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D Murph
climber
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Topic Author's Original Post - Sep 25, 2018 - 08:39am PT
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Does anyone here understand some of the underlying mechanics of how my info gets harvested while surfing the web?
Recently I was at the Patagonia website looking for a jacket. A few days later I receive a coupon in the mail from Patagonia (addressed specifically to me).
I never entered any information on the website, and I've never bought anything directly from Patagonia nor received a catalog from them.
So somehow they have learned who I am, where I live and can identify that it's me searching their website.
How does this work? Especially the part about associating the computer with me personally. I can imagine they buy consumer lists from other outdoors stores but the computer?
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Sep 25, 2018 - 11:27am PT
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And thanks to changes under FCC during Trump's tenure (footnote 1), your home Internet providers can sell data about EVERYTHING you do online, so even your porn, fetish, bomb-making, and subversive organization preferences are also available to anyone who wants to buy it.
So much easier than the days when private investigators or law enforcement had to grab your trash bags and sift through everything looking for scraps of useful intel.
Footnote 1: To be fair, Ajit Pai was first nominated to FCC during Obama's tenure, and became the head under Trump. His nomination by Obama was probably part of a concession related to financial/political pressure, anecdotal evidence of the corrupting influence of money spanning to Dems and Repubs. Given Obama's public stance on Net Neutrality and the well-known leanings of Ajit Pai after his tenure as a lawyer for Verizon, there must have been an external influence that forced his hand. It probably takes a lot of favors, regardless of your political party, to make it to the Presidency.
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jbaker
Trad climber
Redwood City, CA
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Sep 25, 2018 - 12:02pm PT
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There is a whole eco-system of identity resolution services. They pay sites that have access to your email or street address to connect that info to their cookies or beacons. Different services cover different pieces - identity across devices, matching to email addresses, matching to street addresses. As mentioned above, there are also services to map ip addresses to physical addresses.
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kunlun_shan
Mountain climber
SF, CA
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Sep 25, 2018 - 02:48pm PT
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D Murph, am curious about who your internet service provider is?
I'm lucky to have Sonic, who do not sell subscriber data.
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silverplume
Trad climber
Boulder
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Sep 25, 2018 - 03:14pm PT
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It's likely the situation you're describing is a coincidence and not directly tied to your web browsing. Patagonia could have gotten your name and address from any number of other affinity marketing sources and the coupon just showed up around the time you were visiting their site. It's highly unlikely that you received a coupon just by browsing the website unless you were signed in to Patagonia's site at the time you were browsing, or had been signed in at some time in the past. While not out of the realm of possibility, it would be very unlikely and very unusual for Patagonia or any other company to process and deliver a piece of direct marketing that quickly and specifically addressed to you just from a random visit to a website – whether or not you were logged in – and especially if you didn't already have an account with them.
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D Murph
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 25, 2018 - 03:14pm PT
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I have Charter/Spectrum.
So let's say it is through cookies. Since I have never given my address to Patagonia, they are taking it from a cookie stored by another website where I have entered my address? Same for my name?
Sort of comes down to this: if I've never given Patagonia that information, where are they getting it?
This seems a little different to me than my clearly incomplete understanding of cookies, personalized ads, etc. Specifically: Google seeing that a certain computer / web browser is looking at info on jackets then showing that computer / browser ads for jackets seems different than Patagonia seeing a computer / browser surfing its site, somehow discovering it is me, and sending mail to my home.
I've never expected perfect privacy but I am a little surprised by how personally identifying this is.
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silverplume
Trad climber
Boulder
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Sep 25, 2018 - 03:17pm PT
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...they are taking it from a cookie stored by another website where I have entered my address? Same for my name?
Not possible (or at least highly, highly, highly frowned upon in internet security circles) – cookies can only be set and read from the same origin. Not only that, no website is going to store your address in a cookie- at least not if they're reputable and take security seriously.
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D Murph
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 25, 2018 - 03:20pm PT
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silverplume of course you might be right. that'd be really coincidental though especially considering that I've never ordered anything directly from Patagonia and I rarely browse their website.
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silverplume
Trad climber
Boulder
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Sep 25, 2018 - 03:26pm PT
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Again, I think the timing of the coupon's arrival is most plausibly coincidental. I can't see any feasible way that Patagonia would otherwise be able to tie your web browsing of their site to you specifically unless you were signed in with an account on their site.
As for how Patagonia or any other company gets your name- they can buy that from affinity marketing lists. Maybe you bought something from another company or catalog, a retail store somewhere, or subscribed to a magazine. The marketing groups tie all of that together and make inferences about your interests, purchasing habits, political affiliation, etc. (all manner of things that would surprise you), and then package that up to resell in lists. That's more than likely where Patagonia got your name and address to start.
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Roots
Mountain climber
Redmond, Oregon
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Sep 25, 2018 - 03:47pm PT
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You think that's bad...when my wife surfs for something on her home computer, ads for it show up on my an unrelated (work) computer/internet.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Sep 25, 2018 - 04:23pm PT
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So yer concerned that Patagonia fleeced you?
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Sep 25, 2018 - 07:42pm PT
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Big data is big business. Lots of friends and family are in it, making a lot of money, great career to be in these days. Oracle, among others, is just up the road. That post card is no coincidence.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 25, 2018 - 09:40pm PT
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D Murph
You are finished now .... they even know what underwear you are wearing.
Ho maannnn .....
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Ricky D
Trad climber
Sierra Westside
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Sep 25, 2018 - 09:44pm PT
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Now I know why I keep seeing those Zulily ads - thought I was turning gender until this thread made me recall the Missus ordering some frilly shirt thing.
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Roots
Mountain climber
Redmond, Oregon
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Sep 26, 2018 - 10:57am PT
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Happens when both computers are logged into the same google account in Chrome
Sure, but that's not the case with her personal computer and my work's computer that is located at work on their server.
Also, both of our personal computers do not share a google account...creepy sht.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Sep 26, 2018 - 11:05am PT
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WTF? Is La Femme secretly trolling guide services?
Have I been relegated?
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Sep 26, 2018 - 11:07am PT
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Even if you have a web service that does not sell your information, there are companies out there whose entire business model is creating data bases about internet users. So if you ever bought anything from a web site that sold data to that company, that company can sell it on to somebody else.
Facebook is also very big on tracking internet users even when they are not on Facebook.
You can also be tracked even if you have cookies off.
If you are just paranoid about Big Data knowing everything about you, there is not much to do besides becoming a hermit back in the hills and having no contact with society.
If you don't like adds showing up after searching a particular topic or going to a particular web site, do your searching/surfing in a private browser tab. It doesn't completely block tracking, but at least with Google/Chrome, it won't show you targeted adds based on what you did in the private browsing session.
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Jim Clipper
climber
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Sep 26, 2018 - 11:19am PT
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I don't wear a tinfoil hat (very often), but I can kind of see the danger with AI. I was a little dismissive of Bill Gates's warning. It's being used for high speed trading, purging voting rolls, redistricting, etc.? Wealth is being concentrated, patents created, money re-invested in tech (hardware and algorithms). Didn't the EU say something recently? Didn't the US say "Cat video! Like"
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Sep 26, 2018 - 12:09pm PT
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People have been putting together ever more complicated ways to make money since the dawn of money. Imagine the infrastructure millions of people smarter than anyone you know can build over a few lifetimes.
Tinfoil: I predict the Russians actually control bitcoin (and clones). They'll collapse it at some point and take over the planet - but for now they wait.
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Over the course of four years, Google hashed out a deal with Mastercard in which it agreed to pay millions of dollars in order to use data from the two billion payment cards it has in circulation. Most Mastercard users are unaware of the arrangement. Google is expected to capture almost 40 percent of the digital ad market in 2018
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Google has been using the Location History feature in Google Maps to notify advertisers whether users ending up visiting a brick-and-mortar store after clicking on a related ad since 2014. This infusion of credit card data would make its consumer-tracking system all the more powerful. Google has claimed that it has access to “approximately 70 percent” of credit and debit cards in the U.S. The company has reportedly approached other credit card companies in an attempt to strike up similar deals, though Bloomberg was not able to determine if anything resulted from those offers. American Express and Visa did not respond to Slate’s inquiries about whether they also had arrangements with Google.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/google-mastercard-data-track-offline-purchases.html
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