Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

On-boarding in the Facebook context is even cleverer. Facebook and companies like Acxiom and Datalogix have compared personal data (with none sharing actual data with the other, again via the miracle of hashing), and joined the universal FB user ID to the analogous IDs inside Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. The advantage that Facebook and Google have over the regular data on-boarders is twofold: they have much more of your personal data, and they see you online all the time. The match rate (i.e., the percentage of offline personas that can be found online) for Facebook’s Custom Audiences product, introduced in 2012 (and more on that shortly), is as high as 90 percent. That means for every hundred people marketers target via Custom Audiences, Facebook will find ninety of them, a shockingly high fraction in the fuzzy world of advertising. Facebook, Google, and others have achieved the holy grail of all marketers: a high-fidelity, persistent, and immutable pseudonym for every consumer online. Even better, they’ve joined that to your real-world persona, the one that shows up bleary-eyed at two a.m. at a Target in El Cerrito looking for tampons or a six-pack of Natural Light. Incidentally, this is all public, and fully documented by Facebook press releases. It’s just poorly understood and no one thinks about it. But people probably should.