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KGB-Building

Whatsoever incertitude the Yahoo of today is a far cry from the company that led the doomed fight against the NSA'south warrantless wiretapping died earlier this month, courtesy of the United States Trademark and Patent Office. On March 31, 2022 Yahoo applied for a patent with implications that would make the Stasi sit up and cheer. The patent abstract is reprinted below, and at first glance it doesn't read all that badly.

Methods and apparatus are described past which advert channels in public spaces are configured to deliver adaptive and targeted advertising in real time. Real-fourth dimension, contextual information is used to make determinations almost the likely audience currently in position to view an advertising channel (e.k., a digital billboard). Appropriate advertisements are then selected based on those determinations. Techniques for measuring user engagement with ad content are also described.

The bones idea behind this patent is uncomplicated: For all the talk of targeted advertising on personal devices, mass advertising is yet generically aimed at whoever might be driving by or looking out the window. There'southward no manner for Samsung to scan a oversupply of people and determine that they all use Android and might savor a flaming brick of death new smartphone. But in that location could be, if you and anybody else would merely surrender all your personal data forever.

Yahoo describes a organization in which remote sensors would analyze a group of people to determine who was in a position to view an advertisement and how likely they were to engage with that content. These remote sensors would place who they were seeing, specifically, via the apply of biometric data and image recognition, and could target ads to wide demographics or narrowly tailor them to specific interests (Yahoo calls this brave new world of data mining "grouplization.")

In some cases, this data would be used to build a generic profile of the group by broad characteristics related to historic period, race, gender, and so on — merely that's not the merely use Yahoo envisions. From the patent application:

In another example, image recognition techniques can be used to identify the makes, models, and years of vehicles on a highway, from which demographic information relating to the socioeconomic status of the corresponding drivers tin can be made using, for example, previously stored marketing data. Such information tin and so be aggregated to represent all or at to the lowest degree a portion of the target audience. In nonetheless another example, jail cell tower data, mobile app location data, or image data can exist used to identify specific individuals in the target audience, the demographic data (east.thou., as obtained from a marketing or user database) for which can then be aggregated to represent all or a portion of the target audience. In still another instance, vehicle navigation/tracking data from vehicles equipped with such systems could be used to identify specific vehicles and/or vehicle owners. Over again, those of skill in the art will appreciate from the diversity of these examples the slap-up variety of means in which an aggregate audience profile may be adamant or generated using real-time information representing the context of the electronic public advertizing display and/or additional information from a broad variety of sources.

What Yahoo describes here is securely Orwellian, equally Ars Technica reports. Yahoo begins by speaking virtually broad characteristics. But the references to "previously stored marketing information" and obtaining information from a marketing or user database is a dead giveaway. By cantankerous-referencing your vehicle, style of wearing apparel, and demographic information against existing data in its own databases or those of third parties, Yahoo wants to build a network in which we are all under surveillance, constantly — at least, unless you alive in a county where the cows outnumber the people.

And that'southward what this actually boils down to. When I took a trip to Amsterdam several years agone, the first thing I noticed was how sparse the advertising was in that city compared with the U.s.. Here, outside of the privacy of our own homes, we are rarely completely out of sight from advertisement billboards and signs. In Yahoo's brave new earth, the rich expanses of public life are nothing just a vector for advertising.

Yahoo-Ad

How the organization fits together. Besides titled "We literally spy on everything you lot do."

For centuries, laws in the U.s. accept protected the right of people to congregate and vox their opinions on a broad range of topics, subject only to certain limited restrictions. Baked into these laws is a primal assumption that the correct of people to gather and engage in speech is of import, and that they should not be subject to threats or intimidation as a result.

Yahoo would no doubt protest that its ideas for a mass surveillance database are only meant for advertising, nothing more. But non two days ago, the ACLU (via Ars Technica) exposed how Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all sold data from users' personal information feeds to a third-party visitor, Geofeedia — and how that company was selling the data to constabulary. Geofeedia explicitly bragged to its police customers about how its information could exist used to track protesters and demonstrators during events.

Nosotros've already written about how in Texas, cops are now utilized to collect on court costs and other fees, thanks to the mass tracking and surveillance of ordinary citizens who accept committed no crimes and are not subject to a judge'south warrant. To their credit, all three firms cut ties with Geofeedia as soon as the story went public — simply none of these massive firms had done any investigation into how their information streams were beingness used in the outset place.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Verizon have done astonishing things for engineering and the Internet. Merely their ideal vision of the world is ane in which your every waking moment is tracked, monitored, and sold to the highest bidder to line their ain pockets. Information technology's not a world with any room for protests or freedom of speech, whether y'all are marching on behalf of Black Lives Thing or at a pro-life rally. To the extent that those events matter to these companies, information technology's only as an opportunity for a little targeted advertising.

Mega-corporations are a fact of modern life, but they shouldn't be allowed to unilaterally ascertain how we collaborate with each other in public. Putting the populace nether mass surveillance for the purposes of advertisement targeting is a definitional change to how public space is conceived of and used. Later the Snowden leaks, there is no credible argument that the NSA wouldn't vacuum upward this data with delight — and we've already seen how corporations and government are cooperating to erode what little sense of privacy people yet possess.

Yahoo used to fight for your rights. Now, it's just interested in monetizing them. Small wonder Verizon wanted to buy the company, at to the lowest degree until some of its cataclysmic security practices went public.