Look who's defending users from surveillance marketing
09 September 2018
(updated 14 Jan 2019: added two more examples.)
What's the best defense against surveillance marketing? In some cases, another surveillance marketer. Just like hackers lock up a vulnerable system after they break in to protect against other hackers, surveillance marketers who know what they're doing are helping to protect users from other companies' data collection practices.
Amazon: Retailers include different degrees of data in
email receipts. Amazon only emails consumers links
to their full receipts, limiting the information an
email provider can extract.
Oath gets to know
shoppers through their Yahoo emails | Digital - Ad
Age
Google: Google’s recent changes with Ads Data Hub keeps
data locked within Google Cloud and cannot be combined
outside of Google’s controlled environment. As a
result, data lakes for marketing are under threat by
recent changes by Google.
How does Google’s
Ads Data Hub Affect My Analytics? (Part III of
the Ads Data Hub Series) - Thunder Experience
Cloud
Google again: Google Demanded That T-Mobile, Sprint Not Sell Google Fi Customers' Location Data - Motherboard. (If you want to target Google's users, better pay Google.)
Facebook: Late last week Facebook announced it
would eliminate all third-party data brokers from its
platform. It framed this announcement as a response
to the slow motion train wreck that is the Cambridge
Analytica story. Just as it painted Cambridge as a
“bad actor” for compromising its users’ data,
Facebook has now vilified hundreds of companies who
have provided it fuel for its core business model,
a model that remains at the center of its current
travails.
Newco Shift | Facebook: Tear Down This
Wall.
(And Facebook even runs a Tor hidden
service.)
Real surveillance marketers play defense.
But in most cases, publishers don't. And that's Why Local Newspaper Websites Are So Terrible. What happens when news sites can play some defense of their own?
I don't know, but IMHO it will be an improvement for everybody. And the good news is that browser privacy improvements are finally making it possible.
Bonus links
The people who get how Facebook works are also the most likely to leave it
