cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19675447
Here is an Invidious link for the video (and ‘Lola’ part starts at ~5 minutes)
To demonstrate this, Sadoun introduces the audience to “Lola,” a hypothetical young woman who represents the typical web user that Publicis now has data about. “At a base level, we know who she is, what she watches, what she reads, and who she lives with,” Sadoun says. “Through the power of connected identity, we also know who she follows on social media, what she buys online and offline, where she buys, when she buys, and more importantly, why she buys.”
It gets worse. “We know that Lola has two children and that her kids drink lots of premium fruit juice. We can see that the price of the SKU she buys has been steadily rising on her local retailer’s shelf. We can also see that Lola’s income has not been keeping pace with inflation. With CoreAI, we can predict that Lola has a high propensity to trade down to private label,” Sadoun says, meaning that the algorithm apprehends whether Lola is likely to start buying a cheaper brand of juice. If the software decides this is the case, the CoreAI algo can automatically start showing Lola ads for those reduced price juice brands, Sadoun says.
Collection, agregation and use of this data needs to be severely taxed or made very difficult. Sale of personal data, ‘anonymized’ or otherwise, should be illegal.
Writer Ben Tarnoff and researcher Dr James Muldoon have been proposing to ‘deprivatise’ the internet. Dr Muldoon writes a lot on ‘digital democracy’ and how the ‘extractivism’ of today’s digital world needs to be rethought, very much a the UK’s Ada Lovelace Institute.
Their and other people’s ideas are mostly based on cooperatives, which are not new as we know, but barely applied in the technical space.
There are, however, already first projects in a lot of countries around the globe, and despite in their early stages, many of them appear to be very promising. In the U.S., for example, researcher Trebor Scholz’s Platform Cooperativism Constortium is certainly among the most notable. The organization supports communities from cooperatives that then build more or less the same products and services like the centralized, venture capital-backed surveillance technology (Uber, Amazon, video conferencing tools, …), but are owned on a more collective basis and pursuing a less extractive business model.
In Europe, the Smart Cooperative was launched as a social economy project by founders from the cultural sector. These visionaries created Smart as an innovative solution for freelance artists and cultural professionals who often work under precarious conditions. Today, the collective has tens of thousands of members, and is active in 7 countries (Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal).
In Mexico, Tierra Comun is a similar project and equally successful.
There are many more across the globe, aiming at solving a huge variety of issues, and they are very promising imho.
This is a marketing video to Publicis’ customers. They love to make themselves look like evil all-knowing villains in these videos. As scary as Connected Identity sounds (which I do think is a real and scary thing), I highly doubt they would have a level of data insight they had on Lola on 91% of the world’s adults. But I would believe that they have at least 1 piece of data on that many.
I am sure they got this data on some idiot who got nothing to hide.
But a lot of these data points are easily obfuscated which reduces value of the data they do have.
But goes on show that using kyc’d services is a privacy and security risks. Since KYC is being used against you now.