The Modern Smartphone is a Security Risk
Cox Media Group, a Facebook partner, uses an AI program to surveil smartphone users. It's not the first company or group to gather data on the sly.
(Several mobile devices carried in a recycling bin. Photo courtesy of nykdaily.com)
In what will likely to prove a violation of wiretapping and surveillance laws (if such are enforced), Cox Media Group has been using an AI program called Predictive Audience Technology to further gain an understanding of individual buying habits. Those habits, once understood, will then be used to advertise to users- not that anyone pays attention to advertising in the first place. Advertisements are those pesky videos waiting for five seconds before a skip button is pressed, a mute button is utilized, or the content on offer is disregarded entirely.
Four years ago, an article on the website Psychology Today appeared explaining why people don’t like advertising any longer. The article claims media exposure for individuals has increased, which has led to an increase in exposure to ads. In the past, when television was the primary medium of promulgating advertising videos, recognizable brands such as Gray Poupon regularly made ads along a similar theme. Actor Jim Varney played the most popular role of his career, Ernest P. Worrell. The character was created in 1980 to advertise an amusement park in Nashville, TN. The character became so successful it launched a series of movies, as well as a few VHS tapes cataloging previous video clips.
Advertising agencies, and the companies who fund them, might still be trying to chase the success of old ads, some of which were so well done they became a highlight of the Super Bowl each year. However, rather than trying to create eponymous characters or familiar situations (“will you pass the Grey Poupon?”), they are instead focused on getting their brand name out there. Brand names with advertising budgets at stores are easy to spot: they are higher-priced than other products without offering a significant upgrade in quality.
One example is Tylenol, which contains the drug Acetomenaphin. Name brand Acetomenaphin is not significantly different from generic medicine, except that one may be coated in food coloring. The only reason the name brand Tylenol and others like it exist is to create trademarks and intellectual property rights which the company can use for the purpose of advertising. If every company made the same product the same way, none of them would have any need to engage in competitive pricing or trying to establish market share over others.
In trying to serve such name brands, Cox Media Group looks like it’s living in the past by embracing a backwards theft-driven system like AI. Corporate executives with their products want increased profits each year; it’s not enough to have modest year-on-year profits indicating a healthy business model. This is why hotels charge pet fees when once they didn’t, video games have in-game purchases when once they didn’t, and Google Chromebooks brick themselves after a number of years has elapsed (with the expectation people will buy another eventually).
The “Grow or Die” mantra businesses believe in isn’t accurate any longer. Businesses with hands grasping for consumer wallets end up losing customers in the long run due to reputational harm and a disregard for quality. Capitalist business today, especially large businesses, are not merely satisfied humming along with steady profits every quarter. They want more money, more growth, bigger profits, number goes up.
What does all of this have to do with smartphones being a security risk? Without executives engaging in rapacious, avaricious Wall Street-type practices, number goes up would be a cute phrase to describe investment bankers who invite systemic risk to the countries in which they operate because they can’t ever have enough. Without number goes up, Cox Media Group wouldn’t be looking for new ways to glean more customers through advertising- even though an increasing number of people are living paycheck to paycheck with less discretionary income anyway.
What’s more, it’s not just mobile devices that are at risk. Cox’s AI scheme also targets: streaming television and audio, paid social media, as well as Google and Bing searches. Its current business partners are Google, Amazon, and Facebook. The technology surveils user data from digital sources, then creates a list of users with interests similar to the advertiser’s product. Once the target audience is identified, advertisements are then promulgated to that audience. At price points of $100 and $200 a day, Cox Media Group has combined two of the world’s worst practices: they’ve become an AI landlord.
This practice relies upon users clicking “agree” or leaving the “opt-in” box checked. Although sometimes, even if users click off an opt-in box for advertising, companies will advertise anyway. Facebook in particular, which has been a porous sieve of user surveillance and data breaches that would make NSA officials blush, has shown little regard for its data mining sources- its user base- and has instead operated to benefit itself and itself alone.
Amazon was among the first companies to develop strong data analytics, a process that, while allowing tracking of user purchases and browsing history, has turned the Amazon website into an endless morass of links. The search results are often prioritized to whoever could pay the most to advertise their product on the site. By collecting user data, Amazon hopes to enable itself to better understand what people tend to buy. It can then show people related searches in which they might be interested.
Eventually, reputational harm caught up with Amazon after mistreatment of workers, damaged packages, and overall bad press caused users to leave Amazon entirely. Forbes reported users were leaving for Temu, a company owned by PDD Holdings, located in Shanghai, China.
Cox, unfortunately, isn’t alone in spying on the modern smartphone. Anyone with an app in an app store, however otherwise innocuous, can spy on its users. App stores contain thousands and thousands of apps, all of which are difficult to perform safety checks on by the app store’s owners; there are simply too many of them. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, women began worrying that period-tracking apps would send off their data to a third party without their permission.
Any device with a microphone or camera which can install an app is susceptible to surveillance. Some collect data for advertising purposes and/or to sell that data to someone else. Others collect data, as China does, in a social credit system for draconian law enforcement measures to limit a person’s civil rights if they behave in ways contrary to accepted state doctrine.
Among possible devices containing personal data, the individual smartphone remains the most susceptible to surveillance due to the large amount of time people spend with them. While wiretapping laws would ostensibly prevent surveillance from occurring, the reality is regulators thus far have a different sense of what constitutes personal property. Were a written communication in the form of a letter to be opened, read, and resealed before delivered by mail to its intended recipient, this is seen as a crime. If a voice chat, video stream, or text message is intercepted in a similar manner, users have little redress- especially if they clicked on an “agree and consent” button somewhere along the way giving a company permission to engage in a practice which would be prosecuted were it done on paper.
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