Technology

59204 readers

3333 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

525

Data company sold visitor location data for 600 abortion clinics to pro-life group, senator says (therecord.media)

submitted 8 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Data company sold visitor location data for 600 abortion clinics to pro-life group, senator says::undefined

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] doesnt_use_lemmy@lemmings.world 82 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Holy crap that's dark. Now I have even less sympathy for the companies losing revenue from chrome removing third party cookies

[–] Copernican@lemmy.world 58 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You don't need cookies for this kind of targeting....

[–] PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How do they get the ads to appear on the social media pages of these very specific people? Logistically I’m not sure how that works.

[–] plz1@lemmy.world 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You think the forced birthers are buying this data to show ads? Oh sweet child...

[–] PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mean…it is mentioned several times in the article. Do I think that’s all they’re doing? No. But I am curious how they do this one specific thing that the article mentions repeatedly.

A pro-life political organization obtained mobile phone location data from a broker and used it to target people who had visited 600 abortion clinics across the country with advertisements, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced Tuesday.

The senator began investigating the company last year, in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report revealing that the pro-life Veritas Society had used cell phone location data Near shared with online advertisers to target people visiting Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinics with misinformation about reproductive health.

On a webpage that has since been removed, Veritas Society revealed that in Wisconsin alone in 2020 it sent 14.3 million ads to people who visited abortion clinics across the state, Wyden said. The page said the organization “served ads to those devices across the women’s social pages, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat,” he said.

[–] ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Why are you using a bot account?

[–] PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

lol thanks for pointing that out, I don’t recall ever turning it on. Hopefully it’s fixed now?