I love how you say ‘almost every app’ and then your three examples include two Meta apps and also Twitter. Their whole business models are to gather as much as possible to sell.
Not every app needs your health data, financial information, and usage data to send short messages to their friends. I get wanting a certain amount of data in order to do certain things but needing basically everything possible frankly SHOULD BE eye opening to people if they didn’t already know.
I just happened to pick the lowest hanging fruits. I could list many more but it’d be easier to list the ones that don’t.
Put it this way: Android now has an automated feature which disables app permissions for apps you’ve not used in a while. I regularly get notifications of apps that have had permissions blocked because I’ve not used them in a week. Even Google realises that developers are getting obnoxious with their permission demands.
And Google aren’t innocent. E.g. Google Home, Chrome. But also non-Google: Binance, banking apps, Fiverr, AliExpress.
I suggest installing an Android firewall. You can use a non-root version. You’ll get so pissed off with the constant ‘phone home’ notifications day & night that you’ll disable them. I was getting fucking RSI in my wrist cos the notifications made my Garmin vibrate almost non-stop for every notification going from a phone app to somewhere across thw world with my data. Last night I got 3 notifications in 15mins stopping me from sleeping and I still had things locked down a lot.
Until you’ve looked at how truly obscene it is you don’t realise just how banal this post is.
Their whole business models are to gather as much as possible to sell.
I wish people would stop repeating this, since that’s not how any of this works. It’s a common misconception that way too many people believe to be true. Logically it doesn’t make sense - having data that other companies don’t have is what makes the company valuable, so why would they sell that? Google would just buy Facebook’s data and vice versa, and then neither of them would have a competitive advantage.
Data is used for ad targeting. Advertisers specify the audience to show their ads to, and Google/FB/etc deliver the ads to the specified audience. The advertisers never actually see the data, nor do they see the exact users that saw their ad.
How do you think Meta and other similar companies attract advertisers? They sell ad space to them with the ability to highly target ads to their users.
That’s what I mean by sell - they are literally letting advertisers buy ads to target to all of the people who they’ve gotten information about that would most likely click on and convert to buyers. Non-targeted ads are significantly less valuable from an advertising standpoint because if they don’t apply to you, you’re more likely to ignore it and the advertiser is getting less money back on their ad purchase investment.
They are focused on the immediate profit, not long term; no publicly traded corporation focuses on long term, not anymore. If it increases their bottom line to sell my data, they will.
What they have that’s unique is their particular algorithm for targeting. They don’t need to keep my info to themselves to profit off said algorithm.
In short, I don’t believe you. shrug Nothing personal…
But if they sell the data, then isn’t their ads delivery system less effective and therefore less valuable? If two people have the same data sets, they can undercut each other when selling it/access to it. Makes more business sense to hold onto the data, and just sell ad delivery to businesses that want to show ads to the users that that data is about.
If it increases their bottom line to sell my data, they will.
It doesn’t though, since the data (having unique targeting attributes that otter ad networks don’t have) is what makes the company valuable.
What they have that’s unique is their particular algorithm for targeting. They don’t need to keep my info to themselves to profit off said algorithm.
Targeting is mostly about having good data. The algorithms are all based on having the data. If other companies have the same data, they’d be able to use it in similar ways.
I love how you say ‘almost every app’ and then your three examples include two Meta apps and also Twitter. Their whole business models are to gather as much as possible to sell.
Not every app needs your health data, financial information, and usage data to send short messages to their friends. I get wanting a certain amount of data in order to do certain things but needing basically everything possible frankly SHOULD BE eye opening to people if they didn’t already know.
I just happened to pick the lowest hanging fruits. I could list many more but it’d be easier to list the ones that don’t.
Put it this way: Android now has an automated feature which disables app permissions for apps you’ve not used in a while. I regularly get notifications of apps that have had permissions blocked because I’ve not used them in a week. Even Google realises that developers are getting obnoxious with their permission demands.
And Google aren’t innocent. E.g. Google Home, Chrome. But also non-Google: Binance, banking apps, Fiverr, AliExpress.
I suggest installing an Android firewall. You can use a non-root version. You’ll get so pissed off with the constant ‘phone home’ notifications day & night that you’ll disable them. I was getting fucking RSI in my wrist cos the notifications made my Garmin vibrate almost non-stop for every notification going from a phone app to somewhere across thw world with my data. Last night I got 3 notifications in 15mins stopping me from sleeping and I still had things locked down a lot.
Until you’ve looked at how truly obscene it is you don’t realise just how banal this post is.
I wish people would stop repeating this, since that’s not how any of this works. It’s a common misconception that way too many people believe to be true. Logically it doesn’t make sense - having data that other companies don’t have is what makes the company valuable, so why would they sell that? Google would just buy Facebook’s data and vice versa, and then neither of them would have a competitive advantage.
Data is used for ad targeting. Advertisers specify the audience to show their ads to, and Google/FB/etc deliver the ads to the specified audience. The advertisers never actually see the data, nor do they see the exact users that saw their ad.
How do you think Meta and other similar companies attract advertisers? They sell ad space to them with the ability to highly target ads to their users.
That’s what I mean by sell - they are literally letting advertisers buy ads to target to all of the people who they’ve gotten information about that would most likely click on and convert to buyers. Non-targeted ads are significantly less valuable from an advertising standpoint because if they don’t apply to you, you’re more likely to ignore it and the advertiser is getting less money back on their ad purchase investment.
Yes, but that’s different to directly selling the data, which is why gets said (or implied) a lot.
They are focused on the immediate profit, not long term; no publicly traded corporation focuses on long term, not anymore. If it increases their bottom line to sell my data, they will.
What they have that’s unique is their particular algorithm for targeting. They don’t need to keep my info to themselves to profit off said algorithm.
In short, I don’t believe you. shrug Nothing personal…
But if they sell the data, then isn’t their ads delivery system less effective and therefore less valuable? If two people have the same data sets, they can undercut each other when selling it/access to it. Makes more business sense to hold onto the data, and just sell ad delivery to businesses that want to show ads to the users that that data is about.
It doesn’t though, since the data (having unique targeting attributes that otter ad networks don’t have) is what makes the company valuable.
Targeting is mostly about having good data. The algorithms are all based on having the data. If other companies have the same data, they’d be able to use it in similar ways.