This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of apply.

KGB-Building

Any doubt the Yahoo of today is a far cry from the company that led the doomed fight confronting the NSA's warrantless wiretapping died earlier this month, courtesy of the United States Trademark and Patent Role. On March 31, 2015 Yahoo applied for a patent with implications that would make the Stasi sit up and cheer. The patent abstract is reprinted below, and at first glance information technology doesn't read all that badly.

Methods and apparatus are described by which advertising channels in public spaces are configured to deliver adaptive and targeted advertizing in real time. Real-fourth dimension, contextual data is used to make determinations about the probable audience currently in position to view an advertising aqueduct (e.g., a digital billboard). Appropriate advertisements are then selected based on those determinations. Techniques for measuring user engagement with advertising content are also described.

The basic idea behind this patent is simple: For all the talk of targeted advertisement on personal devices, mass advertising is however generically aimed at whoever might be driving past or looking out the window. There's no way for Samsung to scan a crowd of people and make up one's mind that they all use Android and might savour a flaming brick of death new smartphone. But there could be, if you and everyone else would only surrender all your personal data forever.

Yahoo describes a system in which remote sensors would analyze a grouping of people to determine who was in a position to view an ad and how probable they were to engage with that content. These remote sensors would place who they were seeing, specifically, via the use of biometric data and image recognition, and could target ads to broad demographics or narrowly tailor them to specific interests (Yahoo calls this brave new world of data mining "grouplization.")

In some cases, this data would exist used to build a generic contour of the grouping by broad characteristics related to historic period, race, gender, and so on — just that's not the only use Yahoo envisions. From the patent application:

In another instance, image recognition techniques tin be used to place the makes, models, and years of vehicles on a highway, from which demographic information relating to the socioeconomic status of the corresponding drivers can be fabricated using, for example, previously stored marketing data. Such information tin and then be aggregated to stand for all or at least a portion of the target audience. In nonetheless some other case, cell tower data, mobile app location data, or image data can be used to place specific individuals in the target audition, the demographic data (e.g., as obtained from a marketing or user database) for which tin can and so exist aggregated to stand for all or a portion of the target audition. In still another example, vehicle navigation/tracking data from vehicles equipped with such systems could be used to place specific vehicles and/or vehicle owners. Once more, those of skill in the art volition appreciate from the diverseness of these examples the peachy variety of ways in which an aggregate audience profile may be determined or generated using real-time information representing the context of the electronic public advert display and/or boosted information from a wide diversity of sources.

What Yahoo describes hither is deeply Orwellian, as Ars Technica reports. Yahoo begins past speaking about wide characteristics. But the references to "previously stored marketing information" and obtaining information from a marketing or user database is a dead giveaway. By cross-referencing your vehicle, style of clothes, and demographic data against existing information in its own databases or those of third parties, Yahoo wants to build a network in which we are all under surveillance, constantly — at least, unless you live in a canton where the cows outnumber the people.

And that's what this actually boils downward to. When I took a trip to Amsterdam several years ago, the first matter I noticed was how sparse the advertizement was in that city compared with the United states of america. Here, outside of the privacy of our own homes, we are rarely completely out of sight from advertising billboards and signs. In Yahoo's brave new world, the rich expanses of public life are nothing just a vector for advert.

Yahoo-Ad

How the system fits together. Also titled "Nosotros literally spy on everything you do."

For centuries, laws in the United States have protected the right of people to congregate and voice their opinions on a wide range of topics, subject only to sure limited restrictions. Baked into these laws is a central assumption that the right of people to get together and engage in speech is of import, and that they should not be subject to threats or intimidation as a result.

Yahoo would no doubt protestation that its ideas for a mass surveillance database are only meant for advertising, nothing more. Just not two days agone, the ACLU (via Ars Technica) exposed how Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all sold data from users' personal data feeds to a 3rd-party company, Geofeedia — and how that company was selling the data to constabulary. Geofeedia explicitly bragged to its police customers most how its data could exist used to track protesters and demonstrators during events.

We've already written about how in Texas, cops are now utilized to collect on court costs and other fees, thank you to the mass tracking and surveillance of ordinary citizens who accept committed no crimes and are not subject to a gauge's warrant. To their credit, all three firms cut ties with Geofeedia as soon as the story went public — but none of these massive firms had done any investigation into how their data streams were being used in the first place.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Verizon accept done amazing things for engineering and the Internet. But their ideal vision of the earth is i in which your every waking moment is tracked, monitored, and sold to the highest bidder to line their ain pockets. It'south not a world with any room for protests or freedom of voice communication, whether y'all are marching on behalf of Black Lives Matter or at a pro-life rally. To the extent that those events matter to these companies, it'south only as an opportunity for a little targeted ad.

Mega-corporations are a fact of mod life, merely they shouldn't be immune to unilaterally ascertain how we interact with each other in public. Putting the populace under mass surveillance for the purposes of advertisement targeting is a definitional change to how public space is conceived of and used. Subsequently the Snowden leaks, at that place is no apparent argument that the NSA wouldn't vacuum upward this data with delight — and we've already seen how corporations and regime are cooperating to erode what lilliputian sense of privacy people still possess.

Yahoo used to fight for your rights. Now, it'due south only interested in monetizing them. Small-scale wonder Verizon wanted to buy the company, at to the lowest degree until some of its cataclysmic security practices went public.