Interesting, I'm a bit shocked that these appear to actually be real user-data pulled things vs editorialized made-up details.
Somewhat also interesting that it looks like the negative feedback started up before the companies commented on how they came up with the lines.
I remember a decade-oldish fast food TV commercial I remember that was something along the lines of "dear person who ordered a double cheeseburger and then felt regret after your buddy ordered a triple: it was only a dollar more", and it was obviously a fictional yet relatable ad. Funny how much things have changed since then, as companies have done such a poor job building anything like consumer trust around data - what was once obviously cheeky and cute (if faked) now comes off as rude and malicious and sneaky but real. And from the article and discussion here, it seems like the less you know about how the ad creation process works/has historically worked, the more likely you are to cry foul on first blush.
Pornhub ARIA
@Pornhub
Pornhub would never play you like that fam
Netflix US
@netflix
To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?
7:47 AM · Dec 11, 2017
I sure hope so!
A few thoughts WRT that NetFlix tweet:
The "data" culture is so pervasive, the want of privacy is so weak, that these corporations are not ashamed to post tweets like that. And the lack of outrage, which should be easier to amplify and snowball due to the Internet, tells me, that the battle for privacy is lost (or impossible to win).
That Netflix tweet made me feel like a prostitute TBH, like a cog in a machine. Brazil, the movie comes to mind.
Spotify has an ads product. Everyone knows they are collecting the data. It would be foolish to think otherwise. Using it in advertising serves an added benefit of helping their ad sales team tell the story of how much data they have and how they can use it to help target the correct audience.
>"Using it in advertising serves an added benefit of helping their ad sales team tell the story of how much data they have and how they can use it to help target the correct audience."
So its advertising targeting advertisers, paid for by their users and and the artists?
Cute? No. These ads are smug and tone-deaf. Complete disregard for privacy has become the rule rather than the exception on the internet, and these ads practically celebrate that. I don't care if the data is anonymized.
I've never had a Netflix account and I've already started building my .flac library back up and will be cancelling my spotify subscription. The convenience of these services is not worth their disrespect to me as a customer.
Devil's advocate: what is harmful about using anonymised data this way? In an actual "this is how it will negatively affect you" sense?
I ask because while I share your concerns (perhaps not to the extent you do) sitting on HN agreeing with each other does little, and neither does cancelling our accounts. What you'd need to do is explain to a vast number of users why this is problematic in very clear terms, and I'm yet to see anyone actually do that.
Anonymized data generally is not very anonymous. You can only trust that data is actually anonymous if there exists no non-anonymous dataset with which you can cross reference the anonymized data, and you can guarantee that no such database will ever exist.
I'm willing to bet that many "anonymized" datasets are of the kind which could relatively easily be deanonymized, especially datasets which are frivolously used to make ads "funny".
Dear person, who watched $show $number of times in one $time, $snarky_comment?
Netflix themselves might know who this person is, but there's no way anyone reading the tweet is going to be able to link it back to a specific person. Are you concerned that Netflix can query their own data?
That's an incredibly broad statement; we are talking about what movies people have watched on netflix. What possible non-anonymous dataset could you be cross referencing to de-anonymize it? Even if you could, who cares?
Because they are using them to single out individuals (even if those are anonymous) - people expect them to at most use that data privately (ie to see what you probably like) and to have aggregate things (ie this is the most popular $ITEM on weeknights).
And to that that Netflix was condescending and quite frankly rude.
> Complete disregard for privacy has become the rule rather than the exception on the internet, and these ads practically celebrate that.
Ahahaha, has me in tears, really. For all we know, these claims could as well be made up. We can't verify that 53 people watched any movie 18 days in a row. Why? Well because they didn't actually violate these peoples privacy by dropping their names. The only entity that could use this information and track those people down is the NSA (correlating Traffic). But they wouldn't need tweets to do that.
My point is: Please stop making a fool out of yourself. There are really harmful players out there, people that can ruin your life not your audio listening experience. Rage in the right direction.
It doesn't matter if it's made up. At the very least it appears as though Netflix and Spotify are completely disregarding privacy, and that's all that really matters.
I'm talking about appearances. It does not matter if anyone's privacy was actually violated, what matters is the message the ad sends, and that message is "we're looking at the exact viewing habits of individual people".
> For all we know, these claims could as well be made up.
The companies have confirmed that is not the case.
> They didn't actually violate these peoples privacy by dropping their names.
The articles mentions a Spotify ad that said “To the person in NoLiTa who started listening to holiday music way back in June, you really jingle all the way, huh?" I mean, how much more specific can you get? Nolita is five square blocks[0]. If you think I'm making a fool out of myself by being concerned with this, I don't know what to tell you.
What level of specificity would you no longer be comfortable with? If it had been 500 or 50 people, would that still have been okay? How you can be sure that this data is inocuous? You can't predict the intentions of every stalker or bad actor that might have access to this data or be able find a use for it.
Listening habits can make a good forecast for other lifestyle habits; i.e, he listens to a lot of jazz, maybe I can find him at Maxwell's drum shop. She streamed a song by Purity Ring 25 times, I bet she'll be at their show in Brooklyn this weekend.
> he listens to a lot of jazz, maybe I can find him at Maxwell's drum shop. She streamed a song by Purity Ring 25 times, I bet she'll be at their show in Brooklyn this weekend.
He/she is on Hacker News, showing off his/her New York specific knowledge and making vague points about privacy. He/She is probably an software engineer living in NYC. \s
Sure listening habits are information worth keeping a secret, but that's not the topic discussed here. And all they said is that someone in NoLiTa listened to Christmas tunes in June. That is nothing of value for anyone and Spotify and Netflix did a good job not doing harm to anyone by this campaign. Again the real privacy invaders are somewhere else, sitting there silently collecting your data!
Nerflad is exactly on point with his harshness if you ask me. I don’t care for those ads at all and they prove that privacy is a non-issue for Spotify. It paints the picture of employees perusing my data to see if there is anything funny to take to a weekly show and tell. All the while laughing at our stupidity as customers for trusting them.
Your comment makes me wonder how you believe this data is viewed in the business. I work in BI, who are usually the developers who turn such data in to insights that can be comprehended by the people in businesses who don't know the first thing about databases. Just from my personal experience in such analysis, I think it's highly unlikely they're looking at the "who" behind the weird listening patterns they're reporting on.
It's much easier to report anamolous behavior in the form of anonymous aggregations than it is to report on such a fine granularity as individual listening patterns. A simple SELECT statement with an DESC order by and a SUM aggregation could yield that Sean Spicer statistic, without every touching a specific individual's data.
Such detailed reporting tends to actually be counter-productive, as it usually leads to information overload. I highly doubt that any analyst within Spotify has ever looked specifically at your history.
In this example, you're absolutely right, and if all they had was my name and my listening history, that wouldn't be so bad. But some of the ads do reference specific individuals. Spotify in particular have made it clear that
1.) listening behavior profiles may be "anonymized" in the sense that they have had the names sanitized from them, but there is a myriad of other potentially identifiable data, such as location, that has not been sanitized, and
2.) they are willing and able to comb through this data to find anomalies.
You're right about some of the ads touching the individual level, but if they're following any "best practices" in their data models, those individuals are likely just unique identifiers.
Granted, everything I'm saying is most certainly speculation. There could most certainly be some folks scouring this data with insensitive intentions. I'm just pointing out that that there are actual technical AND practical limitations to doing such reporting effectively.
It is a matter of appearance. I know how databases work, I am a developer myself. The point in was making is that apparently Spotify is very comfortable with the image of them looking through their customer's data and use it whichever way they find fun/profitable. I expect them to analyse listening behaviour in order to recommend certain sponsored content, I expect them to connect my listening to other's listening in order to recommend music to me, I expect them to use my listening behaviour in order to sell insights to the music industry on how to sell better to people with similar music preferences. What I did not expect however is that they would sift through my playlist titles in order to find out whether there is something embarrassing in there for them to use in their advertisements.
What is next?
Spotify ad:
Dear Mosselman, who has listend to his playlist "Oh no Veronica, why did you leave me?" 100 times in the last week. Veronica isn't thinking about you anymore, shes listening to _her_ playlist "Thank god for Mosselman's brother and his good lovin'" since day 1.
How naive could you possibly be to think that Spotify or Netflix wouldn't have had this sort of data?
I don't see anything wrong with the ads, not because it isn't fucking creepy, but because you'd have to be an idiot to think that they don't have that much data and because there was no personal information shared.
By using these types of services you're implicitly (explicitly? Wouldn't be surprised if it was in ToS) agreeing to have pretty much everything you ever do on their platform collected, and if you're lucky anonymised.
I encourage you to check out https://hdtracks.com. As far as the expense goes, yes you're right it's a drag. One thing I like to do is buy used CD's on ebay or Amazon (usually about half price from a reseller, or even cheaper from private sellers) and rip them to flac.
Yep, I think the last time I looked at hdtracks, less than 20% of the songs I wanted were there, even without taking into account the asinine geoblocking going on there. Don't they also force you to use a pretty terrible download client?
And yes, I've grabbed discs from eBay and Discogs, but it takes up a lot of time. Then, if I get rid of the disc (or omg, sell it to the one person left who wants discs) am I still allowed to play it? I don't like dumping CDs in landfill.
For me, I don't have a "Collection" of music I like. My tastes are hard to define, ephemeral, and silly. I will play a song hundreds of times and then a week later never play it again. I want to support artists but doing so through anything other than a subscription process would bankrupt me
I'll go one step further and say that they are actually mean-spirited. Read this again- "To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?"
In some ways, I think the unintended consequences of these ads are very positive. Anything that encourages us to think about the ever-increasing amount of data held by private companies is a good thing in my mind.
I doubt that we will ever break the grip of the advertisement-driven web, but maybe someday a corporation will make an advertisement tone-deaf enough to spark a revolution on how the internet is funded. I'm not affiliated with, nor do I have any stake in this concept, but I think micro-payment funded content, like yours.org, is an interesting alternative. But I doubt many people will adopt yours.org, myself included, until the content is on part with that of ad-funded media.
I have a pet-hypothesis that people really don't care about their privacy, but rather they care about being reminded that their privacy is being violated. That is to say they really don't care enough to do anything about it, but that being reminded makes them uncomfortable enough to not want to be reminded.
The advertisements advertise to advertisers that they know the users location and most likely emotional state of mind. The personal information that may be inferred from metadata is the additional cost of using these services. This is why GDPR.
While this detracts from the main point of data mining behavioral transactions, I do want to voice the internal debate I have with these ads to get some feedback. I think it's silly that they spent budget on OOH (billboard) ads when considering other options.
These "cute" ads require reading and thinking time, and I question people even stop to absorb and process. Granted, here we are, looking at these ads in a digital medium. Clearly, the KPI is probably "sharability" and ultimately brand awareness. Would it have been more efficient to just release these digitally only? As someone who has lead advertising both on the brand side as well as media agency side and is now trying to fix a lot of hot trash snake oil, I really wonder what the measure success is here beyond "let's do something funny and get people to write about us". Can these brands/agencies answer one simple question backed by data: Was it worth it?
No. Considering the state of data collection the advertising I see is a joke. If they manage to provide a somewhat relevant ad, I see it 100 times.
I will side on the simple answer and say. Advertising companies like Google and Facebook collect tremendous amounts of creepy data and are blatantly incompetent in utilizing it
I found those ads funny (I assumed they were not derived from customer data - just something made up for the sake of comedy).
That said I wanted to know the end-goal of those ads?
If it's going to make me convert or sign up - that does not look like it's going to happen (no CTA, no real driver etc.)
If the idea is to be on people's mind (informational) - I can see it being hip/fellow-kids' like (considering it's coming from a multi-million dollar corporate entity) - I don't see how it'll last longer than a few weeks at best (considering the amount they probably spent on it).
That said, I can see how it stands out from the crowd (creepy factor not outstanding).
I would find it funny if the ad was about data that related to a large group but when you're poking fun at a single user that's misguided and creepy to me.
When I first saw the Spotify ads with playlist names, I was a bit concerned about the privacy side of things, since you can search public playlists and most people have their real name attached to their Spotify account.
However, in the article Spotify claims that they sought permission before using playlist names on their advertising, so I can't really be upset about it.
Way to go Spotify, you paid more for that advertising space than you did to the artist for streaming their their content to your users.
Using someone else's art as a surveillance marketing tool? Wow that's gross even by the music industry's low standards. Congrats, you've really made it!
It's well known that artists get paid less than 1 cent for a stream [1]. Do the math with the figures they mentioned in those ads. Now look at the ad rates for the New York City subway stations.[2]
>"They're not using someone else's art for these statistics."
When you are an artist and you write songs, those songs belong to you. So yes they are using somebody else's art.
Spotify pays 70 to 85% of its revenues to music labels as royalties [1]. The problem isn’t with Spotify. It’s in the contracts between the labels and artists.
>"The problem isn’t with Spotify. It’s in the contracts between the labels and artists."
That's the convenient lie - "Oh we have nothing to do with that, that's between the record label and the artist."
The overwhelming majority of Spotify users are free tier users(90 million) not paid users(50 million.)[1]
Ad supported streams pay out an even worse royalty rate to artists than the paid user tier royalty rates. And that free tier rate appears to be declining as well.[2]
Spotify's business model depends on converting those free tier users to paid users - that's the funnel. So yes Spotify very much depends on this awful arrangement between the record label and artist.
Because the rest of what I wrote explains exactly why this is a lie.
Paying out 75 cents on the dollar does not mean they aren't propping up that corrupt system. Spotify likes to repeat this line about payouts as if it absolves them from any blame in a system where artists can't make money from their recordings.
> Paying out 75 cents on the dollar does not mean they aren't propping up that corrupt system
So...anyone listening to music is "propping up that corrupt system"? If so, that's a nifty moral framework you've got there? Not very practical, though, if it sorts everything into the "bad" pile.
>"So...anyone listening to music is "propping up that corrupt system"?"
That's a total strawman and not at all what I said.
I would gladly pay artists more than .001 cents a stream if I could but I can't. There is no option to do that. I actually believe that music is worth more than $9.99 a month.
And in case you hadn't noticed there's not many record store left so the ability to buy hard product that offers artists a better royalty rate is getting harder.
My only other options are to support those artists is by paying to see them live which is the only way most of them are able to make money now. And I pay to see live music all the time. I also visit their merch booth and generally buy something there like a piece of vinyl where all the money goes in their pockets.
The Spotify model is not the only model. Artists largely don't need record labels any more but there is no way alternative where artists can deal with Spotify directly.
Why is that? Because if Spotify announced that they were doing to allow artists to deal directly with them the records companies wouldn't renew their licensing when it came due. So yes they are very much propping up that system.
You might want to look into how how the Spotify model actually works to see why this claim of "we pay out 70% of everything we make" argument falls flat:
Somewhat also interesting that it looks like the negative feedback started up before the companies commented on how they came up with the lines.
I remember a decade-oldish fast food TV commercial I remember that was something along the lines of "dear person who ordered a double cheeseburger and then felt regret after your buddy ordered a triple: it was only a dollar more", and it was obviously a fictional yet relatable ad. Funny how much things have changed since then, as companies have done such a poor job building anything like consumer trust around data - what was once obviously cheeky and cute (if faked) now comes off as rude and malicious and sneaky but real. And from the article and discussion here, it seems like the less you know about how the ad creation process works/has historically worked, the more likely you are to cry foul on first blush.