Comment by vrosas
6 days ago
I used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e. a company that bid on TV ad spots in real time. The bidding platform was handling millions of requests per second, and we were one of the smaller fish in the sea. This system is very real. Your tv is watching what you’re watching. I built the attribution pipeline, which is what this is. If you go buy a product from one of these ads, this is how they track (attribute) it. Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
The TV thing isn't a new story, this was public. Everyone should have known about it and no one cared. (I could inset a boilerplate rant about Snowden here)
Those datacenters are not being built so that you can talk to ChatGPT all day, they are being built to generate and optimize ads. People who were not previously very suggestible are going to be. People who are suggestible will have their agency sold off to the highest bidder.
Avoid owning a TV? Your friends will. Maybe you can not have a FB/IG/WhatsApp account, only use cash, not have a mobile phone, but Meta (or Google, or Apple) can still detect your face in the background of photos/videos and know where you shop, travel and when.
This is really interesting. Can you expand on this? What are OTT and DSP in this context?
Do you have a sense for what data is tracked and how it's used? Or if this sort of system is blind in certain cases? (eg: I hook up an N64 to the a/v ports -- will I get retro game ads on the TV?)
OTT = over the top = ads that aren't shown on cable ("linear") DSP = demand-side platform = real-time bidding on ad space on behalf of advertisers
What data is tracked? Don't think we can see what's plugged into the TV if it's not connected to the internet but besides that... all of it... If we have your TV we know where you live. We know what you're watching (hopefully our customers' ads!). We know all the devices that connect to your home network. We know where those devices go when you leave the house. We know you were driving down this stretch of road when you saw that ad on that billboard or on the side of that truck ("out-of-home" advertising). We know if you saw that ad and then bought something ("conversion" + "attribution"). We know what apps you have downloaded. Did you know Candy Crush is spying on you, too? Did you know Grindr sells your IP address? We likely know your age and your race and how much your home cost and where you went to college and how many kids you have ("segmentation"). Privacy laws have gotten in the way a little bit, but not much - it's less "we can't get this data anymore" and more "here's the hoop(s) we now have to jump through but we still get it".
I don't want to freak anyone out. In my time in adtech I never felt like anyone was using this data for anything besides "Please buy more coca-cola..." but you never know. Privacy _can_ exist it's just insanely hard because there's so much money hell-bent on tracking you down.
So, you helped with this... Why?
> you have zero privacy
Is this data linked to me personally in some way (e.g. though an account) or is it anonymous data?
They can definitely work out who you are from your IP address. (or get close enough that the advertisers don't care) Not too many people are putting a VPN on their router and using throwaway accounts for their smart TVs. This might be difficult anyhow if your log into major services such as Amazon, etc, who will know who you are.
I'm not saying this is impossible to avoid, but it ends up being a LOT of work when the alternative is just not connecting the TV to the internet and using a laptop / Apple TV / etc. instead.
Personally identifiable. Most smart TVs force a login to connect to the Internet or even use at all.
>Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
Hence why I will never connect my TV to the internet
I understand the perils of a capitalist system but whyyy would you agree to build this
The perils of the capitalist system man. For what’s its worth, I left adtech many moons ago specifically because it is a horrifyingly depressing industry and very very not fun to talk about at parties.
I'm glad you got out, but given your vantage point what would you say to those who feel pressured to do these types of jobs? Would you say more "it isn't worth it" or "if you have to... but get out as fast as possible" or something else?
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It makes its creator the money they can spend buying the products they see in TV ads.
If someone is going to get paid to build it anyway, I might as well be the one getting paid for it.
This attitude is the reason “someone is going to get paid”.
If you see a unattended laptop in a coffeeshop, do you steal it because “someone will steal it, so it might as well be me”?
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Where do you draw the line?
Ready to do anything for money as long as it seems legal-ish or your ass is covered by hierarchy?
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Yeah, there are reasons why "someone is going to do it anyway" is a classic example of an ethically unsound argument.
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Soooo.... Why did you build it for them? You didn't have to further enable it. Despise people who just drop this kind of thing without any hint of repentance or contrition.
Would love to know what are the best things we can do to prevent this sort of tracking in general. PiHole? Don't re-use emails? On a scale of 1 to fucked are we cooked?