Selling Human Data - Evil Businesses

you might think of yourself as a customer of YouTube as you clicked to watch this video you might think of yourself as a customer of all these products that you use daily for thousands and thousands of years we've been the consumers we're the ones who traded and purchased and we think of ourselves as customers of all these free products but let me break that bubble for you right now you are not a customer of these companies you are the product of Trashed by the company not advertised to its amount of data being collected was shocking access to your camera photo video location information if this product that you're using is made by a for-profit company and none of your money is going to that company that means that there's somebody else paying the bills there's another customer and you're just the product that they're selling we've become the products in the era of the internet people's data has become this valuable asset that companies and even governments are willing to pay really good money for and tech companies just figured out the business model to make this happen it's not your email or your phone number or your address it's fundamental data about you about your opinions your relationships your political or religious inclinations your live history your current and future aspirations even your darkest desires even if you try and browse the web anonymously if you install ad blockers that visit leaves a trace maybe it's a cookie on your browser maybe it's your IP address anything you do goes into a log that's tied to this Anonymous user ID and they might not know who you are by name but they know what you did and that's enough for many of them and once that Anonymous ID is tied to a Facebook login or a Google login or credit card well then the profile is complete dozens of companies have these profiles about you about people and while it sounds creepy as hell it's not inherently bad I mean most customers don't know I mean a lot of them don't don't even care about it I really don't know which which one it is but we've just kept agreeing to these terms that we don't read or I really don't really understand and we just carry on with our lives the fundamental problem here is what happens with this data once the real customers jump in and in today's video I want to explore how this trillion dollar industry of human data emerged how it works and and what it could mean for our future foreign there's no sponsored call out today it's just gonna be ourselves and you get this free content not because we're selling your data but because YouTube is really just our sidekick what we really do at sleeping is we help companies pitch investors with compelling data driven stories typing is going to turn 10 this year and for the past decade sounds really big like for the past decade we've been helping startups craft beautiful pitch sticks and compressed complex founder stories into these 15 slides that an investor expects to see and we're good at it 300 million dollars of funding has been raised with our decks telling that story it's not just about the visuals it's not just about making the problem that you're solving obvious to the viewer it's about financial projections and budgeting expenses and estimating your Market size and we have this really solid team of analysts that have helped hundreds of companies with their documents just head to slightly.com agency to learn more about what we can do for your business so we made this video last week on how everything has become a subscription everything has become a service makeup to meals can be delivered to your door getting out of hand and so many of the comments were people bragging that they don't have any subscriptions that they don't pay for anything they're absolutely paying for it with their data Spotify or the free email client they're all collecting usage data and there's likely a fine print in their privacy policy allowing that company to share the data with third parties even if they're just downloading pirated content the website that they're using to find the torrents guaranteed has dozens of trackers otherwise how would they keep the website afloat but let me stop right there is all data collection bad well we need data for things when does using customer data become incorrect is it a question of consent is it a government versus private company question or a for-profit company question is it purpose what the company's doing with the data or is it the fact that it's sold to third party where is the line where can we draw a line between bad and good data collection it's really not an easy question but we're going to draw this dark to wide gradient today and just try and find the place where we can draw a line between what's good and bad so let's let's take one that's obviously white medical research and 2003 for example once we were able to isolate and sequence the human genome the DNA sequence thousands of people volunteered to get their DNA sampled and this allowed scientists to match the genes to different human traits but most importantly to find diseases to find the genes that are associated to certain diseases Viagra exists today as the happy pill that it is by accident and by data its active ingredient was meant to help with angina this chest pain condition but during its medical tries in the 1990s a lot of the test subjects reported this unexpected side effect and well now Viagra helps 150 million men with Ed the ongoing cancer genome Atlas project is actively analyzing data from thousands of volunteering patients to help develop and understand associations with cancer and to develop cures so it's hard to argue against any of these cases we have consent data collection for men medical purposes has to follow very very strict requisites and people no I hope I hope that they know that their son they know what they're signing up for they're participating very willingly in this medical trial the data that these companies collect stays with them forever oftentimes it goes to third parties as well or or universities also come up to help analyze the results of these medical trials that's not a problem is it we have a great purpose understanding our bodies healing people even though this is done by a for-profit company we're not going to question capitalism today so if we agree that capitalism is is good then we can place this on the white side of the spectrum but now let's go to the complete opposite extreme and we have these guys there will always be a version of Facebook that is free it is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and we're committed to doing that now let's go back to 2013 Facebook this was still the cool Facebook not the Boomer failed Facebook this is a platform that lives and breathes because of the data that you feed into it your age your relationship status your next trip your big important live event I don't know if it's the fact that people didn't care too much about data privacy back then maybe Facebook was too fun and just didn't mind that it knew some things about us we're not going to share people's information except with the people that they've asked for it to be shared but that's the thing what did Facebook really know about us it started with the innocent almost obvious basic questions but that's what you told Facebook about you that's what you voluntarily put on your profile but your internet activity can speak a lot more about you than what you say who are you stalking on Facebook who are you talking to how many seconds are you staring at this one photo versus the other if you have a website and you were trying to promote your website on Facebook then they'd encourage you to put this like button right the Facebook like button so that people would follow your page you're installing their pixel a pixel is just a little piece of code that people put on their websites and then thousands millions of websites around the world put the Facebook pixel on the site so now Facebook can see what happens in those sites as well and now Facebook can match that Anonymous visit with that very complete profile about each person that you've voluntarily given them you can check it yourself I'll list a couple tools down there that can let you do it most websites especially those websites whose Revenue depends on Advertising have dozens of these pixels installed from a bunch of different companies that are just tracking your activity people freak out when they talk about something in real life and then they suddenly see an ad on Instagram just pop up about that thing that they were talking about as far as we know Facebook probably isn't listening to your microphone we don't do that they don't need to they just know so much about your activities so much about you they can almost predict what you might want add to this worst of all most people don't know this is happening technically and and really stretching the word to the very edge technically people have given consent about this when they signed up for Facebook but when you look at terms of service this is what you get I don't think that the average person likely reads that whole document so we have questionable consent massive amounts of data for advertising and how much of that data is going to other companies that's when things get a lot darker right so I'm a bit I'm a bit Rusty on Facebook ads think we we haven't really advertised on Facebook in a while but the the interface the Facebook interface is pretty crazy on how you can Target people and how you can find people so let me show you yeah so I'm just going to start let me start just with a with a random uh ad campaign so I'm just gonna start a new campaign and show you kind of like how you can Target or how close you can get to targeting people so when you're defining an audience you can filter based on a lot of factors so let's start with location so let's say that I don't want to do us I want to just do people living in Brooklyn okay so that gives me 1.8 to 2 million people too many so then you can Target by age so let's just go to some uh well Millennials just got older so I guess minimize like 30. like 30 to 40. so Millennials in Brooklyn gender you can do you know you can choose and then uh this is where it's crazy with interests and behaviors so you could say people who are interested in uh I don't know Tech that's a huge that's a huge audience technology that doesn't really filter out we still have hundreds of thousands of people but check this out you can do income so you can do people who who have a household income say in the top five percent of income in the US or the top ten percent of income in the US you still have a lot of people your New York is an expensive city so uh you can narrow that down even further or you can for example exclude so you can say well I don't want people who do this for example I don't want people who watch sports or baseball let's say specifically and you could just get really really crazy with interests and targeting so when whenever you have somebody like really specifically targeting an ad to you just know that they use this interface like a lot of people don't haven't seen this like they don't know how specific you can get but you can one other thing you can do is just people who were recently in this location or people who travel to this location so meaning tourists who are in Brooklyn right now and this is Facebook which nobody uses but this applies to Instagram as well right so the you know this extends the ads everywhere now this is half creepy but the full creepy stuff that you can do it is with the audiences so what you can do with audiences here is you can upload an audience that you have um so this could be uh the say the email addresses that subscribe to your newsletter so I prepared a spreadsheet here with just a random sample of some swiping users we'll upload it here it'll match we'll we have to clear this out but it'll match your names and emails and all that you create an audience based on them and then you can just serve ads to that audience specifically another really cool feature is you can create a look-alike audience so you can for example say like I want people that look like these people but who are not these people so that way you can just based on your existing customers go and find other other potential customers that sort of fit that criteria now what's fun about that is that this used to be even more specific so you used to be able to see so like how your audience how this audience that you uploaded behaved in comparison to the rest of Facebook so for example you could say like if your audience is more if it's proportionately more single or in a relationship or engaged you could do you know you could do their job titles and how they skew one way or the other or your ages compared to the average of Facebook this is no longer possible so they've blocked it uh and you can no longer get incest like this no like no for a fact that uh most ad platforms even if they're not showing the data they have this data and they can Target you with it it's an online information War where often unseen hands Harvest your personal data so in 2013 this company called Cambridge analytica figured out a way to harvest some of Facebook's data from over 87 million people and it used it for their own marketing they found a way to get a lot of this data out of the Facebook world Garden of the ad platform and and to use it themselves there was a long story but we made a whole video about it Cambridge analytica did marketing for politics they built they used the data to build these very deep psychological profiles about people and then they used these profiles to start crafting ads that would trigger their psyche to make decisions and then they made these ads and they started targeting it to them both the Trump campaign as the pro-brexit campaign in 2016 hired that company to Aid in their advertising and they both won this is very extreme Tahira gathered illegally to forge people's opinion by playing on their psychology to Define elections regardless of where you are in the political Spectrum I think that we can agree that this goes on the very far black end of the spectrum what pages you follow on Facebook what what do you like or dislike what type of comments are you leaving it looks like trivial irrelevant data but it's anything but trivial Cambridge analytica was proof living proof of how powerful this seemingly insignificant data can be now the middle of this diagram exists for a very simple reason because we let it happen from the newspaper to the magazine to TV what we pay for it if we paid anything at all absolutely does not cover the cost of operating that business creating content is very expensive and you can tell us about it this media team the team whose only job is making this video the branch of slide pin that produces all our YouTube content costs around thirty thousand dollars a month and based on our monthly unique viewers we would have to charge each one of you about six cents to watch which sounds like nothing but who would pay that money for Content that they can get for free Shameless plug opportunity you can actually join our community and help support our Channel and get a bunch of perks including Early Access to our videos and monthly lab sessions with me and the rest of the team content Press News can be massive profitable businesses but not because of what the readers or the viewers are paying but because of their real customers still in a non-digital area the data that the newspaper or the magazine or the radio station knew about you was really small they literally had to survey people to understand and their own demographics what they were watching and this made things really hard for advertisers who just had to guess or even survey people again to find out if an ad that they published worked one unexpected place where your data is being gathered is in supermarkets you think that those memberships those frequent buyer cards are just this marketing stunt to get you to spend more and they are what they're also doing is tying your purchases to a profile to understand someone's purchasing patterns they don't even need to do that these days they can just do it with your credit card number and the data can be used to maximize you know supermarkets own Revenue to run promotions to segment customers to forecasts and plan demand even optimizing the layout of the store and all of these look I mean to me they look like pretty innocent users but a lot of that data is also sold not your name not your address but the anonymized version of these consumption patterns now Supermarket might conclude that customers who buy a lot of Taco ingredients prefer a certain toilet paper brand I don't know but as data processing has gotten smarter literally other patterns can also be predicted such as whether someone has moved in with you or whether you stop using contraceptives or and then start selling you diapers our purchase behaviors do say a lot about us and supermarkets our first row in knowing what we've been consuming they've known for decades but it would seem that they aren't doing anything to evil with it at least as far as we could tell maybe in part because that's not their main business model their first priority is still selling to you you are the customer and also a little bit their sidekick do we care like do we mind if they collect that data there's a good chance that new products that we use and that we like exist just thanks to that data I don't know maybe some new ice cream flavor or some variation of Nutella it's critical for companies to learn from their customers to improve on what they do and there are no terms of service for the data that Supermarket collected from you you sort of implied agreed by just visiting them right but but hold that thought on that consent and let's translate this to to a website so one key difference that you'll notice in this case is the amount of data that's at the disposal of anyone who runs a website and after running a tech company for so long you start to discover a lot of surprising details our website's typing we get around a quarter of a million visitors every month and at the very basic a platform like Google analytics which is just a script right it's just a text that you put on top of every page analytics can track traffic and conversions on your website great metrics like bounce rate the number of people that visit a page and then leave right away are super key to improve that landing page to improve our services to improve our messaging our pricing but since Google already knows so much about everyone it can also tell us people's age their gender their location doesn't stop there it can tell us their interests the device that they're using your internet speed what other devices you have you gave that data to Google by just using Google you gave them permission to use it when you signed up for your Gmail account and then analytics runs on virtually every website in the world now while they don't give us Google analytics users the names and the emails of the people that they're tracking it's still a lot of data funny Star by the way did you know the first case of data being sold ever the one that we can find it was Coca-Cola John Pemberton the Creator came up with an idea to boost sales through pharmacies pharmacies at the time sold all kinds of Remedies and busy Blends and headaches stuff for fatigue which made some great Target customers for Coca-Cola which is just sugar and caffeine and coca leaves he offered them this deal two gallons of free Coke syrup in exchange for the names and addresses of nearby customers and then with that database and they did it the pharmacy sold the data Pemberton began mailing coupons to hundreds of people for just one glass of Coca-Cola and they would probably go to the pharmacy to redeem it all of this would probably hopefully be illegal today but for these folks at the time it was this win-win Pharmacy suddenly had more customers people would try coke maybe probably get hooked on it and the stunt word for decades and then where would the stunts land in our little diagram I don't know but it's it gets a lot crazier when we talk about lead tagging because you have platforms like Zoom info or lead forensics that can tag visitors on a website and what you do is you install their plugin on your website and what they do is they identify each visitor as a person from a company just one more some platforms also let you enrich leads so if you're able to collect someone's email you can run it through their platform and find out everything they know everything the internet knows about that person their role in the company where they live how long they've been of that company previous companies they've worked with the internet knows this about you a combination of dozens and dozens of different scripts and websites across the world have worked on gathering this data tying it to a person and a lot of this data you just put on the internet willingly it's all public on your LinkedIn or your Twitter bio or I don't know your only fans all these companies had to do was just crawl public data random survey by the way if you didn't know this was possible just go like we'll link a platform that you can use this is not an ad just try it out check run your email and find out what they already know about you I'd love to see how surprised are you about what they discovered this is all a hundred percent legal today is it on the white side of the spectrum I don't know speaking of legal there is some regulation about this mainly gdpr CCPA which essentially forces companies to allow users to see what data they know about them to download it and to remove it all together for users to request to have that data removed we had to comply it with this ourselves by the way it was really annoying it was this massive Sprint we had to do a couple years back just to be compliant with gdpr but take a look at Google's takeout site where you can download Google's data about you there are 50 plus checks on different platforms and sub services that Google owns that have data about you this is probably gigs maybe terabytes of data that the company has used has been using to recommend places that you like to eat or to tag the clothes that someone's wearing when you use Google photos which is an actual feature by the way really cool but yes also to Target you or to grow their data collection business again I'm not saying all this is bad I think we should all be aware of what's happening and we should come to terms with it and this all can feel of course quite dystopian China's camera surveillance system Skynet can you believe they actually called it Skynet this is probably the most extreme of all examples they installed millions of cameras around the country that use phase recognition to tag and to track you when the amount of data is that massive you can for example link a person's behavior to their credit score this is true to create ethnic and religious profiles to track journalists and control information flow to put people in jail or in re-education camps the implications the consequences the shade of gray the legality we can talk about this for hours governments around the world are barely keeping up with just finding ways to regulate this in part because many legislators just don't understand half of what's Happening Mr cute does tick tock access the home Wi-Fi network now as a marketer I've been living and breathing this stuff for the past 10 years and I still get surprised sometimes when I find this new targeting platform and just realize how how specific the targeting can be or when I find the stuff that a company knows about me and the best they can do now is make a video about it awareness has made a difference a lot has changed since the Cambridge analytica Scandal people have started it choosing certain platforms over others because of the Privacy advantages but it is only a handful of people the reality is these Technologies move a lot a lot faster than anyone can keep up and I stand in the middle of these two things and it is a struggle I get why this is gray or dark gray maybe but I'm a marketer this data is useful to do to run better ads it's I have to compete with other companies that are doing the same things so this is just a standard for us marketers these days but I understand as a consumer why knowing knowing everything these companies know about me doesn't look great this by the way the awareness that this is given in people using ad blockers has given influencers a lot of power recently influencer marketing the budget the money spent on influencer marketing is growing a lot because that just seems to be a new way to Target people in a world where ad blocking and people are just being more aware about not being tracked we made a whole video about it so you should check that out and we'll see [Music] thank you

Channel: Slidebean

Views: 33,320

Keywords: slidebean, caya slidebean, company forensics, caya, startups, startups 101, privacy, data, data entry, data analytics, data scientist

Id: _6TxE_7m7cw

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023