Data Brokers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

moving on our main story tonight concerns computers there's one in my house one in my pocket and one on my wrist and fun fact if they all broke at the same time i die more specifically we're going to talk about the fact that we've all had unsettling moments when it became clear that our computer was monitoring our activities a little more closely than we might like after financial planner rod lawrence opened a new office he used a credit card to buy baby wipes to clean the place he says after picking up just one canister he was shocked to be bombarded with targeted online ads for other baby wipes and more children's products something this single guy around town says he's definitely not interested in at least not now yeah it's true poor rod got roped into the modern update of hemingway's classic story for sale baby shoes click here and look of course rod didn't want that he was a man about town he was only interested in three things getting laid getting paid and rocking the hell out of some wrap around shades but we have all found ourselves being targeted by ads for something oddly specific and thought how on earth did they know to show me that and tonight we're going to talk about who makes that possible data brokers it's a multi-billion dollar industry encompassing everyone from credit reporting companies to these weird people finding websites that pop up whenever you google the name of your friends sketchy new boyfriend to these names that you may never have heard of but what all these companies have in common is they collect your personal information and then resell or share it with others as one expert puts it they're the middlemen of surveillance capitalism which sounds like both a horrific profession and also a b-plus jake gyllenhaal thriller he's not a spy and he's not a civilian he's the middle man and ladies in this one he shows trunk and look i know it is not news that you get tracked online in fact roughly six in ten u.s adults say that they don't think it is possible to go through daily life without having data collected about them by companies or the government making four out of ten us adults embarrassingly wrong but this this isn't just about the convenience and or irritation of targeted ads data brokers operate in a sprawling unregulated ecosystem which can get very creepy very fast the major u.s retailer officemax knew not only that mike say's daughter was dead but how she died it says mike say daughter killed in car crash or current business and this is my home why would they have that kind of information why would they need that right and obviously that is completely appalling but i will say it is not that surprising to me that officemax was behind that as they're clearly not entirely on top of their if you google officemax right now the people also ask questions include and this is true is officemax the same as office depot is office max and staples the same and does officemax exist the truth is when it comes to data brokers they know significantly more about you than you might like and do significantly more with it than you might think so tonight let's talk about the whole industry and let's start with how your information is collected basically every time you interact with society you are leaving little breadcrumbs that can be gathered together and sold and much of this happens online thanks in large part to cookies cookies were developed in the early days of the internet and they're actually one of the things that make it slightly better a distinction that they share with henry winkler's twitter feed and literally nothing else what they essentially do is enable websites to remember you they are why amazon remembers that you put a 106 complete box set of the mentalist in your cart after eating an unexpectedly strong weed gummy even if you don't and if that's all cookies did it'd honestly be fine but the practice gradually evolved to invol to include third-party cookies basically companies other than the site that you are on planting a piece of code in your browser that allows them to track where else you are going on the internet just watch as a tech writer explains what they found when they tried to learn just how many companies were tracking them so i started the day on google and did a search and nine trackers were downloaded onto my computer trackers do what it sounds like they do they track you they can get my ip address or the device i'm using or the screen size they were able to determine my location very precisely next i went to huffpo and i was swarmed the the trackers kind of multiplied there were dozens and dozens and they're just the trackers are just kind of you know on my heels as i go around the web yeah and i don't know about you but i don't want a whole crowd of strangers watching what i search for on the internet not because it's gross because it's private private doesn't have to mean gross there's nothing gross about looking up let's say are there any shower heads with a contains pulp option i wouldn't want it all the time i wouldn't need it all the time that's why it's an option the option to have some pulp in the shower it's can i finish it's a normal shower most of the time but occasionally i'll have the option to get pelted with something that's got some heft to it just some weighted chunks of whatever swamp for one flop something to wake me up and keep me on my toes sometimes i need it don't claim that you don't we'd all love to pretend that the sun only rises in peace time but things being what they are we find ourselves again at war so yeah start my day and rock me with some juicy bits that's what i want and i don't want anyone watching me when i search to see how close we are to that particular technology existing because it is private but data brokers often take all the breadcrumbs that they have gathered about you pair them with other data they can obtain and then share all of it with businesses who want to market to you and they will frame this as a win-win here is how epsilon one of the biggest data broker firms positions itself this is a person so is this here's another and another they all look and act different but people are fundamentally the same they all want respect protection and an easier time getting the things they need from brands right the big three it's all in maslow's famous hierarchy of needs people want their physiological needs met their safety accounted for and their search history handed over directly to the aflac duck epsilon's ad even goes on to show how that particular service of theirs works demonstrating how they can create a client id for someone that contains everything they know about them like the fact they're a vegan and that they make 45 to 50 000 a year or that they are a 41 year old male who is married with kids at home and is googling snow globe stuck in but what to do question mark and once companies like epsilon collect enough information about you they can sort you into groups data broker firms sell access to lists with names like couples with clout ambitious singles boomers and boomerangs potlucks and the great outdoors golf carts and gourmets and kids and cabernet those are all both real names of groups compiled by a data broker and as of now immediately greenlit shows on tlc and look you might not care if a company wants to toss your data in a group called kids and cabernet so marketers can more effectively sell you things that make you seem like a bad mom in a fun way but there is also a dark side here because some companies can and do draw up even more narrowly targeted lists like people with certain ailments or sexual preferences and then sell those lists to anyone who wants to buy them and what they can buy is pretty troubling wreal bought thousands of names and addresses of local people with serious illnesses this group living in the 27607 zip code have diabetes these people in 27608 have cancer these residents of 27609 have high blood pressure and all of these locals battle depression this list is moms to be so we brought this data and it and it tells us you're pregnant yes and you are i am yeah i am 18 weeks that's pretty creepy isn't it i honestly did not think there could be a worse thing to ask a woman you don't know than are you pregnant but you are pregnant want to know who i paid to find out has certainly entered the chat and if you're thinking but that's illegal under hipaa right well no as one researcher pointed out the medical information that you relate to your physician is highly protected but if you go to a medical website and search for terms like hiv or abortion that information is not protected at all it's a system that seems ripe for abuse before you learn that some data brokers have offered lists such as suffering seniors payday loan central hispanic or even help needed i am 90 days behind on bills and some in this industry will insist that they would never put people at risk by selling their data remember epsilon the company that collects clouds of information about you in 2014 their then ceo even went on 60 minutes to reassure people that his business in particular operated in a completely above board manner if there are abuses out there we don't believe those happen within our company and we would be the first to raise our hand oh really you would be the first to raise your hand would you that is interesting especially because last year epsilon settled with the doj for 150 million dollars for facilitating elder fraud schemes after admitting that it sold more than 30 million consumers data to clients who employees knew were carrying out scams and they were doing it for nearly a decade so i guess that that guy really should have been doing that entire interview with his hand in the air and at this point you may be thinking okay i think i get it i am sufficiently creeped out there is nothing more that you need to tell me well hold on what about the fact that apps on your phone can give away your exact location to third parties sometimes without you even knowing it this free flashlight app settles with the ftc for doing just that and they are not alone take life360 an app giving families the opportunity to keep track of one another you may have seen their ads featuring parents looking relieved because they can see where their kids are going and know when they have safely reached their destination well guess what in a report from the website the markup says that life360 sells its location data to about a dozen different brokers who then sell it to marketers yeah it turns out they were selling location data to around 12 different brokers it's like those old commercials it's 10 o'clock do you know where your children are because if so same and i have to tell you live 360 insist that they are no longer doing that and anyway they had de-identified their users data before selling it that last claim is actually very common among both data brokers and the companies that they work with and it is worth taking a look at because while it sounds reassuring the truth is it can be incredibly easy to find out who is behind a number or a code one team of researchers even found that 99.9 of americans would be correctly re-identified in any data set using just 15 demographic attributes among them age gender and marital status and the ease of de-anonymizing data is something that we have actually known about for years in 2006 aol turned over a bunch of these anonymized search records of their users to the public and it only took a few short hours for reported decode who user number 4417749 was between searches for things like numb fingers 60 single men and dog that urinates on everything the reporter uncovered a woman named thelma arnold she was age 62. okay i'm not saying that it is at all pleasant that that happened but for the record i am glad that it introduced me to thelma arnold because i love that woman she hasn't given up despite her numb fingers lackluster love life an utterly broken dog none of that is stopping her from shooting her shot and looking for single men in her area we stan a middle-aged queen with stamina as we looked into this story we constantly got reminders that none of us are really anonymous online at one point a researcher clicked on this company's website didn't do anything else just went there on his browser and later that day got this email saying that they knew he visited and that we offer a pretty cool service called website visitor identification which helps brands identify who's browsing their website in fact it's how we knew how to send you this quick email which is just objectively unsettling i don't want anyone tracking what my staff members are doing online mainly because i don't want to know how many of them have looked up what is john oliver like and it is not like data brokers are super careful about who gets your sensitive information you have already seen a local news station ambush a pregnant woman and a few years ago cbs bought some location data from brokers and it did not take much for them to find out whose it was where they lived and what they were doing no names or phone numbers were tied to the data but it was easy to figure out who each phone belongs to based on where they spend their nights here in greenwich one phone pinged in the morning inside a seven million dollar mansion the person then visited a country club before heading downtown and returning home yeah that doesn't feel great does it although i will say that particular example is not that surprising to me if you told me an individual woke up in a 7 million mansion in greenwich connecticut and made me guess where they went next i'd have gone with i don't know um a country club downtown to hunt humans for sport and then home again and i'd have been pretty sure that i was right and the thing is that kind of identifying information can cause huge problems just last year a priest was forced to resign after a catholic newsletter said it used app data signals from grinder to monitor his activity and matching his phone to his residence essentially outing him which is a massive harmful invasion of privacy and definitely the worst scandal ever to hit the catholic church also just quick side note here catholic church are you absolutely sure that jesus was homophobic think about it he had mutually respectful friendships with women a distant relationship with his father and when he found out he was going to be betrayed he invited everyone to a confrontational dinner i'm just saying it might be worth re-examining your thesis there and look you might still think i don't care about this my life is an open book i have no secrets so data brokers can just have at it even if that is true for you though consider that there are others out there who might have very good reasons to not want to be found donna is a domestic violence victim we're protecting her identity one of her addresses came up on a data broker site she says that's frightening if you have someone that's tried to kill you for them to be able to just type in your name and any known address that you've ever stayed in can pop up it's scary because now they know ways to start trying to find you right and that's not just theoretical it has happened in new hampshire a stalker killed a former classmate after finding her with information that he bought from a data broker for 45 and if you have a stalker or you're a victim of domestic violence it is understandable to want your information removed from these people search sites unfortunately each has its own specific and sometimes very complex process of requesting the removal of information and there is no federal law requiring that they honor an opt-out request at all and the lack of regulation here doesn't just benefit individuals who might mean you harm it benefits the government too because it gives them a very attractive loophole to the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures because under that the government typically needs a warrant to collect information about you without your consent but if it is not forcing someone to turn over your data if it's simply buying it from a data broker that is apparently fine no warrant necessary and you can see how valuable that would be to them it happens all the time in fact federal agencies from the fbi to ice have purchased data without warrants public disclosures or robust oversight to carry out everything from criminal investigations to deportations and the thing is you might not know if your information has been supplied to the government by an app even the company behind the app might not know because it might sell your info to a broker which then resells it to someone else which then supplies it to the government i'll give you an example a couple of years back vice found that the app muslim pro which lets muslims know when to pray have been selling user location data to a broker that supplied information to the us government and while because the chain is so opaque it is hard to know what exactly was sold or what the government did with it the app's users were understandably pretty alarmed feeling disturbed appalled but not surprised sarah mustafa used muslim pro that app has since reportedly severed ties with its data partners so intrusive you know my conversation with god is not information that the government needs yeah of course it's not information the government needs there is a reason the book wasn't called are you there god it's me margaret and homeland security's on the line as well hope that's cool so to recap here we've got shady data brokers with virtually no oversight collecting your data and building profiles that can track who you are where you are and what you are most likely to do or buy you cannot edit this dossier and others from cops to reporters to your own abusers can find and use this information it's not a great situation so what do we do well it is a bit tricky especially given the fact that the entire economy of the internet right now is basically built on this practice all the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product they make money by selling your data but experts say that there are actually some small steps that you can personally take you can use web browsers like these to help better protect you against third-party tracking and if you have an iphone you can go to the privacy menu hit the tracking button and turn off allow apps to request to track but this should not be your responsibility your privacy should be the default setting here and there should be legal fixes to this other countries have actually tried the eu passed a law to force sites to disclose cookies and allow you to opt out but i will say companies now often cleverly present those options in the most annoying way possible with accept all cookies and easy default but if you want to reject them forcing you to go through multiple confusing steps for no clear reason which is very smart to be honest no one is going to put in the work to reject cookies just to sneak a peek at an article titled five times andrew garfield's just was you'd much rather just hit accept and enjoy your remaining time on this earth gazing at the most emotionally connected spider-man to ever splooge the ooze now as for here in the u.s individual states have tried to limit data brokers but advocates say that what is really needed is a comprehensive federal privacy law governing them this has been proposed for years now but nothing has happened for a couple of key reasons first data brokers spending on lobbying in 2020 rivaled that of facebook and google but also politicians now famously build their campaigns on data obtained from brokers both parties regularly boast about how much they use data in fact just listen to former rnc chair reince priebus openly bragging about it everything about almost every potential voter in georgia is known and it's not even a joke they they know what beer they drink what car they drive how many kids they have and all that data is used to target every single voter in georgia it's true politicians rely on data to be able to target our interests with pinpoint precision although therefore i do wonder why no presidential candidate has yet targeted me personally with as promising to fight for the shower of morning chunks that i so richly deserve i google it all the time you would have my vote instantly but it is very frustrating that the people who could do something about data brokers are so actively incentivized not to but here is where we may actually be able to help because interestingly the one time that congress has acted quickly to safeguard people's privacy was in the 1980s when robert bork was nominated to the supreme court and a reporter walked into a local video store and asked the manager whether he could have a peek at books video rental history and he got it as soon as congress realized there was nothing stopping anyone from retrieving their video rental records too they freaked the out and lo and behold the video privacy protection act was passed with quite deliberate speed so it seems when congress's own privacy is at risk they somehow find a way to act and it also seems like they're not entirely aware just how easy it is for anyone and i do mean anyone to get their personal information which brings me to me because in researching this story we realized there is any number of perfectly legal bits of that we could engage in we could for example use data brokers to go fishing for members of congress by creating a demographic group consisting of men aged 45 and up in a five mile radius of the u.s capital who had previously visited sites regarding or searched for terms including divorce massage hair loss and midlife crisis we could we could call that group congress and cabinet and then target that list with ads that might attract those men to click like marriage shouldn't be a prison or can you vote twice we could also throw in do you want to read ted cruz erotic fan fiction just to see what would happen and if anyone clicked we'd be able to harvest even more data from them which we could then theoretically take steps to de-anonymize now am i saying that we're actually going to do that collect all that raw information and store it in let's say a manila envelope somewhere well i am sorry to disappoint you we are not going to do that why would we when we have already done it because all that raw data is currently right in here and honestly this whole exercise was creepy we ran those three targeted ads this week in the capitol hill area and to give you a sense of just how many clicks we got it was very much not zero do you want to see more because i do please come with me because let's let's start with the very first hit that we got it came at 3 35 pm on tuesday afternoon from around the embassy row area when a man fitting our demographic description clicked on the ted cruz ad meaning that we now have his ip address and device id and also know that he did it on an android phone so we could now take steps to identify him just like we could with all these others who clicked on one of our ads in the capitol hill area this week including at least three who may have been inside the capitol building itself one of whom clicked on the can you vote twice ad one of whom clicked on the divorce one and another who clicked on the ted cruz erotic fanfiction which was distressingly popular if you're thinking how on earth is any of this legal i totally agree with you it shouldn't be and if you happen to be a legislator who is feeling a little nervous right now about whether your information is in this envelope and you are terrified about what i might do with it you might want to channel that worry into making sure that i can't do anything anyway sleep well that's our show thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week good night you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 7,099,877

Keywords:

Id: wqn3gR1WTcA

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Barbaricliberal]

Insert obligatory PSA about Ublock Origin for browser based ad-blocking, and especially Pi-Hole for ad-blocking on all devices on a wifi network.

Combine it with the PiVPN, and you can have ad-blocking and privacy capabilities when also outside the home. It's especially useful if you want to connect to a public wifi or something and don't want to worry about anyone monitoring your internet traffic or anything like that.

For instance, ~25% of my traffic queries are ad, analytical, or tracking in some form.

[u/MegaBaumTV]

Fantastic episode. The ending was great and I do hope that we'll get a follow-up on that in a few months.

[u/Darabo]

Here's a useful article with direct links and info on how to opt-out from the major data broker sites.

Here’s a mega-list of opt-out links for data brokers and all sorts of databases! I spent the past hour opting out of more databases and services I didn't know existed until now...

The CCPA for Californians makes opting out much, much easier on many sites, but it's often semi-hidden and/or a seperate link.

Edit: Here’s another list and guide with opt-out links and which opt-outs are high priority.

[u/violue]

I liked the attempt to put the Fear in congress but it also didn't feel like enough.

[u/Nachttalk]

He should have dropped just a few names of politicians he got some info on, without dropping any details.

That way he could have created some real pressure. Because as of right now, I suppose most of them would just be like "ain't me, don't care", thus nothing would change at all.

[u/Justausername1234]

A reminder to any major tech companies who might be reading this that strong privacy laws are good for big tech. They help reinforce your strong market position as data collectors and prevent third-parties from providing people with the raw data that you don't want to share. They also hinder start-ups from growing to compete with you because they're not going to get to exploit data the same way you could while you were growing. So get out there and lobby for better privacy laws.

[u/extrobe]

We play ‘guess who googled it’ in the office … anytime one of us starts getting adverts for something unusual, we try and work out who in the office it was searching for it.

But you can also use this at home to work out what birthday/Christmas presents your other half has been searching/ordering for you. My wife thinks I have some sort of superpower 🦸‍♂️

[u/Black_Dumbledore]

I feel like their legal team definitely advised them not to reveal the info/names in the envelope at the end.

[u/NewClayburn]

Capitalism always falls back on the "choice" defense. You can boycott. You can choose a different product. You can refuse all cookies. Whatever.

But it's such utter bullshit because the whole purpose of the system is to use money to manipulate the playing conditions. We don't actually have a choice. Most people can only afford to make decisions based on price and accessibility. A lot of people aren't even aware of the problems, as this has shown people don't even know certain apps are selling their data, and when the problem is known companies purposely make it difficult to opt out. And then all this data is used for targeted advertising too, which again takes away you're free will because they literally have psychographic information on you that they use to push highly effective advertising in order to push you toward a certain action. This is the whole system.

We aren't just products; we're also highly manipulated consumers. We're also the exploited labor which makes us dependent on this system too because how many Walmart employees really want Walmart to disappear?