New Orleans I’m not a gamer. I believe some might be good and interesting, but it’s past my bandwidth, patience, and curiosity. I don’t do it, but I understand its attraction when there’s time to kill and boredom knocks at the door. What I didn’t understand fully until reading a report recently in the London Review of Books is how much data is harvested from our smartphones through these systems and others, whether we call it marketing, business as usual, or surveillance.
For game companies, the real deal with a free roll like the popular Candy Crush is whether they can get the player to pop for extras. “…typically, 95 per cent, 97 per cent of all users who play a game will never monetize.” There’s a big “but” here, because when a game outfit can get gazillions to play, a small percentage, like a few hundred thousand, can make bank for them. The trick is getting enough information from your very own phone to entice them to cash you up.
The price of many of these “free” apps is a certain amount of digital advertising. Operations like Google and Facebook, using machine learning, have made this process into a science, based on the data that they’ve collected on your activity. As the reporter, Donald MacKenzie, summarizes,
A major digital advertising platform …is like an iceberg…. Visible above the waterline are the characteristics of users on which advertisers tend to focus, such as age, gender, and ‘interests’ such as enthusiasm for cars. But below the surface, invisible to the advertiser and too copious to make full sense to human beings, is the much larger data that the platform possesses.
All of which you’ve surrendered either gladly or glibly, making you putty in their hands.
This system has become so effective that the old school reckoning from 2016, for example, that the Trump campaign’s use of Facebook was so brilliant has now been revised with the understanding that their success “resulted simply from its use of Facebook’s standard machine learning optimization procedures.” An inside campaign source told some reporters that their operation was inspired by “the successes of the mobile game studio Machine Zone’s machine learning optimization of user acquisition.” MacKenzie casts shade on that analysis, arguing instead that by 2016 that level of optimization was pretty much the industry standard for advertising.
Many of us probably sensed this already and have bent to the yolk. Those committed to more privacy have cheered the fact that Apple and Google seem to have made it harder for advertisers to know us by the identifiers on our phones and computers. Think again, the new boss is not much different from the old boss. “…most people … aren’t savvy enough to alter or delete our phone IDFA [the Apple identifier] or GAID [the Google identifier]. In practice, therefore, IDFAs weren’t so different from the permanent identifiers they replaced.” Gotcha looking, didn’t they? These mega-techs have “infrastructural power,” as the sociologists call it. We’re stuck like, Chuck, and so are some of their competitors and minions.
There’s a whole lot more to this story that starts to trigger migraines in all of us. There are some restrictions that companies have imposed on advertisers collecting your data within 24 or 48 hours of a purchase, so you can’t be targeted if you just bought a lawnmower or something, then, you supposedly have some anonymity.
The United Kingdom, European Union regulators, and the US Federal Trade Commission are all trying to get a handle on this in terms of public policy. We see frequently around the world when we are asked about cookies, the common name for all of these identifiers. Standard operating procedure for me is “Reject All,” because I don’t trust them on their claims about just enough to make the system more efficient. Yeah, right, fool me once, shame on me the second time.
The key for public policy has to be upstream, which means forcing the companies to correct their intrusions on data and privacy, not downstream, where all of us “techno-peasants” live and work who can’t navigate the process or are just clueless about their claims. We can’t live without our phones anymore, but that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to be weaponized against us by big business or hostile governments.