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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
All right morning, everybody. Um Sorry, I'm a little late to the show. Things are in disarray, you can kind of see the horrendous background, the weird framing today. Um I had actually ordered in one of the new GoPro sevens. Um a cool little device uh had a five before.
Uh the sevens definitely made some uh advancements. The intention was to stream off of this this morning. Um did not happen. Uh So uh in a bid to uh get things set up quickly, um I'm actually streaming from my phone but using my phone as an HDM, I input um into my laptop.
Um Of course, you know, as I'm looking into the feed and realizing right behind me is my big four K um Ds LR that I just didn't plug in. Uh So um experimenting is the name of the game when it comes to streaming. Um So thanks for joining the show.
This is Mornings with Mark already up to episode 114. Wow. Um Today I want to talk about an article that's floating around about um a research study that was done. Um very, very interesting study um on I'm just looking here in the background. Uh, so from a professor, um, uh, uh, the study targeted a professor called Alan Mislove, um, who was part of the, the, the project.
Um, and essentially what they were doing was a test, um, to see if, uh, the Facebook could target ads, um, with information that wasn't directly given to it. Um, and that seems kind of really interesting. Um Right. So basically the concept, the principle, I'm sorry about the audio here.
Um The principle was simple was that um uh Professor Mislove um knew what he had provided to Facebook as far as um information um and using his office number, which is not in his Facebook profile, they looked to see if they could target an ad to show him specifically.
Um and only him and of course, uh within uh a couple of hours, um you know, within the day that ad actually showed up in his profile uh like on his timeline. Um So this is really interesting because that's not supposed to actually be possible according to what people commonly believe about Facebook.
Um And it's targeting ads in that um you have created a profile as a user. Facebook then uses that profile and the behavior of you on their network um in order to target ads at you, right, that's how they make money. And we heard that directly from Mark Zuckerberg and his testimony in front of the US um house in the US Congress was that they sell ads and that's how they make money.
So the common perception is basically based on what you do and what you provide. Facebook, they'd be able to target ads. Well, this study proves what's long been understood. Um Behind the scenes, what's long been suspected um Is that Facebook compiles every piece of information they can get about you.
Um That means going out to data brokers, that means going out to um third party sources. That means um things like the beacon, things like comments on um third party websites who use Facebook for login and Facebook for comments um and buying data from other sources and pulling all of this information together to create what's called a shadow profile.
So your profile is what you control. It's what you see. Your shadow profile is all of this compiled information. It's your behavioral information. You mean anything and everything that the company can get their hands on to better understand you. Now, I did this um a few months back um where I um wrote a little tool and pushed up a visual of how Facebook had accurately tracked my location even though I don't give it a location.
I mean it does that by um scanning all the photos that people do upload to see if there's data um for location data in those um um photos and then linking the logged in IP to the photos when it can. And cross referencing and doing all sorts of cool things in the background.
Um So essentially trying to figure out, uh you know, to build this go IP database, that's a glimpse of what it does in the background of trying to compile this additional information. And one of the things that was really troubling was that the um uh profile that they used in this study showed that one of the things um they were using was also the second factor authentication phone number.
Um which according to what they say in the U I shouldn't be, that should be a GDPR violation. Um because they're not telling you what they're using it for though, I'm sure it's buried in the Legalese somewhere. But at the bottom line is Facebook has a lot more information about you than, you know, or realize.
And that's because there's an entire ecosystem that's rarely talked about called um whoops uh called uh where was I going? See? Gotta hit the notifications off for those of you on the podcast notification pop down on my screen because I'm in I OS and it's mirroring it basically um to the, to the video, to the vlog.
So, um for uh for these, this entire ecosystem underneath called um data brokers and what they do is they compile as much information as they can about you. Um And then they um go through and what they'll do is um pull in these data sources and then sell that profile out.
And Facebook obviously as a consumer would be no, it would be a shock to no one if Google was also a consumer there. Um So there's lots of scary stuff going on behind the scenes and I think it really comes down to a tweet um that I'll try to retweet um that I saw yesterday, I think um that basically said count on any piece of information you've ever given any company anywhere being monetized at some point.
I think that's extremely true. I think there's a lot of questions that are around, you know, what we're doing, um Who we're giving information to how that information is being passed around. Highlights yet again, um The need for um strong regulation um for data privacy globally.
Um There are some jurisdictions that have that some jurisdictions that sorely lack that us being one of them that lacks significant California may, may get strong regulation in 2020 if it doesn't get watered down by then. Um But essentially the US doesn't have the concept in law of the privacy and data protection.
Um There's, you know, outside of health care, so there's a lot of scary stuff going on there. Um And a lot of companies making a lot of money from our data behind the scenes. I'm a firm believer in being able to control our own data to clearly understand when companies are using it, how they're using it.
Um What about you, what do you think? How do you handle your personal data? How do you hand sharing things online? Let me know, hit me up online. Um Other side, there we go um at marknca. Um And for those of you on the vlog as haphazard as it was today, hit me up in the comments down below and as always, um for podcast listeners and for everybody else, you can hit me up by email me at Mark N dot ca.
I hope you have a fantastic Friday. Hopefully, it is more put together than this vlog and the start of my day. Enjoy the weekend. I will talk to you online and I will see you on the show on Monday. Have a good one.
