Why do you want to buy something that always appears in App ads?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Operation Research Society” (ID: U_quan), author’s routine editor.
Yesterday, PGone and Li Xiaoying suddenly shook the video on the Internet a year ago, and they let the two people who had disappeared for a long time boarded the Weibo hot search again. Many netizens lament:
This melon does not know what to say.
But behind this incident of eating melon, it is even more contemplative: how is the video released?
Some netizens speculated that this is “the video of the vibrating draft box, which was stolen by internal employees.” Others said that this is “the mobile video was stolen after being stolen”… but no matter what the truth, it can’t escape. The four words “Privacy Leak”.
This reminds me of the things I have encountered in the last two days.
Looking at the double eleven is coming, I also can’t help but buy the impulse to buy and buy. After an hour of hard work, the shopping cart was filled with me, but think about the balance of the account with only 3 digits left… Well, let’s take a look at the sand sculpture video on the vibrato.
When I open the app, I find that the advertisement on the vibrato is actually the same item I just visited! Later, I opened my circle of friends and actually saw the goods I had just seen.
There is definitely more than just me, and there are even a lot of netizens who spit out:
When you talk to a friend, you mention something, and when you swipe your app, you are pushed an ad!
The accurate delivery of Internet advertising is now scary!
Although it has long been known that apps have been getting user information out of bounds, how do they get our private information? And why is it so accurate to push ads across platforms?
Those cross-platform ads
How is it accurately delivered to your phone
The most confusing thing about these ads that are precisely delivered is why the products that I browsed on the shopping platform in the last second will appear on other apps in the next second.
It turns out that these apps have long formed an alliance and started to collectCut us. In fact, the “culprit” of cross-platform precision delivery is programmatic advertising.
1) Programmatic advertising, the hand behind targeted delivery
The so-called programmatic advertising is not an advertisement or an app plugin, but a technology that collects user information through big data and then delivers the ad to the user accurately.
In a nutshell, programmatic advertising is a new type of advertising in the Internet age. Nowadays, this kind of programmatic advertising has penetrated into every corner of the Internet.
First, programmatic ads rely on big data to record a user’s network behavior.
Under the observation of big data, every behavior of our mobile phone software, each browsing record, content of interest, App used, etc. will be recorded, and the user will be imaged according to different behavior weights.
Under normal circumstances, our mobile phones and computers have corresponding unique device ID numbers. Therefore, the big data platform generally uses the device ID number as the user identifier and integrates the collected information into the device ID.
Then, after collecting enough data, big data can accurately depict a user’s portrait features, such as interest preferences, property status, consumer attitudes, and cultural level…
Finally, Big Data Platform will classify your portraits. Once an ad that matches your characteristics appears, the programmatic ad system will find you and target the ad to you.
For example, if you look at a new brand-name bag on the e-commerce platform, you can easily enter the product interface. Once you start browsing this item, programmatic ads will capture your behavior.
Then it analyzes your gender, age, hobbies, browsing history, etc. based on big data to determine your recent need to buy a package. So in the massive ad library, it finds the product that you “smell” and puts the ad on the app you open.
When I saw this, I couldn’t help but think of the oldest novel “1984”.Look at you!
In the face of big data and programmatic advertising, we seem to be streaking lambs with no privacy.
2) How is our privacy spread between platforms?
In fact, there is a platform similar to stock trading in the programmatic advertising industry. The process of accurately pushing each advertisement to users is carried out around this trading platform.
In the real trading process, there is a “demand side platform” (referred to as DSP platform) for advertisers, and a “supplier platform” (SSP or ADExchange for users).
When you open the mobile app, the software detects that the page has a corresponding ad slot, so the software collects your information and sends a message to the provider platform (SSP&ADExchange): There is a user who can advertise.
The SSP&ADExchange will analyze your characteristics, find the portrait tag that corresponds to you, and then tell the demand side platform (DSP): there is a user with the feature “XXX”, fast notification The corresponding advertisers are coming to bid!
Subsequently, the demand side platform (DSP) notifies the corresponding advertiser program to bid.
Next, the supplier platform (SSP&ADExchange) selects high-priced ads from these auction-targeted ads and lets the ad slots on the app display the ad.
These processes take no more than one second, which means that the programmatic advertising is complete the moment you open the app.
So, what you have just searched for, or what you browse often, can always appear in the platform ads you are logged into.
Mobile software is over-authorized,Your privacy is being bought and sold online
If only in terms of patterns, programmatic advertising is just a means of advertising for precision marketing, there is not much to be blamed for targeting product ads to target users.
However, the big data platform on which this kind of advertising investment is based is based on the excessive use of mobile apps to collect our personal information.
As mentioned above, the bidding platform for programmatic advertising is similar to the stock trading platform, and both parties are transmitting demand., and will not directly trade the user’s tag information.
Does this mean that although our personal privacy is infringed by App software, it is still just watching more advertisements without much harm?
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Because in reality, these software platforms do not protect the information collected by the software well, criminals can easily crawl user privacy for platform vulnerabilities.
1) How serious is the excessive installation of software installed on your mobile phone?
On September 19 this year, 21 of the 32 application software checklists released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s official website in the second quarter were blacklisted for illegally obtaining user privacy.
In the “App Special Governance Working Group” released “100 popular apps to collect and use personal information permission list”, the problem of excessive cable rights in mobile phone software is even more alarming.
“The 100 Common App Applies to Collect Personal Information Permissions List”
In the 26 personal information related permissions in this form, the average App has more than 10 mobile phone permissions. Almost all software will apply for permissions that are not related to its own function, and its purpose is to programmatic ad push.
In order to be able to collect personal information from users, these softwares will take a variety of routines. I downloaded the App software on multiple lists and found the following 3 routines.
The default checkbox allows you to authorize if you don’t pay attention. Many apps will log in and log in, they will display “I have read and agreed to the User Agreement and Privacy Policy” on the interface, and “intimate” to help users quietly tick, let you inadvertently agree to the software Privacy Policy.
Use to agree. This kind of software does not even give the user a choice at all. It is only in the inconspicuous place below the login interface. In small words, “Continue to use is to agree to the “Privacy Agreement”…”.
Zhere mines in the user agreement. There are a lot of external ones in the software of some platform lines.Three-party software, but in the privacy agreement, the software side clearly stated that “does not infringe on third-party infringement”.
In other words, when you agree to the agreement, even if your privacy is collected and leaked by the software, it has nothing to do with the App platform!
In addition, according to many media reports, some software will use text games to trick users into allowing users to agree to the software to collect information and sell it to third-party platforms. Other software directly regards user information as “assets”, Xu Jin does not allow it, and it is difficult to cancel personal information…
In short, most software in the current mobile phone market will obtain permission from outside the service scope to obtain user information.
2) The privacy collected by the software is being bought and sold online
When personal privacy is collected by the software, it not only allows us to receive a large number of targeted advertisements, but also makes it easier for criminals to access our personal information. Many unscrupulous merchants can obtain a large amount of user resources and sell them on the Internet only by crawling the software platform.
For example, if you search for “data sales” on Baidu, there will be a number of merchant advertisements selling user information on the top advertising space.
In order to get the insider information of these merchants, I pretend that the buyer has added the merchant’s WeChat.
After communication, I found that they don’t sell user information directly, but sell software that can crawl user information through apps and search engines.
The software can directly crawl to the target app to save user browsing information, and then automatically filter out the users you want. They also sent a special demonstrationFrequently show me the crawling process.
The other party in the video said that it is very simple to obtain the user information on the Internet. As long as the corresponding domain name and limited information are input, the system can automatically crawl the information such as the user’s name and mobile phone.
On the Internet, similar software and merchants are not uncommon. Like an Internet company named @瑞智华盛 in Beijing last year, it collected more than 3 billion personal information through illegally implanted software.
Excessive claims on mobile software have kept our personal information on the software platform, and many criminals have been able to steal our private data more easily.
When our private data is obtained by similar businesses and is freely traded online, no one knows where our private information will flow and which illegal businesses will use it.
Conclusion
Programming advertising has been developed so far, accurate delivery has become the basic logic of Internet advertising. According to @Inmobi’s forecast, China’s programmatic advertising will exceed 190 billion yuan in 2019, and mobile advertising spending will grow by 111%.
But behind the growth of the industry, most mobile software is over-authorizing, and our privacy has been indiscriminately violated.
Although in May of this year, the National Internet Information Office issued the “Data Security Management Measures (Draft for Comment)”, but it has not been implemented until now.
So far, there is still no effective legal means to control the business, and we have no way to completely use the Internet without downloading the mobile phone software.
But we can turn on the phone settings – privacy, see which apps secretly use the permissions they don’t need, and turn them off.
