The fact on how ad tracking goes on, where your privacy stands, the secrets behind the data being collected on your name without knowing it, being served with a little and taken a lot. The Artificial intelligence and the future.
SEARCH. This is how it all starts, you search for things and they search for you.
While searching for nearest place to buy an Apple Watch I understood that I can do it on mediamarkt.ch which is in Switzerland and surfed around on different categories then went to Apple Watch section and looking at models.
After that I closed the window as I didn’t decide yet but when I went on Facebook apparently I saw a lot of ads from mediamarkt.ch no surprise there, what I did was that I saw like a 100 of Apple Watche’s afterwards, then on google all ads covered by it then every where I went You Tube basically every where.
I was very shocked by it and started to look around how actual tracking works & re-marketing in general.
While you visit a website and that like button inside that is not just a like button that is like a window where your data get recorded through and transferred to different sources which will be used then to show you products related to your research no matter what, this is good right ?
But when you think of it this just leads to a point where what is real like how much is real the content in Facebook, twitter and all social media feeds how much of that is controled for for commercial purpose, I might be wrong but just knowing the fact that this is too much optimized makes me feel bad, no wonder that Facebook is changing the news feed algorithm constantly and nothing better is with other social platforms.
On my research i understood that collecting those data for sure is consumes some of the pagespeed also, how i got in to it was looking at the page speed by adding and removing different like button, page widget, share buttons and any thing that could track down and get data outside.
If you ask your self how in the hell exactly what i was searching on google and seen on a blog now appears on fb, well you know now 😀 .
Hmm so this is it ? You think oh ok this is good my data get analyzed and of course it shows relevant ads, this is supposed to be good right ?
Well not actually this is just scratching the surface, there are so much complex data collection methods used widely from almost every single major sites that will make you freak out, and not just to show you up some Ad e.g while you were searching for a good Albanian Beach Hotels and on the right sidebar banners showing you “Cheapest hotel rooms in Albania” on google ads.
Yeah but how they know that you are you, you might ask,-// say what are you going bananas or what.
ID is something that represents you no matter where you are and connects every dot about you so this is what happens these days everything you do you have a digital ID , large and powerful companies have databases beyond imagination and capacity, don’t worry they won’t run out of space, even for the 3 Billion internet users worldwide.
The ID that was created for you during web surf that will be linked to all data you generate and it goes even further that in some cases even on different devices your ID are going to be merged in to one by analyzing patterns . None of companies share these details and they are not transparent about it, imagine what goes behind the scenes.
This might be some hard to explain so let’s take an example.
You are right now in New York on a iMac, logged in on Facebook, YouTube etc. Looking to buy an electric car , you look at different options and there you see Tesla Model S & BMW i8. On Tesla.com you see Ads about BMW i8 trying to convince you that is the right solution, remember you are logged in every where so your data are being collected on your digital ID all the time.
Your name is Hans and actually you live on Germany you were only for a visit on New York, so you continue looking to best options to buy a BMW i8 or a Tesla Model S on a Windows PC but logged in every where once more. Even if you go at tesla.com from Germany a million times BMW won’t show any ad as they tracked you down and know your current location is Germany so competitor is thousand of km a way and they don’t need ads that much any more., believe it or not they know even if you visited for the first time the site or not.
This is known as canvas fingerprinting.
Remember that this is surveillance this is AI, NSA, NASA it goes beyond ads and to keep your privacy is becoming scary.
How to protect your self ? Maybe TOR , VPN , VPS etc. But all of these cost so best way to protect your self is to not put online something that you don’t want some one to see, not even in a private account . Great example is Google Photos a free unlimited service . Do you really think that is free ? Let me tell you something
if a product is free know a fact that you are the product being sold.
How does Google Profit from something like this you might ask, well not that they only train their AI on face detection or to create automatically an awesome portrait with blurred background with just data and trillion of images analyzed, but they also might sell that data to government specially US which invests 60% on army and surveillance , don’t ask why some face detection device on US border would know you without even being there at all.