Is it even worthwhile to turn off ad personalization or location tracking for services/apps?
So, I’m moving to a new phone and revisiting a lot of accounts, apps, and settings.
When it comes to things like location history or ad personalization or whatever, is it even worthwhile to turn it off? Am I really supposed to believe that because I have some toggle off that Google suddenly doesn’t track where I drive on Maps? Like if they are going to be tracking me, which I assume they are, I might as well be able to see it to rather than have it exist in the aether somewhere where the info is attributed to me but not viewable in the UI.
Even with ads, I know shadow profiles are a thing, and that they definitely have data beyond what they show in the UI, so might as well opt in there too right? Plus, the non-targeted ads I get are basically porn-tier ads or stuff for gay men.
What should I do here? Move into the woods? Feels like I can’t win.
It probably muddies the waters a little to turn off what you can. Personally, I take some similar steps:
Ultimately, if you're really concerned about privacy and ad targeting, your best bet would be to get a Linux phone or install a custom OS like Lineage then lock down any security / privacy leaks.
I can vouch for Sailfish, which I genuinely like a lot more than Android and iOS. It comes with compromises of course. The paid version comes with Andoid app compatibility, but you'll find many apps still won't work.
I just feel like I’m at at a point where it doesn’t really matter anymore what I do, so might as well opt in. That might be what they want, but oh well.
My work phone (Pixel 6a) will be given to me after an upgrade so maybe I’ll try Lineage or Sailfish.
If you're concerned about privacy/security and carrying a Pixel phone, I can highly recommend GrapheneOS. It's a build of Android without all of Google's pesky tracking stuff, but it provides a compatibility layer so you can still use (most) Android apps (even those which rely on Google Play Services). It's very polished - but also only supports Pixel devices.
I'm a big fan of muddying the waters. I'm less concerned by the ads themselves and more with the dataset that's used for deciding which users see which ads. There's big money in being able to micro-target segments of the population with specific ads. That's hella creepy, and I want to take whatever small steps I can to make such targeting a little bit less effective.
So I disable location history, opt-out of ad personalization, opt-out of data sharing (using Simple Opt Out which I just recently discovered), use DNS filtering to block known advertising/tracking networks, use browser extensions like Privacy Badger block tracking code, and so on.
I don't think we're going to "win", but we can make it harder for Them to.
I am all for figuring out ways to avoid data collection and targeting, but I also have to point out that it's only half the battle. No matter what, people will have advertisements delivered, so it seems important to also learn to identify advertisements and not be so influenced by them.
I recognize there are many downsides to business/capitalism as executed in the US, but there is often still a choice.
The duckduckgo browser on Android also has a great little app tracking protection vpn function that will block tracking attempts and log them for you to tell what and who is trying to scrape your data. Quite handy and also a little alarming to see just how absurdly common it is.
In theory, with GDPR or other data protection acts, by hitting those switches you should be opting out of having data stored against any personalised identification (if any is stored at all)
The truth is often much more complicated than that like a lot of things. Like you say, companies will keep a shadow profile so they can link your data back to you if you ever opt back in, which is pretty grey area.
The other comment about custom OS phone is about the only way to really make sure your privacy is nailed down as you get to control what apps see on a very granular level, but it's a pain to manage.
In my opinion, it's a bit of a balancing act. I think it's hard to escape the data collection black hole. The only consolation is everyone else is stuck with it too.
For me, I'm happy to opt out of data collection/tracking at a software level when I can and when it's convenient. I understand it's not bullet proof, I know I run Java script on websites and they have cross site tracking cookies but I have stuff to do and a life.
The pay off is the ads that do get past U-Block Origins are all nonsense and I don't feel like they know me at all.
The trade off is losing some functionality on apps I'd otherwise quite like. For example the Google maps history or the voice activation in Android Auto.
I also have a life, so I feel similarly… the trade off on functionality conversation is where things get interesting and was the reason I asked this question. Google Maps for example has this timeline feature that shows you past drives and places you’ve visited, which might be cool to look back at after a year. It of course requires Location History to be on. If I have it off, is Google really going to not collect that info, or just not show it to me? So might as well have it in.
I lean into it, personally. If I have to see ads - and I do choose to not avoid them because internet ain't free - I'd rather see ads vaguely relevant to things I am interested in. The other bonus is with personalisation on I can turn off ads for things I really don't want to see. Like alcohol.
A while ago Facebook somehow got the idea I was interested in buying underwear and I actively encouraged them to think that and now my feed is peppered with an assortment of good looking people in their pants. Which is far better than 5G blocking keyrings and life insurance.
To add to what @skybrian mentions, if The Authorities want me, they're taking me regardless of an ad profile existing somewhere.
Although many people feel strongly about privacy, I haven’t heard of anyone being harmed by location history or ad personalization. Seems like at worst you get spooky ads, which could happen by chance anyway and I don’t think that counts as harm. Ignoring the problem seems like a valid choice to me.
Possibly it could be bad if the police take an interest in you or someone gets access to your phone.
Depends what you consider harm. Ads for baby stuff following someone who terminates or loses a pregnancy, "personalization" features making a slideshow video to peppy music from photos on your phone of your mom's funeral, unwanted products promoted to people in harmful ways like alcohol advertised to alcoholics. If you're in the world you can't avoid these things entirely, but you can prevent systems that think they know you from misunderstanding you and pushing things on you in psychologically harmful ways that can be a lot more than just "spooky." Depending on what you've got going on in your life, you might not know how harmful these systems can get until they serve you something that microtargets you in exactly the wrong way.
It makes sense for a recovering alcoholic to want to try harder to avoid alcohol ads, but as someone else pointed out, this can also be done by setting your preferences with more ad personalization. Similarly for avoiding ads about baby stuff. This isn't possible with billboards. I guess you could cut the ads out of a print magazine, but how many people would go that far? Being able to set some preferences seems like an improvement.
When a photo app runs amuck with suggestions that are in poor taste, it shows how personalization features can go badly wrong, and this is an example that product designers should keep in mind. It's not advertising, though, and I think it shows how avoiding problems like that is bigger than advertising. Ads are not the only source of upsetting content. You can read upsetting stuff in a newspaper, or by following a link on a website like Tildes.
I'm in favor of things like content warnings and filters to try to get rid of stuff you don't want to see. I feel like avoiding everything that might be upsetting isn't all that practical. As you say, the best you can do is try to minimize it. Sometimes you see something you don't want to see, and then you take steps to get rid of it.
I don't want to see videos of extreme violence, for example, even though I do read news about what's going on Ukraine, so I'm glad people are cooperative about warning about links like that. I don't watch horror movies either.
The nice thing about approaching it this way is that you can make practical choices. "What content do I find really upsetting and what can I do to avoid it" seems like a more practical question than "how can I avoid being tracked?" You can judge for yourself how well you're succeeding at that and make adjustments to what you look at online. Maybe you don't find a lot of things to be upsetting?
You can probably avoid upsetting content without installing a custom OS on your phone or customizing your browser to the point that many websites break mysteriously.
By contrast, if you're really concerned about being tracked then it seems like nothing you do is ever going to be enough? You don't get feedback about how well you're doing at it.
You can only fix it with more personalization if the platform allows you. The Google Now home screen on Android, for example, only allows you to block topics that it decides to raise, making a constant whack-a-mole of telling the algorithm things you aren't interested in - only for it to conveniently "forget" to stop showing you these things weeks or months later, in my experience. Why try to use the tool to correct the tool's bad behavior when you can opt out of the whole system instead? Personalization is a product feature, whether that product is something you are using intentionally - your phone's photo gallery - or something that you are unintentionally a user of, like an ad on a website. It seems to me the more effective way to get the message to companies that they don't, in fact, know what they're doing with these personalization features is to turn them off rather than try to work within their badly-designed systems.
That's true, being able to turn things off and having them stay off is important. (Although I'm a little open to occasional reminders, because I do sometimes forget about what I turned off when it's been years.)
Ignoring that advertisements prey on and manipulate vulnerabilities of the human psyche, there are definitely instances of direct harm that can be attributed to targeted advertising, like the teen pregnancy article from NYT about a decade ago.
People are going to bring up the teen pregnancy thing forever, but it's unclear if it was anything more than coincidence.
Here's a blog post about it:
There are going to be some spooky coincidences in your life and targeted advertising probably does make them more likely. Learning to be more chill about that sort of thing seems more healthy than making a big deal out of things we will never get a clear explanation for.
One consideration is who is doing the tracking. The question might be a moral/ethical question.
NebuAd was a company and a technology that your ISP or phone carrier would partner with. Your ISP would send a mirror copy all of your online activity -- inbound and outbound -- to NebuAd. NebuAd would read your inputs and see your web pages, and even alter them to insert their own ads in pages that didn't originally have any ads or those ads. This was, of course, shameful and a huge man-in-the-middle attack and violation of your privacy and trust in your well-paid carrier to carry your data, but it was legal. This was one of the reasons why the Electronic Frontier Foundation pushed so hard to get all of us to use https instead of http, along with other privacy-enhancing technologies to keep our communications from being legally wiretapped.
So your answer might be 'yes' in some cases and 'no' in others. Some ad providers do profile and advertise according to that profile and they leave a lot of control up to you and to the webpage or service that you are using. If I must get ads, I'd rather get relevant ads than stuff I'll never buy. These websites that are asking me about ad tracking cookies are a good thing; they are reminding me that I should be in charge of this (and not my snooping carrier).
I'm going to sound weird for this for sure, but I did keep my location history on in Google. It's for sure creepy how they're tracking this, but I'm very forgetful and would want to know where I was in the past (plus, it attaches photos I took in those places too)
Other than that, on a computer I am running a combination of AdNauseam, Decentraleyes, and Privacy Possum. If advertisers are going to track me I'm going to make it as hard as possible.
For me personally, I know I could be susceptible to well-targeted ads leading to impulse purchases even if I don’t have the disposable income levels that I’d like, so I turn tracking off as best I can when I have the option. That’s not to say it will be 100% effective and I’ll never be tracked or targeted, but at least if I’m only advertised-to by illegitimate sources it should be easier to ignore.
For example, I’ll shop or browse on Amazon only extremely rarely, so while Amazon definitely has information about me, it definitely has a lot less success advertising to me than if I gave it free reign over my info.
As a more eloquent person put it: “I bought that toilet seat out of necessity, I am not a toilet seat connoisseur”
I block ads more because they are obnoxious and waste cpu cycles and bandwidth.
There is certainly a privacy issue at stake, but more up front for me is that many “compelling” online ads are for straight up garbage products, whether I am being targeted or not.
Finally it’s a matter of time. Life is too short to waste looking at ads
Yeah, pihole and unlock origin on Firefox. Have firewall rules for IoT devices on home network but don't get deep into it. Just keeping my homelab safe so it's not hit with constant attempts.
my personal opinion is: if i have to see ads, i want the ads to AT LEAST show me something that related to me.
a good example: instagram. instagram ads are (imho ofc) the best ones out there. sure there are some kickstarter scams, but out of my top 5 fav restaurants, 3 of them i found via IG ads. i also bought two city prints for my living room.
do i like ads? no. i use ublock on every device i can and i use nextdns. but unfortunately, ads are a constant and some of they will show up no matter what.
I don't care anymore, all my data got leaked with the OPM hack so I turn off location unless I really need it and that's it.
It was a fucking nightmare when it came out but overall I have MFA everywhere and credit monitoring so I haven't had any issues.
The biggest thing to come out of the hack for me is that I now know where all the sex offenders are near me. Those are basically the only alerts I ever get (which I guess is a good thing?).