-also-on-the-lines-of-you-knowing-something-so-you-can-tell-other-people
@gabboman I work in marketing. You do not need to explain this to me.
@stavvers@masto.ai I would like to apologize. I am sorry
@stavvers Amazon are always at this. "You bought this one specific, very niche thing that will last for years? Here, you should buy one of these other ones!"
@Tarbh The other Amazon one that makes me laugh is when it asks if you want to subscribe and save for an object such as a fucking deckchair. No, I do not need to buy a deckchair every six months.
@stavvers but you may want a 2nd mattress! Or a 3rd. Or a 4th!
... perhaps they're trying to have you recreate the Princess & the Pea fable?
@stavvers All the platforms I use know I'm a massive Muse fan, because I literally never shut up about Muse and engage with the relevant posts and buy albums and tickets etc, and the algorithms have collectively used their amazing data machine and decided that they should constantly push... Muse. I often think about how much money both the band and the platforms are wasting in advertising to me
@stavvers Another current favourite of my FB ads is a bra company that specialises in cup sizes up to the size below mine. Occasionally interspersed with another company that specialises in cup sizes from the size above mine. I am being specifically shown every size of bra apart from the one I could actually purchase
@originofstimmetry Hahahaha I get bra ones too, specifically for "comfort bras for smaller sizes". Which I am not, and Google must know I shop from a specialist big bra shop, while Facebook has seen photos with my cleavage.
@originofstimmetry @stavvers
OMG, I am always searching on Google for "comfortable bras for large breasted women" and the next day I get served up ads for bras in A& B cup sizes! I have yet to find a comfortable bra, and I've been looking for over 50 years!
@msglincoln @stavvers Sounds like we're all getting the same ad 
@stavvers Back in my social media marketing days I wrote an article on how I am able to confuse FB ads easily. This week, after well more than a decade on FB, it served up an ad almost targeted correctly. I did not click.
@stavvers Sometimes, just sometimes, targetted advertising seems to "work" (by which I mean: it targets the ideal customer at the perfect time to help secure a sale).
But the vast majority of the time, it feels like it's no better than the banner ads of the late 90s and early 00s, targetted using nothing more than basic geo-IP tracking and/or the subject matter of the site hosting the ad.
Big data and the death of privacy online totally paid for itself! 
Disclaimer: between a regular adblocker, usually-on scriptblocker; sandboxed/isolated cookies, etc. I can't remember the last time I saw a targetted ad online. So maybe the state-of-the-art has improved. But I doubt it! (And your experience seems to suggest that my hunch is right!)
@stavvers This is brilliant and I will share it. Thank you.
@stavvers I enjoyed that, ta.
@stavvers Targeted ads are far more expensive and require lots of middle men, but AFAIK if you spend the same amount of cash and instead buy a much higher volume of contextual ads, the ROI from the targeted ads is something like 3% higher. This is somewhat meaningful if you run an extremely high volume of ads, but it doesn’t even begin to justify the computational intensity of targeted advertising and the insane market caps of the businesses involved.
You say not a rickroll like that's a good thing.
@kingkaufman I feel it's a very obligatory disclaimer when posting any links remotely pertinent to infosec
@stavvers that being said, it's worth bearing in mind that back then (7 years ago) far more data scraping and targeting was legally permissible than for now. There's a reason why Meta locked down political adverts after 2016. So just because it's a scam now doesn't necessarily mean it was a scam back then.
IMO Cambridge Analytica and their ilk are part of the scam.
What makes the stealing elections thing work is not the sophistication of their technology, but the crudeness of the product they "sell". They never stole elections for any complex or sophisticated policies. Only for fascist demagouges.
Social Media can't create the desire for a special brand of mattres in people, but it can make them afraid and angry. That has always been enough to sell some people fascism.
@stavvers overstated?
there exists a real memory hole in the states about the G. W. Bush years, but there was a hilarious narrative that the Bush's chief campaign advisor Karl Rove was some kind of brain genius that could perceive these invisible demographic segments and zero in on them with direct mailing and phone calls.
and this was credulously accepted by *everyone*. after an election where that candidate quite famously got fewer votes and was essentially appointed to the presidency by the court.
@jackdaw_ruiz this entirely passed me by but completely fits the pattern of Evil Supervillain Genius and I bet he got a lot of grift work off the back of it
@jackdaw_ruiz I read the book Bush's Brain which is the story of Texas Politics in the 90s and how Rove drove it into the hell hole it is now. After one election one Democrat was committed suicide and another was in jail. It wasn't so much that he was a tenacious genius, it's that he is an asshole who just has to win at all costs.
@jackdaw_ruiz That whole reputation pretty much died on election night 2012, live on Fox News.
He was -- and is -- the nickname that G.W gave him: "Turd Blossom."
@stavvers thanks! this really changed my mind, I love it when someone does that!!
@stavvers This is really interesting, thanks for posting it!
@stavvers I always feel like even when they get this right, there's just not that many exact matches for a particular profile and Meta/Google/etc. aren't in the business of going, "we already advertised to the 68 people in Basingstoke interested in socks and Vauxhalls, no point spending any more" so just blow whatever you give them advertising to randos under the flimsy justification of ML algorithms and over-eager classification.
@stavvers eBay did a number of experiments on this in 2013 with the result that search advertising was not statistically distinguishable from not-advertising, and for the sub-groups where advertising was distinguishable from 0, the ROI was negative (ie: the ads cost more than the sales generated).
eBay pays for search placement to this day.
@RAOF this is absolutely wonderful, thanks for sending this over!
@stavvers Do you think Cambridge Analytica's influence campaign is an example of how targeted demographic advertising can work, or was it not as effective as reported?
Loved the article by the way, very well written.
@bongobaggins honestly, have you ever read their "methods" for their "behavioural microtargeting"? It is complete gibberish, woo pseudopsychology, and there's no actual evidence they did anything in the campaign ("self destructing communications", the guy said iirc) so I'd probably put them in the category of "the product is they *could*"
That said, they do seem to use humans reading public posts for data gathering
@stavvers No I haven't looked into it at all. Someone made a lot of money, I know that
@stavvers It's such a relief that only private companies are wasting their time and money on this, and not, for example, government comms departments.
@internetsdairy Don't ask me how, but I am convinced Matt Hancock is mostly responsible for making it quite so egregious.
@stavvers Possibly! I think I might have mentioned to you before that at DCMS he had his digital team right outside his office and he would regularly pop out and 'help' them.
@internetsdairy You did not but omg this is so so on brand for him, yikes.
@stavvers That was his heyday of Twitter content, with his own photographer to snap him playing cricket with some "diverse" children or jumping over a tiny fence.
@internetsdairy @stavvers government intelligence have been known to target phones of people who spend lots of time around certain buildings (embassies, consulates, etc.) with enticements to become moles.
@stavvers having briefly worked in adtech (I still feel dirty) - yup, it's all bullshit. Worked for an ad verification company, and despite what they claimed, our systems were trivial to evade, and fraud is beyond rampant.
@stavvers
in one of my previous jobs I was the advertiser. from there I got the idea that marketing people need to spend their budget and if they don't, they will get less budget for the next project or next year. they tell their bossed that the thousanths of percent success rate from the ads is great and we should do more of that.
what's your opinion on that?
@hananc oh this is *exactly* how it works, and what I was alluding to when I mentioned it's something to show your boss so they don't think you're spending all your time tending your geraniums
@stavvers That's very good. I also get this. I travel a lot for my job, and for 6 months after I have been somewhere, I get ads offering accommodation and food recommendations for the place I have already visited.
Also, have you read any of Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) work on this? He has been hammering on about how terrible internet ads are for ages.
https://doctorow.medium.com/killing-online-surveillance-with-contextual-ads-7478c4536ea1
@motomatters @pluralistic I hadn't actually, but looks like we're very much on the same page
@stavvers @pluralistic Doctorow is depressingly prolific (I thought I wrote a lot, but he puts me to shame) and has written extensively about internet advertising, tech, and more, and coined the term "enshittification" to describe the process by which tech platforms start by trying to be useful products, and end up ruining themselves by trying to extract as much income from users on both sides of the platform
@stavvers
I go in to look at "why did you get this ad" sometimes on FB, with particularly egregious examples.
The usual set of criteria suggest that the ad company wanted to target people in the UK who have a pulse
@stavvers Which leads to the question...
How come they're still making record profits, if their ads aren't that well targeted?
Underpaying their workers. All this ad shit is funded by money which should go to the workers in the first place.
Let me say it again: Corporations are paying you less so they can buy targeted ads and tell themselves they're selling more.