Targeted Ads: Pentagon Surveillance Program Taps, “The Largest Information-Gathering Enterprise Ever Conceived by Man.”
February 28th, 2024Related, from 2007: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation:
We must assume that they are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS.
The following Wired piece is adapted from: Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State by Byron Tau
Via: Wired:
Geolocation is the single most valuable piece of commercial data to come off those devices. Understanding the movement of phones is now a multibillion-dollar industry. It can be used to deliver targeted advertising based on location for, say, a restaurant chain that wants to deliver targeted ads to people nearby. It can be used to measure consumer behavior and the effectiveness of advertising. How many people saw an ad and later visited a store? And the analytics can be used for planning and investment decisions. Where is the best location to put a new store? Will there be enough foot traffic to sustain such a business? Is the number of people visiting a certain retailer going up or down this month, and what does that mean for the retailer’s stock price?
But this kind of data is good for something else. It has remarkable surveillance potential. Why? Because what we do in the world with our devices cannot truly be anonymized. The fact that advertisers know Marcela as bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 as they’re watching her move around the online and offline worlds offers her almost no privacy protection. Taken together, her habits and routines are unique to her. Our real-world movement is highly specific and personal to all of us. For many years, I lived in a small 13-unit walk-up in Washington, DC. I was the only person waking up every morning at that address and going to The Wall Street Journal’s offices. Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint even in a sea of hundreds of millions of others. There was no way to anonymize my identity in a data set like geolocation. Where a phone spends most of its evenings is a good proxy for where its owner lives. Advertisers know this.
Governments know this too. And Yeagley was part of a team that would try to find out how they could exploit it.
