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News Oculus VR responds to privacy concerns

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 7 Apr 2016.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. Mister_X

    Mister_X Chaotic Neutral

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    *New Facebook Message from Mark Z.*

    "You have really pretty eyes"
     
  3. Mister_X

    Mister_X Chaotic Neutral

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    Credit to akabaloo for that...
     
  4. yuusou

    yuusou Multimodder

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    So they do want to show you VR advertising, they're just waiting until enough people have bought it. It's that simple.
     
  5. greigaitken

    greigaitken Minimodder

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    feels like either you 'give in' and freely give every company every piece of info about you thus devaluing it. or spend significant efforts avoiding these sharing scenarios and leave yourself with some privacy. Either way, the public lose.
     
  6. Star*Dagger

    Star*Dagger What's a Dremel?

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    You have no privacy in 2016.

    Any moron with an iq of 130 (figure that one out), can spend two hours on the interwebs learning how to get all of your personal data, another 2 hours and they could wipe out your digital existence.

    Maybe this will cause people to be nice to each other

    Yours in Expect Us Plasma,
    Star*Dagger
     
  7. Wwhat

    Wwhat Minimodder

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    Make that 'Any moron can spend two hours on the interwebs learning how to get all of any other moron's personal data'
     
  8. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    Actual LOL :lol:

    Totally lost interest in Oc over this. I will be Vive-ing it now.
     
  9. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    Presumably all the people upset about this don't use a clubcard at their local supermarket, or have never registered for a competition or don't have a credit card or bank account.

    I work in advertising, and you should know, that on average we have between 180 and 350 data points on any one individual.

    Do I want to live in the world where that just simply isn't the case? Yes I do! Is it realistic, given the things that advertising cash is spent on (like supporting this wesbite for example?), no it's not.
     
  10. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    So do I work in marketing, but I don't give my room, movement, location, inside leg measurement details to my bank. I can choose the limited of my personal privacy, rather than just cynically giving up.
     
  11. Wwhat

    Wwhat Minimodder

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    @Parge

    You work in advertising, so that seems a little biassed.
    And yes we can live in a world where there is advertising WITHOUT intruding on people's privacy.
    In fact, there is really very little point in it, if for instance you sell computer equipment, do you really need to intrude to know this site is a good place to advertise? Of course not, it's ridiculous how much effort advertisers do to be unwholesome and nasty when they could do the same job without all that nastiness. And that job would be advertising.

    And that is the whole thing, the tracking and intrusion is a separate thing, and unnecessary.

    And to take another example of what you mentioned: The clubcard (when used for tracking), what's the point? A supermarket just needs to have a stock of items people wish to buy, and AFAIK the demand is created after advertising, and then the manager decides to to try to add a product to his inventory, if it sells he orders more, if not he foregoes, and seeing the advertising is the initiator and the only real data you need is sales, there is no need for tracking and spying on an individual basis.
    And as for who to target, that's usually rather obvious, let's take sanitary towels, who's the target? Women between certain ages, and who do you advertise towards? Women of that group, and the more varied of ethnicity and background and age groups the more customers, so you always want to target them all, and the make-up of the population you can find in the population records from the government.
    And if you have a product with a potentially larger group of customers, again, try to reach them all because every sale is a good sale for a manufacturer.

    And the mad thing is that I really have the impression the targeting isn't even used (and nor is common sense) because I see ads for things at places where I know for 100% sure the target audience is virtually absent.
     
  12. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    My point is that, choosing a headset based on whether they may or may not collect data in the future is very much a case of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. Whatever data Facebook might collect in the future is absolutely insignificant compared to the data that is already collected out you from every other company you've dealt with over the last 30+ years.
     
  13. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    Biased? No. If you’re a network engineer and a networking topic comes up here does that make you biased?

    Advertisers aren’t ‘unwholesome and nasty’ – the data they collect is most often used to make sure their clients ad spend isn’t wasted on those people that will never be interested in their clients products. Targeted advertising based on customer data is excellent for this, especially useful for smaller, more niche products who have smaller budgets (rather than FMCGs who just want to hit everyone). Why would they even be ‘unwholesome and nasty’ – what would be the benefit?

    Interestingly a clubcard isn’t used for stocking/restocking at all – supermarkets had in depth data for that well before clubcards came around. Clubcards are used to collect data about customers shopping habits – purely because that data can then be sold onto other companies (like Experian for example) – that is why you often get discounted goods by using a clubcard – they fund that by selling the data on. So, for example, Warner might have a new Mad Max movie coming out, they might buy TV ads through Sky, and Sky can use Experian data on who bought the previous Mad Max movie on DVD to target those customers only, rather than targeting everyone, including those who aren’t interested in it, and spending 10x the budget. Some of this budget is then spent by Sky on new content (and of course, some goes into the shareholders pocket).

    The reason you sometimes see ads in places that you think aren’t the best is firstly because the above is not 100% efficient, and secondly because quite often that ad space is actually visited by the target audiences, albeit rarely – and that particular ad space is very cheap. I actually spend a lot of my time trying to convince media buyers that they need to think less about environment (ie: where the ad is being shown) and more about results. Our Programmatic DSPs have absolutely incredible machine learning algorithms that analyse the data you give them, and every time you put up a wall (for example, I only want my ad to appear on ‘premium sites’) you limit its effectiveness. Users visit over 110 sites across the net a month on average, and if we’re tracking a high net worth individual, who happens to also REALLY like playing ping pong, being able to show him ads for say, expensive red wine, on his favourite ping pong site (where he is not only very engaged, but also where ad space is extremely cheap), is even better than showing him those same ads on the FT’s homepage.

    One final point - having worked in Media for a good 7 years, I can say the companies themselves are usually staffed by people like you and me –just regular joe’s doing a job, trying to make a dime and do the best they can for their family – a far cry from the kind of satanic minions some industries are absolutely stuffed with (looking at you Estate Agents!) ;)
     
    Last edited: 8 Apr 2016
  14. Corky42

    Corky42 Where's walle?

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    Isn't more about the type of data than the amount though?

    For example i don't use any rewards cards, I only register for competitions that require nothing more than an email address, I only use my credit card for the limited online purchases i make, and everything else except utility bills are paid for with cash, i would imagine my electronic fingerprint is very small, when compared to Mr or Mrs average.

    Advertisers probably aren't ‘unwholesome and nasty’ but the problem comes (IMO) when the data they collect gets into the hands of someone who is, personally i think people are rightly worried, not so much about what company X is collecting or what they may know about what you get up to, it's more about the inevitable misuse of the data and how damaging it could be in the wrong hands.
     
  15. Assassin8or

    Assassin8or Minimodder

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    What?! There are adverts on the Internet? Who knew? Certainly not me for the last 9 years.
     
  16. Wwhat

    Wwhat Minimodder

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    @Page
    I'm sorry but (many) advertisers ARE nasty ans unwholesome, and the reason why I can say that is that they clearly deliberately ignore people's fundamental rights on privacy against their wishes. Not to mention all the abusive ways they use to bypass protection people might try to throw up. The whole behaviour cannot be described as anything but unwholesome. And that's incidentally where your bias comes in, it's not about you wanting to comment or you having some industry insight but about you for obvious reasons not seeing the issue like a pure victim would.

    But of course your biased view is in itself interesting because many of us simply don't understand the thinking of many in advertising.

    Oh and on those customer cards, I think it's also a psychological trick to bind people to a store, and in fact it might be more of a motivation that the reasons you mentioned. But I'm not sure someone in advertising would want to comment on psychological tricks of course, because the are likely to work best while people remain unaware.
     

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