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by michaelt
81 days ago
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> Even the GDPR gives us enormous leeway to do literally this, but it requires participating in tracking networks that have what amounts to a total knowledge of purchases and browsing you do on the internet. That's the only way they work at all. That data sounds like it would be very valuable. But I think if I sell widgets and a prospective customer browsers my site, telling my competitors (via a data broker) that customer is in the market for widgets is not a smart move. How do such tracking networks get the cooperation of retailers, when it’s against the retailers interests to have their customers tracked? |
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The tracking network is NOT our competitor, nor is it a competitor to any of our competitors. It is a third party outside of our market. We buy fraud signals from them, not the data.
We do not get to learn anything about any other ecommerce from them. They collect info from all ecommerce that buys from them, and any partnerships they have, and they sell us derived signals that we can use to deny transactions that are most likely fraudulent.
That's why they get the cooperation of retailers. They save retailers lots of money, they enable ecommerce to exist basically at all, there's no downside but their price, and they charge big bucks.
There's very little actual "Data brokering" going on. Almost all tracking is done as a company collecting data as an asset, and selling derivations of that data. Why would a tracking company sell the data itself? That's their core IP.
What's funny is that all the retailers could replace that expensive contract with a very very cheap alliance of all interested retailers where you pay some portion of a collective AWS bill and submit your signals and everyone benefits collectively, but US business loves to buy services rather than solve problems efficiently.
Some people point at your raw data not being openly available for some sort of "It's not that bad" conclusion which is absurd. You can't buy the raw data but a third party will happily sell whatever "Against the current regime bit" the right buyer wants. Think of a way the raw data can be used against you and then add to that situation a layer of indirection that gives everyone involved plausible deniability.