Tracking Caucusgoers By Their Cell Phones (schneier.com) 43
Okian Warrior writes: Dstillery gets information from people's phones via ad networks. When you open an app or look at a browser page, there's a very fast auction that happens where different advertisers bid to get to show you an ad. Your phone sends them information about you, including, in many cases, an identifying code (that they've built a profile around) and your location information, down to your latitude and longitude. On the night of the Iowa caucus, Dstillery flagged auctions on phones in latitudes and longitudes near caucus locations, some 16,000 devices. It then looked up the characteristics associated with those IDs to make observations about the kind of people that went to Republican caucus locations versus Democrat caucus locations. It drilled down farther by looking at which candidate won at a particular caucus location.
so now the NSA knows when i vote (Score:2)
Re:so now the NSA knows when i vote (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how much your average social media user shares, I'm pretty sure the NSA knew who you were planning to vote for before you did.
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If you're doing nothing wrong^W we don't like, you have nothing to fear.
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Next up: golden opportunities for Gerrymandering.
Anybody else read that as... (Score:4, Funny)
I must say I was rather interested in the technology involved.
Re:Anybody else read that as... (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody else read that as "Tracking Caucasians By Their Cell Phones"?
I must say I was rather interested in the technology involved.
I first saw it as Caucusaurus and thought someone had discovered a new reptile (or dinosaur) that used cell phones.
Either I have Dyslexia or need new glasses - and am an idiot.
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An important technology to answer that age old question, "Where are the white women at?" [youtube.com]
Slippery slope is slippery, news at 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
While disturbing, this news is by no means surprising.
Advertastards can wave their hands and shout "we're just trying to see what you like so we can send you info on stuff you might find interesting!" until they're blue in the face, but simply having the vast reams data considered 'necessary' to 'get to know' the vict^H^H^H^Hcustomer is too much temptation for some to resist.
Of course, political advertising is still, well, advertising, and they're still trying to sell something to you, even if it's only a predefined set of prejudices or empty promises. So I suppose in the broadest sense this is a legit business purpose for Dstillery...but the ramifications are just a wee bit chilling. The stakes on this sort of ad campaign are a bit higher than whether people buy a Ford or a Toyota, and the one that they don't 'buy' doesn't have access to a list of people who ultimately didn't buy what they were selling...
Re:Pattern recognition (Score:4, Interesting)
They were able to track the former by the swastika wallpaper on their smartphones.
I know plenty of good, honest, moral, non-racist people on both the democrat side and the republican side. Many of them are more similar that they are willing to admit. I think the people in congress know this and it's all a game to them. If they keep both sides fighting over trivial things and demonizing each other then they can run the country however they want.
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Can you cite any neo-Nazi or KKK groups that are supporting the Democrats in 2016?
Nah, didn't think so.
Re: Pattern recognition (Score:2)
Melissa Harris-Perry, the former MSNBC host, isn't a group, but she is a racist. She has a problem with interracial adoption, specifically criticizing Mitt Romney's son and daughter-in-law for adopting an African-American child. Harris-Perry supports Bernie Sanders, a Socialist who is currently lying and claiming to be a Democrat.
The NEA wants to keep inner city mino
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He's also not a True Scotsman, from what I hear.
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[Trump is] also not a True Scotsman, from what I hear.
Actually, he is. Apparently, if your mother was born in a country, you're entitled to citizenship in that country. Trump's mother is from Scotland, and so he's not eligible to be president. Because he's a True Scotsman. I think I did that right.
More to what I assume to be your point, the problem with the KKK isn't that their name is the Ku Klux Klan. It's that they're a bunch of racists and general bigots and they use violence and intimidation to attain their evil ends.. Plenty of violent racists/bigots b
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Except the Black Panthers never hung white people from trees.
Do you have any evidence of Black Panthers using "violence and intimidation"? Ever? Anywhere?
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Except the Black Panthers never hung white people from trees.
Do you have any evidence of Black Panthers using "violence and intimidation"? Ever? Anywhere?
They used guns, jackass. And plenty of them. I already told you about the intimidation part. (In 2008, they were "guarding" Philadelphia polling stations to keep white people out.) As for violence, they led ambushes on the police, robbed armored cars, tortured and murdered informants, and executed their accountant after she threatened to go public about financial irregularities. That's just what a quick scan of Wikipedia turned up.
But because they are racist against white people, they're not True Scotsmen.
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Just came from the Wikipedia article. There is not a single item demonstrating that the Black Panthers used violence and intimidation against white people.
So, either give an example or you're a liar.
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Can you cite any neo-Nazi or KKK groups that are supporting the Democrats in 2016?
Nah, didn't think so.
Just because a group supports you doesn't mean that you support that group. Every racist, pedophile, etc.. out there that votes has to pick a side. The racists tend to vote for republicans while the pedophiles tend to support democrats. There might be some subtle reasons for this but that doesn't make the republican candidates racist any more than it makes the democrat candidates pedophiles. That's like saying airline pilots support clinton so that makes clinton an airline pilot. See how absurd that so
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Maybe not, but it definitely demonstrates one of the properties of your appeal.
If all the neo-Nazis and KKK groups support you, then it might be time to do a little self-examination, no? Maybe just ask yourself, "Why are these people all coming to my side?"
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Maybe not, but it definitely demonstrates one of the properties of your appeal.
If all the neo-Nazis and KKK groups support you, then it might be time to do a little self-examination, no? Maybe just ask yourself, "Why are these people all coming to my side?"
But the appeal of a party to a group still doesn't say anything about that party.
For instance, people who want to blow up whaling ships are most likely democrats.
But it's a one way arrow: wants to blow up whaling ships->cares about environment->votes democrat
It says nothing about whether democrats in general want to blow up whaling ships.
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No, they're most likely Green Party members.
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Hey everyone, while we're on the topic of race, REPUBLICANS HATE BLACK PEOPLE.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Dickhead. Keep throwing swastikas around. Al Sharpton is a prominent DEMOCRAT. On multiple occasions, he incited race riots where a bunch of black people killed Jewish people. There is NO ONE in
Re: I own almost 90 cell phones (Score:1)
You gotta strap a few to stray cats and dogs to keep them off your trail!
Not really needed elsewhere (Score:1)
In every state I've ever lived in, when you went to cast your vote in the primary elections, you had to ask for the ballot of a specific political party, because that is what a primary is. You narrow down the candidates from a political party into a single candidate for that political party for each specific public office.
The ballot you ask for is public record, which is how you always seem to get advertisements in the mail for one party but not the other, robo calls that attack one party but not the other
Pertinent questions (Score:1)
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When you vote in a primary election, you sign a piece of paper attesting to your party affiliation as a matter of public record. That means the parties and the state already have your name and address with your political affiliation. It is not a secret, it's long been harvested.
This is slightly different. This is correlating political candidates with advertising demographic data. They already know when a phone is used to check NASCAR results or is used to shop for lawn-mowers. What they did is identify
Very Fast Bidding??! Not (Score:2)
When you open an app or look at a browser page, there's a very fast auction ... where different advertisers bid to .. show you an ad
Very fast? Not in my experience - it's fucking slow, so much so that it turns me off many websites. Now, if a website spends more than about ten seconds doing these shinanegins (as can be seen in the staus bar) I go elsewhere.
It suprises me that most people (even a website developer I was talking to recently) are unaware that this bidding goes on. They just think that their connection is slow.
Ad-blocker (Score:2)
How do you turn it off? (Score:2)
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Some Android builds (mine came with Oxygen) natively give you some amount of permissions control, denying apps granular access, like access to camera or location. I'm guessing 5.0+ can do it, if OEM enables. I don't really know this stuff.