Just a Barcode

0:00 To data mining companies, you are not human. You're not a consumer. You're not a user. You are a product. You're a barcode. Your mobile phone is not safe. Your bank is not safe. Social media is not safe. Your history, your interests, your data, all of this is collected categorized profile to create a product to sell to corporations and digital marketing groups. You are not a human being to these companies. You are a barcode. Now that's today's topic. I know it's a little bit dystopian, but it's not. It's something that's a little bit dear to my heart, privacy, and the right for people to be forgotten protection.

1:02 There's good things and there's bad things, and we are going to weigh those in this podcast. Again, I don't claim to know everything. I don't claim to know anything. But what I do claim is I'm going to ask the right questions. I'm going to help you ask the right questions. And I'm going to help you begin to start that dialogue and begin to do research and give you enough information so that you understand what's going on and you can build your creative empire, so to speak. I want you to be able to pursue the plans that God has for you, the purposes.

2:06 I did do some research, I did collect some data, I did my own research, and I used my own data on top of being in a coding field, working with various APIs, working with Google Ad Manager, working with Facebook, Ad Manager, LinkedIn, all these things, and understanding from advertising component, what data that you have access to, and from that, I also know from a coding perspective, what data is made available to you. You'll be surprised how much metadata is known by just uploading an image. Not only do they know the operating system, the iPhone, the iPhone type, they know the camera settings, and in some cases, in most cases, unless you turn it off or you opt out of it, your location.

3:06 So, several years ago, there was this misconception that Instagram was listening. It was always listening to you, you know, that everything you said was being recorded. And in conversations, it seemed like it was listening because you did a conversation with someone, and then about 12 to 24 hours later, you know, you talk about fishing. This is when I did it. We talked about fishing. I've never talked about fishing before. Talk to someone about fishing, and within, who likes fishing, and within 24 hours, Instagram started showing me fishing ads. Here's another thing I did. Never bought an ounce of alcohol in my life until this moment.

4:13 Things that I had never seen before. And even though I have claimed Instagram, I'm of age, those kinds of things. So it knows my birth date. It never showed me these ads before until I did that at this moment. And that test, it was within 24 hours, and I discovered that the grocery store chain that I was at was either sharing information through my loyalty card, because I had registered it at the time, I had since then used a new one that's unregistered, since I had that at the time, that or my bank in the form of the credit card transaction, and possibly in combination with them scanning the barcode on the back of your license plate, in combination with all of these factors, maybe they're all sharing information, and they're using a data mining process to collect

5:16 that information. So let's talk a little bit about data mining. Data mining is, let's, I'm going to boil this down, and I hate doing that because it, programming and coding is a little bit more difficult than just, you know, how I'm going to describe it, but let's say every database is like a spreadsheet, okay? You have information that has been inputted, whether it's through an automatic process or something, and it's just rows and rows and rows and rows of information. Now, of course, you have multiple databases and different database types, SQL, NoSQL, and all, I'm not going to go there.

6:22 this product isn't selling, and last year it wasn't selling anyway, so we're going to drop this line of business in January, maybe we're going to introduce it in spring and spend more time in that on spring because it's got a lot of sales. So, okay, we'll pull it from the store, we'll pull it from our valued retail space, we'll pull ads from that particular component because it's underselling, it's underperforming. And all that is done by pulling together the orders, pulling together that kind of information, inventory, orders, order history, abandoned cart data, all that kind of stuff is tabulated, and a data analyst can look in and start analyzing how things function, what's working, what's not working, what we can approve, and can, in theory, look quarters ahead and do some, we'll use trending work, but they'll use a neural net, you know it as AI, they'll use a predictive algorithm, they'll put in the numbers, and it will kind of predict what the

7:29 next is, and it learns as you input more data. In fact, that is all AI is, but I'm going to save that to a podcast dedicated about AI, I don't like the term artificial intelligence because it's not technically, it's intelligent, but it's not self-thinking. We always equate AI to something that thinks and can perform tasks on its own, but so far it's a very, very advanced function and doesn't yet think. It makes relationship, it makes, for lack of a better word, a data correlation connects, you know, numbers and words get converted to numbers and all kinds of things, but we're going to quickly move on from AI back into data mining.

8:36 while, okay? We'll pretend MySpace has been around for a long time, let's say it's upgraded, we'll use Facebook as an example, we'll use Instagram as an example. Of course, I'm not, disclaimer, I'm not saying I know it all, I'm not saying these companies are evil, all I'm saying is this is happening under your nose and you need to pay attention to it, okay? So, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, all of them, Google, Google especially, Google's really bad at this, they all have a ad platform. That ad platform allows small businesses, medium to larger businesses, corporations, anyone pretty much can advertise their product.

9:36 have, and they've made a lot of changes to prove to the world that their users, you are not a user, you're a barcode, you're a product, you're a product, a big one, and you're worth millions of dollars to these data companies. So, credit card transactions, if you ever read a privacy policy, we'll hit that in a moment, these credit card transactions, all these kinds of stuff, you know, you're required to enter your phone number, seemingly innocuous, okay, I'm going to enter my phone number, I'm going to get a special code, I'm going to verify I'm a human being.

10:37 You did. It's called your privacy policy. And in most cases, that privacy policy actually doesn't tell you specifically what they do. They use things like, we'll share this information with third parties. We'll share this information for marketing purposes and other purposes. They're not, what they're not telling you is they're selling your information, literally making, they're double dipping, triple dipping in some cases, selling you, your information to companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., and they can tabulate this. Now, I have no proof that Google is doing this. And I want to say, no, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Instagram and Facebook is doing this, but these practices, they've been around for a while.

11:43 And as the industry grown and expanded, you have Facebook. If you ever watch the social media movie about Facebook, you know, the comedy sort of speak shows a little bit of how it happened. But under the scenes, you hear they're selling advertisements, but they're not telling you is every time you like, every time you comment. And if Instagram's case, Facebook's case, it's not even what you like, it's not even what you comment, it's what you view and repeatedly view. So even if you don't interact with it, they still know, oh, you viewed this, you watched the whole thing, you watched 80% of it, you watched 60% of it, and they're going to start trying it.

12:45 And they take your location, if you share it with them, the address, people used to enter all this information to Facebook, and you were like, oh, I don't want to do that. I want to find friends. And I want to connect to them. Great.

13:51 So it knows when you upload and you say, hey, check out my new home. And it's got GPS tag on it. If you opt into it, certain mobile operating systems turn that off and you can respect them. Others will say they turn it off and don't. And you can upload those photos and Facebook takes that metadata because you provided to them and their privacy policy says we use your metadata. In fact, they tell you that they pretty much take any data you provide and they list out specifics of what data it is, but they don't tell you what to do with it.

14:57 when they first started. So I could log into Facebook, I could log into Instagram or not Instagram was another time when it was new, Facebook, Google, Google ads, and I could create an ad based on a keyword search if it's Google, or I could target demographics. And for social media, I could target what you liked. So if you liked Harry Potter movies and I'm selling another book, I can be like, okay, great. You like the Harry Potter movies that read the Harry Potter book. You actually liked. Okay, great. Narrow it down. Okay.

16:00 Okay, great. I can target people who give to nonprofits, who talk about nonprofits, who maybe have given to the Red Cross or all these things out or follow the Red Cross or follow churches or whatever it is. I can target them, boil them down. Okay.

17:03 email, your phone number, and all that kind of information unless you actually interact with the ad or submit. So you, you'll see something that the algorithm thinks, okay, you're going to like, you like this. I know for sure. You like this. You love this. You love motorcycles.

18:07 or registered for a motorcycle license if it's public record. I don't think it is, but I registered for a motorcycle class that's not run by the government or all of these things share information and they're collected and sold to things called data brokers. And this is where a company called LexisNexis comes in. Now, LexisNexis is more risk solutions for insurance companies and that kind of thing. But LexisNexis, which you could right now go on LexisNexis website as a consumer and you can enter in your information, verify your information and they'll give you, uh, they'll send you a link.

19:07 That's the whole idea, right? You know, if someone has, and this is used by credit reporting agencies, this is used by insurance companies, that kind of thing. It could be used by Facebook or social media. I don't know for a fact, please don't quote me on that. Although it would be brilliant if they did because it's literally pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of all your social media accounts, all your emails, all the addresses you ever had, your parents' addresses, your parents' email addresses, information, all this stuff, car accidents, insurance companies you had, everything, tickets, everything, it's just this huge pages of, like, like almost legit past 50 pages of data that I didn't even know existed on me.

20:10 go to Facebook, go to Instagram, go to your interests. If you go to ads, you can see all your interests and you can manually, you say, oh, I'm not interested, not interested, not interested, not interested, not interested, not interested. I haven't done that for several, several hours. It doesn't actually work. It's all fake.

21:12 Okay. Contact me, you know, follow my social media, go to Instagram, JumpCutKing, Facebook, Twitter, go to EGTUniverse.com, all those kinds of things. And the problem with Facebook and social media is it's free, but it has a cost. Anything that's free in this world has a cost. Like I'm Christian.

22:15 Facebook's creed is register for an account. You'll connect with your friends and while you're at it, we'll start collecting information from you. We're going to make you spend more screen time. TikTok, we're going to make you spend more screen time. Instagram, we're going to make you spend screen time. YouTube, screen time.

23:15 But if you registered as a brand, as a product, as a page, two years later, you find out your reach is lower and instead I had to pay for it. I used to be able to post a page and hit every single viewer, every person that hit follow. They may unfollow, they may not unfollow. It was their choice. They can follow me or not. But I could put a post in free advertising, word of mouth advertising, post on social media. Hey, I got a new product. Great. 100, 200 clicks. Purchases. Go. Great. Build your social media.

24:16 We're going to charge your sponsored posts. So now I can go from 1% to 5% or 3% or 2%, depending on my following, because I'm paying per views, not engagements, not clicks, per views, impressions. Let me tell you, impressions in the digital market is the worst thing. So let me bring this down real quick. Impression is when your ad shows up on a web page, on an app, on a whatever. Okay, it could show up in Russia. It could show up on someone who has a VPN that uses United States VPN. Okay, but they're in China.

25:23 The highest engagement, and this depends on your brand type on a sponsored post, is usually 3% to 5%. I would say 3% to 10%, but I'm going to remove the outliers. So, I'm going to say it's really low. It's really low.

26:24 And we're still doing the research to try to figure out why. Unless you're shelling $10,000 into Google ads, $10,000 into Facebook, $10,000 into these paid platforms, your return on investment is almost non-existent. And so I tell people, unless you have a unique product, like you're not selling someone else's product, unless you have a unique product that has differential, in other words, it's different, like your business stands out, this product stands out, this is different than XYZ widget. This has a purpose, this is a reason for existence. Don't use social media ads. Don't use Google ads.

27:25 If I'm spending $10,000 and I only have 500 people clicking it, and I only have 100 people going to cart, and I have 50 people making the purchase, unless that purchase, unless that 50 profit purchases equals $10,000 plus, because you don't want to be making money, not lose money. It is not worth it to run social media. It used to be. It really used to be. Now, there's some things that really work. But for the most case, you'll be throwing money away because it's a sea now. It's a growing amount of people. And to be honest, unless you have 10,000s of dollars, these companies do not care about you.

28:27 And then one day, they did something that an automated system said it was bad, but it wasn't. It was in their terms. They get blocked because they repealed it three times. And apparently there was a three-time limit. And you, you know, wish you could tell them, but before they did this, don't do that. And they get banned, banned, blocked. And the only way to get attention, can't call them. Ooh, I just said the name. These companies' attention is you can't call them. You can send them emails and all that kind of stuff. You just literally have to get a lawyer involved, get the attorney general involved, and inform them of this information.

29:31 A PPI. Oh, dang, the name escapes me. But I'll tell you what it is. Okay, so, each person in your business, if you retail, subscribe, let's do a subscription business, or we'll do something that will make more sense to people. We'll say a donor to a charity or a subscription. Let's, yeah. So, okay.

30:32 to keep your bottom line consistent, not have a drop. You always know, this is what I'm getting, and I have these loyal customers. Okay?

31:34 with your business, has a profit margin. Now, this is where the good side of data is. It sounds bad, but follow me, okay? Let's say you have a customer purchases hosting, okay? Let's say they're a consultant client, and you designed a website for them, you designed XYZ widget for them, app whatever, and it's cloud only, and they're paying for the hosting. Okay, big chunk of mine. Here you go. Small little chunk of money. But, for hosting, it's every month, it's reoccurring income. And I know that if I get XYZ client, at the length of their relationship, they're worth Y.

32:34 for a webinar, a conference, an event, a free book, an e-download, buy my product, make a purchase, right? Okay? Because I don't look at the one purchase event. I look at the lifetime relationship of a person in your whole business. How many more purchases are going to make? How many emails are they going to open? What's the open rate going to be with this particular person? What are they going to do six months down the line? Are they going to stay? Have they bought one product and then six months later they spent $1,000 buying more products?

33:36 That makes logic sense. Now, it might be a long game. It's sometimes tough depending on client situations and things to remind people that everything takes time and consistency. This podcast isn't going to grow if I don't release consistent content, content that I know is compelling, content that I know that you can use, content that you know you find interesting. If I don't do this regularly, I'm not going to grow. I'm not going to have increased followers. I'm not going to have increased engagement. I'm going to start at zero and I'm going to stay at zero because I'm not being consistent.

34:37 these things makes sense. And that's where you can use data collected, email addresses, phone numbers, profiles. You can profile a customer. You have a high-paying customer. You can take the high-paying customer. You can look at their publicly available information and you can say, okay, this person likes X, Y, and Z. Okay, next time they come into my store or whatever it is, okay, you know, they like espressos. Okay, great.

35:37 and I can accomplish purposes God has given me because you're partnered with me in a transaction. I did solve your need. You paid me and we grow. And so there is a wisdom in data mining, having data analysts or learning a little bit of data analysts, most common thing, e-commerce. If you sell anything, most of those dashboards will use AI models and various neural networks to be able to do predictive algorithm based off the information that is provided to them. This is how much you did in sales last month. This is how much you did this month and this is the difference and this is what you did last year and this is the difference and you can help kind of fish in a little bit and here's like a, here's a soft level version of data analysis.

36:38 and you have enough data, now there are two faults with data mining. One, not enough data, meaning you're doing it too soon and you do not have enough data set. You have a website out there, it's getting 1800 views in three months, it's not enough data to make information. It's not enough data to begin to correlate, okay, who's my demographics, who's working, especially if none of them are making purchases, it's not enough data. Maybe the website's working, maybe it's not. Believe it or not, you're going to need three to four to five to 10 to 12 times that on a monthly basis to actually get money rolling in and purchases because you think of it this way, you have to stand out.

37:39 the search engine world and search engine optimization is going to change to like AI optimization and it's not going to be the same. It's not. It's just not.

38:39 to the index and is using Google Index and it's been scraping the Google Index and that's how it's been discovering and Google's like, I just gave away this entire free information that may make me obsolete. That's using data properly. Protecting your business by seeing where the declines are through data, by seeing where it is trending and making changes fast. Now, let's say you have a decent data set. Let's say you're doing 100,000 plus in retail a month of purchases or that's a profit you get. Okay, great. I now have enough information. I can start seeing what works, what shelves are working, what layouts are working on the floor.

39:39 website A, this is website B, it's called A-B testing, and I can send half the people, viewers to here and the other half here and see which one performs better. Okay, I can make changes. Oh, people love the navigation here, they hate the rest of the website, I'll take that navigation, I'll put in the old website, boom. I've now increased my traffic. That's using data wisely. Now, from a privacy concern, I believe that a business has the right to collect data to this kind of stuff and then sell it to another entity. I think that that's a breach of the code, but I do also think that there's a need for it.

40:41 I get freeware that's supported by advertising, but I don't get paying for something that's advertising. Like, I don't, I pay Hulu, no ads, that's it when I need it. Never, never, never gonna pay a dime to be advertised to. I might use a free service like Instagram and Facebook and, you know, all those kinds of things, and I might use some things to minimize the information they have access to so that I'm not feeling profiled. Because all it is is a feeling. And so this is how profiling works, truly. And when I discover this, it's like, oh, this makes sense why people think you're being recorded or things.

41:42 use that information. Okay, this person likes these things, you like these things. Okay, I'm going to start showing you a little bit of what this person likes to see what you like and don't like. Because the best part of marketing is word of mouth marketing. If I show you an ad, show person A an ad, that person B is going to use, I can send person A with that ad, will go to person B and say, okay, buy this, dude, look at this, it's so cool. And it's no longer you're being advertised to, it's now a friend recommendation.

42:42 off of what you post. These are likes we know based off your interact. This is what you send to other people and they love it. So we're going to start showing you ads here based on that and eventually you'll start making purchases as recommendations. Now, we've all seen advertising get more prolific and more in your face. Instagram used to show you ads every five posts. They now they used to show you every ten posts and now they show you every three posts or it's like the first reel and then an ad and then skip, skip, skip, skip, oh, ad.

43:42 Union has something called GDPR. They have the right to be forgotten. That means that I can tell XYZ company I did business with that, hey, I'm no longer doing business with you. Delete my information.

44:43 prefer to pay for an ad-free experience if it was worth it to me. I don't currently find value in Instagram reels and TikTok reels and YouTube reels. I don't find value in that stuff because from a business standpoint, I'm not making money from it. I'm not learning too much from it. It's good entertainment if I want to veg for a while. But that's all it is. It's just a form of entertainment. And the advertising that these companies are going to do to you are designed based off of your profile. And even so, you know, reels are getting, you know, advertisers are trying to figure out what types are working and they got all this money they're doing A and B testing.

45:43 the change to use that one ad and put more money in there. And I always recommend you do A-B testing when you're doing digital tests. And sometimes I recommend that you slice your budget into small little pebbles of a hundred bucks and you test ads one through 24 and then you see what works and then you have 12 or six ads that work and then you put 250 or a thousand into them and if you find out, okay, these two work and you pour the rest of that budget for that marketing campaign into the two that work and sometimes you'll find that it's good to keep a third one around because that third one reaches a whole new target, maybe change information that kind of of course, if it's none of those ads are working, I recommend you evaluate your digital presence, you evaluate your line of business and you evaluate what the consumer is receiving from it because consumers don't make logical decisions.

46:44 They care about that emotional connection. There's reason why all those pet commercials about, you know, send money to my adoption center and they're all playing that one song that pulls on your heart strings and like, oh my god, and they're showing little puppies that are anemic and it's like, oh, when there are starring people in Africa and there are people who are like, well, we're going to ban that commercial because that's probably not true. And I've seen the footage of some of these third world countries and I can tell you it's real and it's heartbreaking.

47:45 podcast is a product, I want you to follow, like, subscribe, and eventually I want you to convert to a client. And, you know, that's what I want. And that's what people want. You're selling something.

48:45 shouldn't have. these AirPods, they came out. Oh, they sound great. They're made from Apple. It's fantastic. I'm not going to get them. Okay. Three months later, client asked me to do some mixing work and I'm like, perfect time to get these. And then there's a delay and it was sad. And it was also, originally they weren't lossless. There was some sort of compression going on and they released updates to make it sound better because, you know, people like me who are buying expensive headphones are not buying expensive headphones to listen to the world or music or to put a Vision Pro headset on and watch entertainment.

49:45 track or build an experience, build the emotion. And that's, you know, why when it presented itself, I bought them. There were much better options, much better, cheaper options. But, you know, consumers don't make logical decisions. They make it based off emotion. Everything you do is emotion. Everything you do is emotion. I'm going to use this example because it's easy and it's going to make everyone understand. One of the things I up for is buying a subscription and not knowing the cost. Like going online, searching for something and not knowing the cost. Or the cost is there and it's hidden.

50:46 You provide them, you know, fake info. And I send you this quote and you're like, what? They're like, well, we did research on you and we realized that you have the budget for it. They don't tell you that. They say something else. And, you know, so they can generate quotes based off it because they're profiling you as a customer. they know that XYZ mom pop bakery. Okay.

51:46 which is also why they probably have a very less ROI when it comes to digital ads because you have consumers like me who are like, I'm up you through emotion. Great.

52:46 and I spent here giving you my information for two hours. Again, I don't want you to say, well, Justin said it must be true. Instead, I want you to spark that question. Ask that why and go do research for yourself. So when you create products, when you create a brand, when you create a business, when you create an app, perfectly with The Universe platform, when you create these things, I want you to make wiser, informed decisions based off of the world you lived in. Again, I'm just, and I believe as a minister of the gospel that everyone has a purpose, a God-given, unique, custom, tailored purpose, whether you're saved or not.

53:47 you want to contact us, go to EGTUniverse.com, and we'd love to hear from you. Be blessed, be at peace, and we'll discover some more topics and some more ways that you can create and be creative, because you are creative, doesn't matter who you are, what you do, you have the God-given ability to create something from nothing.