Last time, we talked a bit about how corporations are getting your data for free. They pay attention to everything, what you say, how long your mouse lingers over an ad, what videos you like, etc. In many ways, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The data companies are always with you, tracking everything at every opportunity.
Why? After all, it takes a lot of time and resources to get all of that information. However, they are getting a hefty return on investment. How so? One is that they sell all of that data to third parties who are interested in using it for their own purposes, whether it is product development, market research, exploring policy outcomes and more. The other is that in tracking all of this information about you, they are able to zero in on all the best ways to get you to spend your money. You might be thinking “but I never fall for any of that”. Maybe not, but plenty of people must be falling for it in order for all those companies to keep working on collecting your data. It’s all directed to getting you to spend more time on a given website, increasing the chances that you’ll see an ad you like and click on it. That’s why so many social media professionals have come out and said they don’t let their own kids use the sites they used to work for. Those professionals know firsthand how their former employers will manipulate people into the behaviors they want and how harmful that can be.
Don’t forget to keep this thought in mind as well, what are you getting for giving these companies all of your data? A few likes? Possibly a friend or two that could completely disappear without you knowing why? The ego boost of people reacting to your post? That’s not a lot when you consider everything you are giving up.
One big factor used by all of these companies that we haven’t talked about is your location. Thanks to all of the smart devices out there, it is very easy to keep track of where almost everyone is. They don’t just use your phone either. There are smartwatches, Fitbits, GPS-enabled cars and who knows what else. Even if you leave all of that at home, there is still your credit card. Every purchase you make with one of those is recorded and tracked somewhere. To be completely free from anyone tracking your movements you have to live like it’s the 1980s; no cell phone, no GPS, and pay cash for everything. Needless to say, all of that is becoming increasingly difficult.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not really a big fan of these companies tracking so much about me. Especially my location. At the very least we should be able to move around without Apple knowing where I went for lunch and how fast I drove to get there. It’s bad enough that the government can do it, I don’t think we need Silicon Valley in on it as well. Especially if Silicon Valley and the government were to work together on tracking and categorizing citizens.
All of these things we’ve talked about are great reasons to start paying attention and taking back control of your data. Signing up with TARTLE will give you the ability to do exactly that. You can sync your accounts with us and funnel your data into our secure servers to be shared out only on your say so, rather than having it constantly skimmed by data aggregators. Go to tartle.co and sign up. In just a few minutes you’ll be on your way being in control of your data and your digital life.
What’s your data worth?
Last time, we talked a bit about how corporations are getting your data for free. They pay attention to everything, what you say, how long your mouse lingers over an ad, what videos you like, etc. In many ways, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The data companies are always with you, tracking everything at every opportunity.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your host Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanities steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:25):
Welcome back part two of our-
Jason Rigby (00:34):
Two, part two! Duals Duex.
Alexander McCaig (00:34):
That's right. Welcome to part two of our, what you're giving to social media companies list.
Jason Rigby (00:39):
Yes. It's 15 ways to give social media companies personal data, we saw this on journalstar.com.
Alexander McCaig (00:43):
Yeah and the way they coined that, it's not saying it in the best way possible.
Jason Rigby (00:46):
No.
Alexander McCaig (00:46):
It's saying pay attention.
Jason Rigby (00:48):
We're we're giving and they're taking.
Alexander McCaig (00:50):
What did you get returned? Oh, a like from your friend, I could post my photo. I'll just send it to walk over to-
Jason Rigby (00:57):
Ego.
Alexander McCaig (00:57):
... and print it out for a little ego boost, followers. I don't want leaders. I want followers.
Jason Rigby (01:04):
Yeah. And people are basing their whole life off of it, well, one part you have people that are just living off the platform. They're getting millions of dollars just based off the platform, you have these YouTube influencers or TikTok now, people are making tons of money off of, it's crazy. So we went over personal data for the taking. What gets you engaged sales, giving them attitude data, behavioral data easy collected. So we hit those four. So right now we're going to get into, what makes you stick around?
Alexander McCaig (01:33):
What does make me stick around?
Jason Rigby (01:34):
What makes you... and this is a big one. When they have shareholder meetings, the red phone, they're looking at what's time on site?
Alexander McCaig (01:43):
Yeah. How long did you stand in the H&M store before you walked out? Don't think they're not registering your face with the cameras when you walk in? They are, they know everything that's going on. They'll use that data. They all have interesting ways to see the heat maps in the store. What aisles you were looking at. What you were five finger discounting.
Jason Rigby (02:02):
Yeah. The Bluetooth, what's the low? Oh, I know the name of it, where they have those sensors set up in the stores and then it has that low energy of Bluetooth devices, it's a mix of those.
Alexander McCaig (02:15):
Yeah. It's a passive RFID.
Jason Rigby (02:16):
Yeah. And if you had... like Macy's has it really hardcore. So if you have the Macy's app on your phone, then in that privacy once it dings, it knows that you're in Macy's. So then that app can serve you up, your coupon codes or whatever it may be.
Alexander McCaig (02:29):
But how long are you there? How do they keep you in there? Or maybe you're in a section of like, "Ooh, that's not really what I wanted." You immediately leave. They be confused, right? So we have a Dillard's over here, that's just how I get into the mall. I bombed through it, a million miles an hour, and sometimes I... my problem, I don't know if other people have this problem, escalators. Which one's the up one, which one's down one? You know what I mean? I'm always like, I always go for the guests and I'm always wrong.
Jason Rigby (02:56):
I love... on TikTok they have these videos of these kids that are doing this, it's really funny. Where they just go up to random people and just try to put their hand. One's going up and one's going down, so they just put their hand on a person and just look at him like... and people's reactions are so funny, especially now with COVID everything going on. But it's like this guy will just touch this girl's arm and just look at her, and then some girls are like flattered and then others are like, "There's a creep, please get out of here."
Alexander McCaig (03:24):
"Get out of here, freaking escalator creeps."
Jason Rigby (03:26):
Yeah. So it's really funny, but what makes you stick around? I think when we look at social media sites, they know that if every fourth, fifth post is an ad, and then you're spending 10 minutes, 15 minutes on Instagram let's say, that gives them more of a chance to serve you more ads. So the odds of you clicking on an ad are there. So their whole idea is to say, "How can we keep them onsite?" Now, I don't want a bunch of new users, and then they're on the site for 20 seconds.
Alexander McCaig (03:54):
You want more interaction, because every second they're on there, we can deliver them another ad, which means more revenue for us. That's all it is.
Jason Rigby (04:02):
That's what it's about.
Alexander McCaig (04:02):
How we lower that bounce rate, and how do we increase time on page.
Jason Rigby (04:05):
Yep. That's what it's all about. Our next is you're the bulls-eye.
Alexander McCaig (04:10):
Bulls-eye.
Jason Rigby (04:10):
So I want to think of it this way. So you've shot a bullet before, archery.
Alexander McCaig (04:16):
Archery-
Jason Rigby (04:17):
We target [crosstalk 00:04:18].
Alexander McCaig (04:17):
... track shooting, rifles and guns, anything. Yeah.
Jason Rigby (04:19):
So whenever you look at the bullseye and the whole idea is to take that arrow from that device and be as accurate as possible and hit that bullseye. So, but I want to take it this... So I want somebody to envision themselves being the bullseye and there's somebody else shooting an arrow at you.
Alexander McCaig (04:40):
Yeah. I don't want that.
Jason Rigby (04:41):
And as accurate as they can be, that's their whole mindset.
Alexander McCaig (04:45):
That's the game.
Jason Rigby (04:46):
Yeah. That's the game.
Alexander McCaig (04:46):
How do we really laser in on you? Let's look at this metaphor. There's two different types of shooting with a bow. There's one where you have a compound bow, where you physically hold it back and you're aiming through a targeted site, and then you have a recurve bows. They don't have those sites. So it's not really a function of me being precision with a target. It's me just aiming where I want to go, and letting it happen. And it's funny, one of them, you are physically lining things up in a material sense and the other one you just... it's a little bit more intuitive, but all these guys are using the compound boat. It's high technology. There's a lot of force behind it, and they really just want to bury into you as much as they can.
Jason Rigby (05:25):
By replica sites, all that stuff.
Alexander McCaig (05:27):
Yeah the-
Jason Rigby (05:27):
So they can play arrow after arrow and-
Alexander McCaig (05:29):
They can track. They can be like, "Okay, he's 200 yards away." Or whatever it can be, that's far with a bow, he's a 200 yards away, a long shot. That's what they're doing, and they're like, how accurate can we be on this long shot, putting this person into our sites? If you're watching an elk go by and someone's like, hits that elk on the discovery channel, you're watching like a hunting show. Imagine that you walk about with your big horns,
Jason Rigby (05:50):
And that's what social media companies are doing.
Alexander McCaig (05:52):
Social media companies is like, [inaudible 00:05:52] the sites and they just let it go.
Jason Rigby (05:56):
And that's been the problem. That's why they've gotten a lot of heat because of this laser focus and then not looking at the responsibility of, "Yeah, we've put this person on our site. We've served them up crack or heroin to keep them addicted and then what is the intention of what we're serving?"
Alexander McCaig (06:18):
Yeah. We've only put a bullseye on so we can get more meat, so we can take the thing back to the butcher, we can feed off of it for a bit. But when you're putting that person in the sites, what do you do for the bull elk? Was that to the bull elk's benefit? No,
Jason Rigby (06:34):
I had this discussion with somebody at the dates. So I think this would be a good one, because my libertarian side of me agrees with what happened, but then there's this other part of me with freedom of speech. So I'm caught in this little dilemma, this will be interesting, everybody knows. So Donald Trump was kicked off of everything, but the big one was Twitter. That's what he was using massively-
Alexander McCaig (06:55):
I didn't know this, this is great. I learn my news from you.
Jason Rigby (06:56):
So everybody followed suit, Snapchat, YouTube, everybody just kicked Donald Trump off. So he's not on any social media, Facebook, everybody. So, one of me is this, Twitter is a private company. So they can do whatever they want-
Alexander McCaig (07:10):
That's correct.
Jason Rigby (07:10):
... as a private company. So if they want to kick me off, they can kick me off. And I have no right to say that they should or not, but then there's this whole-
Alexander McCaig (07:19):
It's the right for them to decide whether or not I can speak.
Jason Rigby (07:22):
... freedom of speech. Yeah, but it's like this oxymoron and then the sad part is, it gets into who are they kicking off and who are they not? And how are they allowed to make that decision? But then as a private company, we can't... me, I can't turn around and say, okay, Jack.
Alexander McCaig (07:39):
It's weird, it's weird.
Jason Rigby (07:40):
It's very weird, because people are consuming the news and they're getting everything off of that. But my question in this is, if we're the bullseye and we have these people that are serving up bad news, let's say, or just serving up. We're choosing to say, I like this. I like this. I like this. I like this. I like this.
Alexander McCaig (08:01):
Let me ask you then, is it Twitter's responsibility to filter through information for you. Is it Twitter's responsibility to do research and say, "This is good information?"
Jason Rigby (08:14):
No.
Alexander McCaig (08:15):
If you signed up to use the platform, it's your responsibility to figure out if something was truthful or not, not Twitter.
Jason Rigby (08:20):
And Twitter is only going to serve you up. See, that's the thing I get. It's like, and I know this is controversial, but it's only going to serve you up what you're saying you like. So at the end of the day, if you're an asshole and you're getting stupid stuff on there, racism, whatever it may be, idiotic material. And you keep saying, you like that, then that's your fault.
Alexander McCaig (08:46):
You're responsible. If this boil...
Jason Rigby (08:48):
It's not the CEO fault.
Alexander McCaig (08:49):
You know what? Don't attack Facebook, don't attack Twitter. Don't attack anything else. It all boils to self-responsibility, like you like to say, at the end of the day. At the end of the line, okay. When the doors close, it all boils down to self-responsibility. It's no one else's responsibility but you, if you want to receive certain information, okay. Your choice. If you don't, that's also your choice. And if you want to receive it and filter through it, that's on you.
Jason Rigby (09:19):
Yeah. And it's so funny how people will... I like conspiracy theory stuff. Do I believe at 90%? I don't believe.
Alexander McCaig (09:24):
Dude, look at my shirt.
Jason Rigby (09:25):
I know yeah.
Alexander McCaig (09:25):
Clearly aliens.
Jason Rigby (09:26):
90% of it I don't. I look at it as WWE entertainment stuff.
Alexander McCaig (09:31):
It has this new one I came on was phenomenon. I knew 90% of the stuff on it. One I've already seen before, and two it's going to be junk, but I still want to watch it. In the other episode, you talked about what's your go-to thing, like McDonald's, that's what I'm going to watch.
Jason Rigby (09:42):
Yeah, exactly. I love that stuff. Yeah. So number... the next one is location, location, location, location.
Alexander McCaig (09:47):
Okay. This is the crown jewel, I'm doing this to create like a mountaintop, like the zeal. I'm slouching down. So I get on the mic because my arms are little limp here.
Jason Rigby (09:59):
They have medicine to that bro.
Alexander McCaig (10:01):
You bet they do. They have like a Viagra for this podcasting arm.
Jason Rigby (10:06):
Oh yeah. People don't realize this, his mic arm is on assess stick. We have a whole new studio coming in here really soon.
Alexander McCaig (10:15):
Yeah. Coming in soon and things will be... and our microphone weighs a metric ton. But location data it's the zeal. It's the final point of focus. It's the acute trauma, right? So what they want to know is we have all this information behaviors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now we just want to know everywhere you're going. We want to watch you all the damn time. Because if we have that, now we have the best observational data we could ever ask for. But here's another one of the issues, you're watching where I'm going. You don't have a damn clue why I'm going there. Even though I went to the mall and walk through a Dillard's to get over to this Champs that I had no intention of going to, and bought a pair of shoes. You tracked my location. So now you're assuming that's my pattern.
Alexander McCaig (11:09):
It's not my pattern. This was a erratic outlier of something I did. This was a splurge chip. Okay, and not really spurge because I needed a new pair of shoes, but you have no idea why. And here's the thing you're taking all this location data from people, let them give you their location and let them tell you why they went there and did this. Do not just... I see they're... Oh, this bothers me. So much investment capital has gone into analytics companies that have found back to our ways to track people's locations. And it's just gross, and you see all these-
Jason Rigby (11:45):
It's creepy.
Alexander McCaig (11:46):
It's creepy, and all these dudes with PhDs are also a part of it. And it's like, where your morals? Where's the line stop for you? And they're like, "This is the most granular thing I can do this sort of analysis."
Jason Rigby (12:00):
Is in triangulate, off the cell towers. And then from there they know-
Alexander McCaig (12:03):
It's just...
Jason Rigby (12:04):
... you were with your friend and you went to this and ate lunch here and so this person that you spend an hour with, this person had lunch here. And so now that person is... we need to correlate these two people together.
Alexander McCaig (12:16):
Location is the final straw.
Jason Rigby (12:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Location is privacy.
Alexander McCaig (12:19):
In my mind, location's the final straw. I should be able to go wherever the hell I want to go. And if I don't want to tell you where I'm going, then I'm not going to.
Jason Rigby (12:27):
Paper straw.
Alexander McCaig (12:28):
Yeah. If I want to bum around in the woods or in the middle of the desert out here, I don't want you to know I'm out there. I want to be left alone. Do not track me. I do not say I could tell you where I was going. I know the government's going to do it anyway with the satellites, but as a private company that wants to serve me up something. No, no. That's the only way I can say it, no, like I'm telling my dog don't eat that on the ground, no.
Jason Rigby (12:50):
Exactly. Our next one is, and we'll end on this one. How you interact is telling, and we talked about this kind of, but I liked the word interact.
Alexander McCaig (12:58):
Of course you do. Interaction, right? It's how cause and effects play off of one another. What you choose to be involved in, as that sort of catalyst. And just because we're interacting with it. If I'm interacting at a Champs, doesn't mean I enjoyed the experience. Maybe the cashier sucked. Maybe I don't like interacting in the mall, but I had to go there because that's my only option. These interactions, they say a lot and they are one of those drivers that sits within cause and effect. And they're trying to get there, but they still have that one last unsolvable, is the thought process you had that drove you to do these interactions that caused the cause and effects.
Jason Rigby (13:34):
So, If we don't look at somebody as users, but we look at them as a human, then the interaction in that consumption should be the most important.
Alexander McCaig (13:46):
That is phenomenally input.
Jason Rigby (13:48):
Yeah, because the customer experience is what I'm looking for if I'm at Champs. So I would want to use TARTLE to ask, okay, we know you went to Champs.
Alexander McCaig (14:01):
We know you had an interaction with us.
Jason Rigby (14:03):
Yes. We want to know how well we served you. How was the cashier? How was the sales associate? How was the product that you purchased?
Alexander McCaig (14:12):
And outside of our brand, why did you go to our competitor, why? What caused you to interact with us and then say, "No, I'm not purchasing here. I want to go interact with them over here," were you browsing? Or was it some sort of a negative experience that said, "I'll pay more than to buying from this person." It's the why, that is the thing that has not been solved for so long. It's the biggest missing piece in the growth of big data. And if you're looking for that final puzzle piece that supports the whole jigsaw puzzle that you have, there's only one place to find it. And you can manufacture the data packet to get that piece for your puzzle. Cool, where do you go to do that? Jason, why don't you tell me, where do you go to do something like that?
Jason Rigby (14:59):
You go, are you ready everyone? You go to T-A-R-T-L-E.co, turtle.co. And here on TikTok, we've been getting a lot about the name. You don't know, we're getting in, and some people say, they've been looking it up, like the name and then some people are like, "Wow, I don't like that, that's weird." Or then some people are just like, "Oh, that's creative."
Alexander McCaig (15:23):
Of course it's creative.
Jason Rigby (15:24):
It's going to be, probably a 50-50. I would imagine. I love that people are giving their opinion on it, that's awesome. But one of the things that I think of whenever I see interaction and this thing says, how you interact is telling them... Ooh I need to close in this, how you interact is telling.
Alexander McCaig (15:43):
It's telling, but it's not... just because you tell something, I can tell something that's not truthful.
Jason Rigby (15:49):
That's where I was going.
Alexander McCaig (15:50):
Am I wrong?
Jason Rigby (15:51):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (15:52):
You and I can be sitting here for the past... by the way, this is like, I think our hundred and third episode, you can see now. But we could've been lying to you for a hundred episodes, Oh, just because it's telling, because we're interacting with you, is it truth? I don't know find out.
Jason Rigby (16:10):
That's where you, in your ability, in your free will and the data that you create to have that assumption, you have to come up with that assumption.
Alexander McCaig (16:22):
Yeah, and eradicate all the false perspectives of you.
Jason Rigby (16:25):
So stop believing all those false perspectives that are out there.
Alexander McCaig (16:28):
As a data champion, grab your sword, cut down those bad algorithms. Cut them down, okay. Fight for a more unifying future.
Jason Rigby (16:40):
Yes. And confuse the algorithm and start liking some stuff that you don't like.
Alexander McCaig (16:46):
Confuse, have a little fun.
Jason Rigby (16:48):
You're far left? Like some far right stuff. You're far right? Like some far left stuff, yeah they do that.
Alexander McCaig (16:53):
You may something you never knew you liked.
Jason Rigby (16:54):
Yeah. And then that's... I don't want to get into that, but we better go with your alien shirt.
Alexander McCaig (16:59):
Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexandra McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future, and the source data defines the path.
