The methods of political propaganda and advertising of toothpaste on the Internet are no different
The US elections were held three years ago. But people are still excited by the idea that someone could analyze their information on social media and influence them with personalized ads. The idea is not new. This is what advertising specialists do every day. Why no one is trying to fight them and how the market for personal data of users works.
At the end of July, the documentary The Great Hack was released on Netflix streaming service.
Perhaps the closest translation into Russian is “The Great Hack”. A film about how the British firm Cambridge Analytica downloaded the data of billions of Facebook users. I made psychological portraits based on them. And it showed these users personalized political ads. As if thanks to this, the British voted for Brexit, and the Americans - for Trump.
The interest of documentary filmmakers in history is understandable - politics, social media, big data. In general, humanity is in danger. What directors Karim Amer, Jehen Nuzheim forgot to mention is that the same technologies are used every day by the most common advertising agencies. And the methods for targeting political ads and toothpaste are the same.
Yes, you are being followed
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Anyone with a little programming knowledge can download data on users of any network, explains Lilia Glazova, director of the communications research company PR News, to Izvestia. There is API technology. And it is written in absolutely open access in the documentation of the social network.
Small companies do not pump out large amounts of user information. “Firstly, not all social networks provide all the information for downloading via the API,” says the director of a research company. - Secondly, there is always a limit on the number of requests per second. Which means that you can get a list of subscribers of some group in which there are 10 thousand people. But you won't be able to get a list of subscribers to a group of 50 million people, or you will do it for a very, very long time. The same Facebook on the third day of downloading will ask you why you are doing this."
According to Glazova, there are firms that do it professionally and quickly. Or they have a contract with a social network for the transfer of information. Or their servers are able to access the site more often, but again they passed the social network check.
The head of one of these firms, who agreed to talk to Izvestia on condition of anonymity, calculated that they download 100 million messages from all social networks in Russian per day. At its peak - up to 30-40 thousand messages per second.
The collection takes place only on the data to which the user has not limited access to the privacy settings, Evgeny Ishchuk, CEO of the Control Digital agency, explained to Izvestia.
The good news is that no one has the right to use your personal data, hidden or open, without your consent. This is spelled out in the law "On Personal Data" (152-FZ). The bad news is that you've already agreed to everything.
“Almost on all websites and social networks, before you send a phone number or other information, you will be asked to read and accept the user agreement on data processing. If the user has given his consent, the company can use the user data for processing, including for advertising,”Alexander Morozov, managing partner of the Make Agency, told Izvestia.
You are being analyzed
Personalized ads for flowers, toothpaste, presidential candidates - with user data, you can do more than that.
But in order not to manually search for every football fan or flower buyer, you need to distribute users into groups - to typologize them. Cambridge Analytica is believed to have done this in a "big five" model. She offered to take a personality test, and then ran the results of users and their other data through a program that measured their 1) extraversion, 2) benevolence, 3) conscientiousness, 4) emotional stability, and 5) openness to experience. So I divided people by psychotype and showed them different content.
The fact that this happened in this way, moreover, significantly influenced the elections, raises serious doubts among Igor Ashmanov, CEO of Ashmanov and Partners, which is engaged in Internet marketing. “It has not yet been proven that people have a stable psychotype. Moreover, it is calculated by posts and likes and can show electoral preferences. The story that there is a “big five” and we learn more about a person by 100 likes than his wife knows is bullshit,”the expert told Izvestia.
Lilia Glazova takes a different position - the theory of psychotypes works, it is simply not necessary, firstly, to simplify it, and secondly, to consider it universal: “There are many theories of psychotypes. They are workers. But if you use them, it is important to verify them with other theories to test the psychotype, after all, it is even whether you are new to buying something or have been buying this product for a long time. This cannot be understood from social media profiles. We focus on action and content that people write. From it we can understand that these are, for example, hipsters - a youth audience using such and such a language. Or is it rockers, an audience using that language. And they are more committed to this product."
With or without psychotype theory, marketers draw conclusions about social media users. And they make them accurately enough to make money on it, reminds Alexander Morozov: "Since most often advertising is paid according to the CPM model (cost per thousand impressions), then in order to get a significant effect from advertising, it is necessary to show ads to the maximum target audience."
The law does not protect you
The collection of data from social networks, both by social networks themselves and by third-party companies, is still in a gray zone from a legal point of view. Everyone is doing this, but they do not want to talk about it openly, as an anonymous source of Izvestia. “The mechanism of targeted advertising is used by everyone. This has been used to create a system for selling advertisements for a search engine, social networks - this is their bread, this is the money they live on,”Lilia Glazova confirmed to Izvestia.
In Russia there is the aforementioned 152nd Federal Law "On Personal Data". It gives a very vague wording of what personal data is - “any information relating to a specific or determined on the basis of such information an individual”.
There is no indication in the law as to who owns this data, if it is made publicly available by users. The legislators have not decided whether third parties can work with this publicly available data.
It is not possible to legitimize this issue - and this is not only the Russian, but also the global situation - due to the confrontation between social networks (and other platforms that have access to personal data, for example, mobile operators) with third parties (companies that build business on the analysis of users and showing them ads).
The loudest proceedings did not clarify, and no judicial precedent was created. “Legally, it can be argued that Cambridge Analytica is in the same hands for data collection [faked scientific research] and targeted advertising. This is not ethically correct. But there is no law [prohibiting it],”Glazova explains. The only consequence of the whole story with the "hacked" elections is that Facebook and Instagram closed the data on users' friends for downloading.
In Russia, in 2017–2018, Mail.ru, which owns VKontakte, and Double Data, which collected and sold open user data to banks, were suing. As a result, the court forbade the company to do this, but an anonymous expert believes that it simply advertised its services too loudly.
The confrontation is taking place not only in working groups, where options for draft laws are discussed. Social media is constantly making it harder to siphon data, and companies are developing new programs to keep doing it.
Igor Ashmanov believes that a bill on the collection of personal data in some form may be submitted to the State Duma this fall. According to him, "all lawmakers are leaning towards the general availability of publicly available data."
So the situation will not really change for the user.
How to protect yourself
There is no place for an ordinary user in this business. And it is unlikely that his or her opinion will be taken into account in any country when developing laws on the use of personal data. Therefore, Izvestia asked experts to provide recommendations for those who want to use social networks, but do not want to be used to build sociological theories and advertising campaigns.
Evgeniy Ishchuk offers several ways to “partially conduct the system”. In the profile, set the minimum possible age and change the city of residence, turn off GPS and do not use Wi-Fi, and also stop interacting with the content - do not write comments, do not like and do not repost.
According to Lilia Glazova, it will soon become impossible to hide from the analysis, even if you do not like, comment or repost anything.
Igor Ashmanov is also very skeptical about the possibility of hiding from analysis: “In principle, you can turn yourself into a black spot for analyzing mechanisms. But then they will see a black spot that moves through the analyzed space."
He recommends not trying to "become a scout", but to observe basic rules of digital hygiene: not to publish photographs of your children, not to discuss sects, not to post dubious images. Ashmanov is now writing a book on digital hygiene for teenagers.
Izvestia's anonymous interlocutor advised to relax and recalled a 2013 study that showed that Facebook, in order to study users' self-censorship, collects data about each character entered on the site and in the application. Not every published, but every introduced. This means that the social network stores everything that you wrote, even if you did not publish it, but erased it at the last moment. And if it does, why not share it with those who are willing to pay.
Ignat Shestakov
