So I was thinking about this recently: do companies actually "sell" your personal details to advertisers?
A practical example: let's say I run a cooking website, where users log in and share recipes, vote and comment on them etc.
I (the site owner) store your votes, and comments, as well as track what recipes you view.
From this I (still the site owner) can learn things about you. If you're always viewing lots of chicken recipes, I an make the assumption you're a fan of chicken. I can also note that the recipes that you view and like are "upper class", requiring expensive ingredients.
Now an advertiser for a large Chicken producer could come to me, and want to advertise its new Free Range chickens. They (the advertiser) asks me to display an ad for all people who like chickens and like expensive tastes. So I (the site owner) do this, and you (a user) see the ad.
At no point has the advertiser learnt anything about my users, or had any direct knowledge of my users and their preferences. It's a completely one-way transaction.
So if I was writing a recipe website and I wanted to fund it with advertising, that's how I'd do it. I'd probably give some kind of iTunes dynamic playlist / email filter style UI where you get to pick the types of people your ad gets seen by, but at no point would the advertiser actually learn anything about those people.
Is this still considered "selling your personal details"? Or are companies like Facebook and (presumably) Twitter actually essentially handing over their DBs?
When people say that Facebook "sells your data," they're (charitably) engaging in hyperbole to strengthen their rhetorical point, or (less charitably) lying. Facebook shows ads to the users they're targeted to, without sharing the users' details or identities with advertisers.
A practical example: let's say I run a cooking website, where users log in and share recipes, vote and comment on them etc.
I (the site owner) store your votes, and comments, as well as track what recipes you view.
From this I (still the site owner) can learn things about you. If you're always viewing lots of chicken recipes, I an make the assumption you're a fan of chicken. I can also note that the recipes that you view and like are "upper class", requiring expensive ingredients.
Now an advertiser for a large Chicken producer could come to me, and want to advertise its new Free Range chickens. They (the advertiser) asks me to display an ad for all people who like chickens and like expensive tastes. So I (the site owner) do this, and you (a user) see the ad.
At no point has the advertiser learnt anything about my users, or had any direct knowledge of my users and their preferences. It's a completely one-way transaction.
So if I was writing a recipe website and I wanted to fund it with advertising, that's how I'd do it. I'd probably give some kind of iTunes dynamic playlist / email filter style UI where you get to pick the types of people your ad gets seen by, but at no point would the advertiser actually learn anything about those people.
Is this still considered "selling your personal details"? Or are companies like Facebook and (presumably) Twitter actually essentially handing over their DBs?