A Startling Anecdote About Online Ad Fraud From Uber

One week ago we said that Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising. We directed readers" attention to the recent Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, in which Restoration Hardware"s delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company"s online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general. What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following:

"we"ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we"re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it"s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"

There was much more in the full transcript which lamented just how seemingly useless and overrated online advertising has become (or perhaps always had been), a lament shared previously by consumer products giant P&G which several months earlier became the first to fire a shot across the "adtech" bow when not long after it announced it was slashing its digital ad spending because it thought it was not getting the kind of return on investment it desired, it made a striking discovery: “We didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate.” CFO Jon Moeller said “What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective.” Previously, the P&G"s CFO had said that “the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands."

Moeller also touched on the two most common complaints about digital advertising scams: 1) advertisers are paying for ads that are viewed and clicked on by bots, not humans; and 2) ads are placed by thousands of automated “ad exchanges” that are out of control of the advertiser on sites and pages that don’t match the advertiser’s products.

The problem, as we discussed last week, for providers of online advertising is that increasingly more are waking up to the pitfalls of "adtech": the false promises, the opacity of digital advertising, the intractability of the Internet, the clicks and views by bots on which advertisers are wasting their money, and the billions of dollars that get blown down the drain without results.  The larger issue is, of course, that retail spending has grown on average by a muted 2% per year in the US over the past five years, while over the same period, digital advertising has nearly doubled to $72.5 billion in 2016, which implies that even digital advertising – despite the lure of Facebook and the like – cannot induce consumers overall to spend more and increase the size of the overall pie for advertisers. It can only, at best, divide up the pie differently.

* * *

And while the Restoration Hardware anecdote may have been a Category 1 "ad tech" storm, on Monday a surprising development out of Uber pushed the maximum sustained windspeed for the online advertising industry to a solid Category 2.

What happened is that Uber, long accustomed to being sued itself, for once was the source of a lawsuit, taking advertising agency Fetch Media to court for click fraud and alleging that the firm improperly billed Uber for “fake” online ads and took credit for app downloads it had nothing to do with. Fetch, incidentally, is owned by the world’s fourth-largest advertising company, Japan’s Dentsu.

In the lawsuit filed on Monday in San Francisco, Uber said it discovered something was "amiss" when it canceled a campaign on Breitbart following the recent blowback against conservative media, where Fetch was placing Uber ads. After the company had asked Fetch not to post advertisements on Breitbart, it saw ads appearing there anyway. While Fetch allegedly pulled ads from all networks that had a relationship with Breitbart, the move had little effect on the number of people downloading the app, contrary to Fetch’s claims, the complaint said.

Uber traditionally had paid Fetch and other ad networks when a potential customer downloads its app after seeing an ad. Uber alleged that after further inspection, Fetch had a widespread practice of over-billing. Uber claims that Fetch had been attempting to claim credit for app downloads it didn’t generate.

Furthermore, Uber claims that after it suspended the ad campaign, it saw no material drop in total installations, as the decline in paid signups was offset byt a "nearly equal amount" by organic installations. To wit:

Just before Uber suspended the entire Fetch Campaign in March 2017, Fetch was spending millions of Uber"s dollars per week on mobile inventory purportedly attributable to hundreds of thousands (even millions) of Uber App installs per week. Had the advertisements been legitimate, one would expect to see a substantial drop when mobile advertising was suspended. Instead, when Uber suspended the Fetch Campaign, there was no material drop in total installations. Rather, the number of installations supposedly attributable to mobile advertising (i.e., "paid signups") decreased significantly, while the number of organic installations rose by a nearly equal amount. 

This indicated that a significant percentage of the installations believed to be attributable to advertising were in fact stolen organic installations. In other words, these installations would have occurred regardless of advertising. Instead networks or publishers in the Fetch Campaign fraudulently reported the last click attribution to claim attribution credit and were paid for the installation.

The complaint then claims ad fraud was not isolated to one core vendor of ads to subcontractors, but that ad fraud was "perpetuated and even encouraged" between the ad agency and the networks and publishers:

Fetch’s own actions perpetuated, and even encouraged, fraud by the networks and publishers from whom it purchased mobile inventory.

When Fetch obtained makegoods on behalf of Uber, the credit would be in the form of additional mobile inventory with the same network or publisher. In other words, after a publisher was caught red-handed, for example click spamming, Fetch would reward the bad actor with additional volume and opportunities to report fake clicks.

Upon information and belief, Fetch also misused its position as a marketplace leader, and as Uber’s mobile media agency, to solicit improper “rebate” payments from networks and publishers in exchange for purchasing advertising inventories during the Fetch Campaign, and failed to pass such discounts back to Uber.

Fetch also failed to enforce Uber’s prohibition against rebrokering. “Rebrokering” is where networks or publishers take advertising offers and re-broker them to third parties to obtain a greater volume of clicks, and thus, hopefully, installations. Rebrokering is against the terms of the IOs approved by Uber for use in the Fetch Campaign and also leads to a loss of control by the mobile advertising agency over the quality of the advertising and the amount of fraud.

According to the lawsuit, from 2015 to early 2017, Uber paid more than $82.5 million for advertisements overseen by Fetch, and said it refused to pay more than $7 million that Fetch has said it owes.

Of course, should the court find that Uber"s claim has merit, the implications for ad tech would be staggering: whereas last week"s admission by Restoration Hardware suggests that online advertising is either being gamed by bots, or generally underperforming to the point where it is not worth the investment, the potential involvement of premeditated ad fraud among the key players in the industry - since Uber"s ads were certainly not the only cockroach - would not only jeopardize the revenue streams of ad giants such as Facebook and Google, but could result in civil liabilities into the tens of billions in potential ad fraud.

As expected, Fetch pleaded innocent, per Bloomberg:

“We are shocked by Uber’s allegations which are unsubstantiated, completely without merit, and purposefully inflammatory so as to draw attention away from Uber’s unprofessional behavior and failure to pay suppliers,” Fetch Chief Executive Officer James Connelly said in a statement Tuesday. “We vigorously deny the allegations from Uber and will be responding robustly to ensure we set the record straight.”

Still, Fetch has acknowledged the challenge of online ad fraud publicly and said it was working with research firm Forensiq to “fight against mobile ad fraud.”

“One of the biggest challenges we face as digital marketers is to reduce mobile ad fraud,” Fetch’s Connelly said a year ago. The problem, of course, is when Fetch itself is the source of fraud.

Around the same time, Fetch’s global head of media, Steve Hobbs, told Adweek that a “significant amount” of downloads in Fetch’s system are flagged as suspicious. “Where there’s money, there is fraud,” he told the publication. “Being 100 percent on top of it is an impossibility, but we think with Forensiq’s help we can get it significantly lower.”

As part of the lawsuit, Uber plans to seek at least $40 million in damages according to Bloomberg. More notable is that Fetch’s publicly traded parent company, ad giant Dentsu which has a $12 billion market capitalization, is not named in the lawsuit, at least not yet. The question is if and when it emerges that such ad fraud as that claimed by Uber is endemic across all online ad network and perpetrated by virtually all ad giants, not only Dentsu but also Google and Facebook, what happens then to the biggest growth stories in the tech world once customer faith in the online ad model "deus ex machina" finally evaporates?

The full redacted Uber vs Fetch lawsuit is below

A Startling Anecdote About Online Ad Spending From Restoration Hardware

Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising.

Two months ago, it was P&G which fired the first shot across the "adtech" bow when not long after it announced it was slashing its digital ad spending because it thought it was not getting the kind of return on investment it desired, it made a striking discovery: “We didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate.” CFO Jon Moeller said “What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective.”

Speaking to the WSJ, P&G CEO David Taylor echoed Moeller when he explained that cuts on digital ads are part of a larger strategy to more quickly halt spending on things – from ad campaigns to product development programs - that aren"t working: “we got some data that said either it was in a bad place or it was not effective,” Taylor said of the digital cuts. “And we shut it down and said, ‘We’re not going to follow a formula of how much you spend or share of voice. We want every dollar to add value for the consumer or add value for our stakeholders.”

Previously P&G"s CFO had said that “the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands."

Moeller also touched on the two most common complaints about digital advertising scams: advertisers are paying for ads that are viewed and clicked on by bots, not humans; and ads are placed by thousands of automated “ad exchanges” that are out of control of the advertiser on sites and pages that don’t match the advertiser’s products.

Commenting on this, in late July, Wolf Richter summarized the state of affairs as follows:

Marketing executives of other companies too have long riled against the murkiness of digital advertising, the false promises, the intractability of the Internet, the clicks and views by bots on which advertisers are wasting their money, and the billions of dollars that get blown without results. But getting a grip on what works and what doesn’t is hard.

There’s a larger issue: Retail spending (not adjusted for inflation) has grown on average 2.4% per year in the US over the past five years. Over the same period, digital advertising nearly doubled to $72.5 billion in 2016. Clearly, even digital advertising – despite the lure of Facebook and the like – cannot induce consumers overall to spend more and increase the size of the overall pie for advertisers. It can only, at best, divide up the pie differently.

And when one of the most sophisticated high-tech advertisers in the world decides it is overspending on digital advertising and is able to very carefully remove the rot, thus bringing down its cost without hurting its revenues, other companies will follow, with some consequences for the relentless but often ineffective surge of digital advertising dollars.

Of course, the implications to this admission that online advertising was either being gamed by bots, or generally underperforming were significant, as it jeopardized the future revenue streams of two of the biggest companies in the world, Alphabet (aka Google) and Facebook, both almost entirely reliant on online advertising. How long before other anchor names decided to similarly cut back on their online ad spending?  In short: slowly but surely, chronic buyers online advertising space, are slowly waking up to the fact that "adtech" may be one of the biggest hype (and hope) bubbles in history. Not all of it, but a material, substantial portion: one that may be responsible for a significant chunk of Google"s or Facebook"s cash flow and market cap.

A separate, if just as concerning problem emerged last month, when the WSJ reported that online ad giant, Google, would issue refunds to advertisers for ads bought through its platform that ran on sites with fake traffic, and generated no actionable advertising "clicks." Just how much of Google"s ad revenue (and thus profits and market cap) had been inflated over the years by said "fake ads"?

* * *

So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday"s Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company"s online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general (courtesy of @parsimony16). What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we"ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we"re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it"s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"

Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there.

Here is the full must read excerpt from the conference (full link here):

I"ll share a little anecdote with you on this point.

We had our marketing meeting in the company several years ago and the online marketing team was pitching to double their budget, right, and at the time, say, look, nobody in the company is doubling their budget. But tell me why you believe that"s the right thing to do. And they said, well, look, our customer acquisition cost and our ad cost is the lowest in the company. And I said, well, tell me about the data, show me how. And they said, well, people who click through the words that we buy on Google, the ad cost was lowest. And I said, how do you know that they"re clicking on the word and going to the website because of the word you bought versus they saw a store or they received a source book? They said, oh, we know.

I said, well, how many words do you buy? They said 3,200. 3,200 words. I said, well, what are the top words? How are they ranked, the ranking of the words? Oh, we don"t have that, right. And I was getting the look at like, oh, Gary is kind of one these old brick-and-mortar guys. He just doesn"t get it.

And I said, well, what are the top 10 words? And they didn’t have the information. I said, why don"t we cancel the meeting and come back next week when you have the data? I"m sure that Google sales representatives who are taking you to the expensive lunches and selling you the 3,200 words have that data. So why don"t we get the data and then let, review the data?

And they came back the next week and we sat in a meeting and all of a sudden, I can tell you there"s a little change in the faces. They had to wear it kind of down. Everybody kind of came in. I said, so what did we find out?

And they said, well, we"ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we"re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it"s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Immediately the next day, we cancelled all the words, including our own name. By the way, we are paying for the little shaded box above our words and said, oh no, we have to hang on to that because Pottery Barn might squat on top of us. I said, excuse me? I said, if someone goes to a mall or a shopping center and they"re going to Restoration Hardware and there"s a Pottery Bam there, they"re already squatting, okay? It doesn"t mean they"re going to go into their store. If somebody wanted to buy a diamond from Tiffany and just because Zale"s is sitting on top of them in a shaded box doesn"t mean they"re going to go to Zale"s and buy a diamond.

I mean, I can"t believe how many companies buy their own name and they"re paying Google millions of dollars a year for their own name, like maybe if this is webcast, right, a lot of people are going to go, holy crap. They"re going to look at their investments. They"d go, maybe we don"t need to buy our own name. Google"s market cap might go down...

One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck? What will happen to online ad spending then? And what will happen to the online ad giants, if the vast majority of ad spending that justified their hundreds of bilions in market cap is exposed as "bloat"? As Friedman politely, yet sarcastically put it, "Googles market cap might go down"...

Google To Refund "Fake Traffic" Advertising Revenue

One month ago, consumer products giant Procter & Gamble - one of the largest and most sophisticated advertisers in the world - launched a mini crisis in the online advertising space, when the company announced that it was scaling back its online advertising spend, stating that "digital ad spending was lower versus a high base period and due to current period choices to temporarily restrict spending in digital forums where our ads were not being placed according to our standards and specifications." The implications to this admission that online advertising was either being gamed by bots, or generally underperforming were significant, as it jeopardized the future revenue streams of two of the biggest companies in the world, Alphabet (aka Google) and Facebook, both almost entirely reliant on online advertising. How long before other anchor names decided to similarly cut back on their online ad spending?

So, one month later, in its first tacit admission that its ad network has few protections against "fake traffic" such as ever more sophisticated ad bots - and that P&G"s criticism was spot on - the WSJ reports that Google will issue refunds to advertisers for ads bought through its platform that ran on sites with fake traffic "as the company develops a tool to give buyers more transparency about their purchases."

Hoping to avoid further spending cuts and outright contract losses - especially to arch rival Facebook, which has similarly admitted to having ad exposure problems on numerous occasions - in the past few weeks Google has informed hundreds of marketers and ad agency partners about the issue with invalid traffic, also known “ad fraud.” According to the WSJ, the ads were bought using the company’s DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Typically, advertisers use DoubleClick Bid Manager to target audiences across vast numbers of websites in seconds by connecting to dozens of online ad exchanges, marketplaces that connect buyers and publishers through real-time auctions.

The ad spending flows through to the exchanges. The problems arise when ads run on publisher sites with fraudulent traffic, such as those where clicks are generated by software programs known as “bots” instead of humans. This is an issue of growing to concern to marketers. It is difficult to recoup the money paid to those sites when the issue is discovered too late.

While in the past advertisers have received small credits from Google when they detect discrepancies, in this case, for some buyers, the fraud was larger than usual. However, since Google’s "increased" refund still amounts to only a small fraction of the total ad spending served to invalid traffic, some advertisers remain unsatisfied: "Google has offered to repay its “platform fee,” which ad buyers said typically ranges from about 7% to 10% of the total ad buy."

Scott Spencer, director of product management for Google, acknowledged that refunds have been paid, but he declined to provide a dollar figure for the amount being returned. Some ad buyers said the refund amounts range from “less money than you would spend on a sandwich” to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Today, we can’t disclose the information about third parties,” Mr. Spencer said. “So when we aren’t able to catch invalid traffic before it impacts our advertisers and we’re unable to refund their media spend, it hurts us, even if we’re not responsible.”

Google added the affected ad buyers in this instance were impacted by invalid traffic over the course of a few months this year, primarily in the second quarter. Part of that traffic affected video ads, which carry higher ad rates than typical display ads and are therefore an attractive target for fraudsters.

Of the billions of dollars flowing into online advertising each year, a percentage is inadvertently shown to sites with fake traffic, with fraudsters siphoning off advertisers’ money for themselves. And while the individual instances of ad fraud tend to be modest in amount, combined they add up quickly: some $6.5 billion in ad spending will be wasted this year to fraud, according to a report released in May by the Association of National Advertisers.

Unlike infamous clickfarms, typically found in some shady warehouse in India or Bangladesh, the methods used by fraudsters are highly sophisticated. Some infect unsuspecting consumers’ computers with malware to form a “botnet” that clicks on ads in the background.

And while ad fraud has long been a well-known, if unresolved, problem associated with online advertising, what makes Google"s admission unique is that for years the company had claimed to have it largely under control.

The search giant has had teams dedicated to filtering out fraud before an advertiser makes a bid on an ad. Those teams can also prevent exchanges from being paid if an ad has already been bid on, but invalid traffic is quickly detected. The teams also work to discover historical instances of fraud, which is what happened in this particular case.

In other words, Google confirms that a substantial chunk of revenue that it, and others like it, pocketed over the years was never actually earned. It also may explain the recent shift in the mood of online advertisers, such as P&G, which failing to generate the desired IRR, decided to cut back on advertising altogether.

Needless to say, any blowback against online advertising which is rapidly eclipsing conventional advertising media such as print and TV, would have a staggering impact on the valuations and stock prices of some of the most valuable companies in the world, among which Google and Facebook to name a few. As such while Google"s admission is commendable, the question is not just how endemic "ad fraud" has become but also how credible any new anti-bot initiatives could be. If, as Google admits, as much as 10% of recurring revenue is "fake", if only applies a generous forward multiple to this, the impact to shareholders would be dramatic. Of course, if the real "ad fraud" number is notably higher, then it could eventually lead to a crash among the ad-driven tech giant space, which as disclosed in the latest 13F reporting period, is where the bulk of the hedge fund money is invested. Which is also why preserving credibility is suddenly so critical to the like of Google, because if and when doubts emerge among investors about the company"s otherwise opaque revenue practice, then what until recently has been Wall Street"s darling sector will be abandoned in a hurry.

For more on this topic, please read: "It"s the Biggest Scandal in Tech (and no one"s talking about it)"

Google Permanently Bans 200 "Fake News" Sites

The crackdown has begun.

In a blog post by Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads, posted on Wednesday, Google said it has banned 200 publishers from accessing its Adsense advertising service for posting fake news stories. Google said it had cracked down on sites which contained 1) Ads for illegal products; 2) Misleading ads; 3) Bad ads on mobile; 4) Ads trying to game the system and, 5) Promoting and profiting from bad sites. But the emphasis was on the so-called "fake news" category which has dominated media buzz for the past two months.

This is how Spencer explained his action:

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

* * *

We"ve had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.

Google has faced criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.

In his post explaining how Google attempted to crack down on “bad ads, sites and scammers,” Spencer explained that Google had expanded its policies against misleading websites in November, leading to the crackdown.

From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations.  We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

In total, Google took down 1.7 billion ads that they found in violation of their policies in 2016, more than double the 780 million they removed in 2015.

It wasn"t just fake news: Google provided the following examples of common policy violations among bad sites in 2016:

• We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.


• We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.


• And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

Some of the more conventional bans were the result of Google adding a policy mid-year prohibiting ads for payday loans, considered predatory. Roughly five million payday loan ads were disabled over the latter six months of 2016. Also among those the removed ads were what Google calls “tabloid cloakers.” These advertisers run what look like links to news headlines, but when the user clicks, an ad for a product such as a weight loss supplement pops up. Google suspended 1,300 accounts engaged in tabloid cloaking in 2016.

Spencer concludes:

In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

Google has not disclosed the list of 200 sites it had permanently banned.

How Globalists Predict Your Behavior

Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

The globalists seem to have an overarching obsession with data collection. As we have seen with revelations from multiple government whistle-blowers, the establishment spends most of its time, energy and manpower collecting information not just on known threats to their supremacy, but information on EVERYONE through FISA-based surveillance protocols. This is because the establishment sees every individual as a potential threat.

Thus, the system, without warrant, is programmed to collate data from everywhere, not necessarily to be analyzed on the spot, but to be analyzed later in the event that a specific person rises to a level that poses legitimate harm to the globalist power structure.

There was a time not long ago when this notion was considered “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream, but with multiple exposures from Wikileaks to Edward Snowden it is now common knowledge that the government (and the globalists) spy on us en masse. However, I do not think that many people understand the greater implications or uses for this full spectrum surveillance. This is why you sometimes hear the argument that “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about…”

The truth is, mass surveillance is not done merely for the sake of surveillance, and it is certainly not undertaken for the sake of public safety. There is a greater purpose, and it is something the elites crave dearly — the purpose of total and PREDICTIVE information awareness.

The establishment is not just hoping to observe our present behavior in detail. No, they hope to use today’s data to predict our behavior tomorrow, and at this very moment, they are extremely close to achieving their goal.

Lets examine some of the methods they use in the pursuit of this goal…

Internet Macro-Analytics

Web analytics are used by almost everyone with a website of their own, and Google is a primary source for this data. Through analytics you can easily measure web traffic for a particular site, but also where in the world the traffic is coming from, how long these people are staying on your site, how many of them are new visitors versus regular visitors, how your traffic has increased or decreased over a span of months or years, etc, etc. That said analytics are not just useful to someone with a web-based business or a blog, they are very useful to the establishment. Why? Because they allow the establishment to view the behavior of most of a population at any given time.

In fact, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is notorious for opening his big mouth and letting slip some of the finer intricacies of the establishment’s information war. In 2010 in a videotaped interview with The Atlantic, Schmidt said this:

“With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

Now, this statement from Schmidt is not entirely true. The use of analytics to know the thought processes of the individual person is nonsensical because, first, individuals can be highly erratic and unpredictable due to emotion, intuition and abrupt changes in psychological dynamic. The elites do not know what you are thinking, yet.

That said, they do have the tools at their disposal to use what I would call “macro-analytics,” a widely encompassing view of internet traffic, to predict GROUP behavior.

The ability to track the web habits of an entire population allows the elites to see shifts in social consciousness in real time. For example, I believe this very method was used to predict the shift of the U.S. population and parts of Europe towards a more conservative or “populist” ideal in 2016. Because of this the elites have acted accordingly.

Instead of attempting to stop the social changes of the group, they have allowed conservative and sovereignty movements to attain a certain level of political power, while also setting those same movements up for epic failure in the next couple of years. I also predicted this move by the elites in advance before the Brexit Referendum (I will go into more detail on this in my next article).

The point is, the elites do not necessarily need to spend the incredible amount of energy required to spy on each individual. When people form into ideological groups their behavior becomes much easier to predict. Through macro-analytics, the establishment can simply watch the traffic numbers of conservative and liberty sites to see how quickly a population is adopting that mindset, or abandoning it. They can read these social movements in advance and move to intercept or co-opt.

Even if everyone in a given population found a way to use the web anonymously, this would do nothing to prevent the establishment from collecting wider analytic data and traffic data.

The best strategy for defusing this weapon at the fingertips of the elites would be a decentralized internet; an internet in which analytics are not collected or cannot be collected. Whether this can be done using existing internet infrastructure or if it would require the freedom minded to start all over from scratch, I do not know. All I know is that while the existing system is indeed useful to liberty advocates as a means to spread information and to counter disinformation, it is also highly useful to the elites as a means to view and predict mass behavior. It is a trade-off, and it is hard to say who is getting the better part of the trade.

For the establishment, though, the internet is quickly becoming, for all intents and purposes, the all seeing eye.

Human Integration With The Internet

Here is where Eric Schmidt’s claim of Google “knowing what you are thinking” could actually come true. Yet another statement from Schmidt in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter breaks down exactly what a human integration with the web might entail:

“There will be so many IP addresses… so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it. … It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”

Note that Schmidt keeps bringing up the idea that they will have your “permission” to watch your life and actions in such vivid detail. The elites love the idea of consent, but see consent as an unconscious act.  Meaning, they take joy in tricking people into consenting to their own slavery through misinformed participation. Surely, if the average person knew the extent to which their information would be used by the establishment against them they would not consent to a thing. But the elites figure that your ignorance and participation is enough for them.

Case in point, the “internet of things” which Schmidt is describing, is already here.

Not only can spy agencies tap into your web activity and your computer microphone and webcam, but also your cell phone activity. This includes the ability to use cell phone GPS to track every move you make in real time. But cell phones can also be activated while turned off (as long as they have battery power), and your conversations can be recorded while you are none-the-wiser.

The cell phone is also a powerful tool for video surveillance. Cell phone makers are now getting ready to equip products with facial recognition software, allowing organizations like the NSA to not only track you with your own cell phone, but also track you through OTHER people’s cell phones if they happen to capture your face in their own phone camera.  Imagine a world in which the elites have eyes everywhere because nearly everywhere you go someone is holding a cell phone with biometric software.

New products are even more invasive. Amazon’s latest “Echo” technology, featuring “Alexa,” an app which allows the Echo to interpret your commands via microphone and talk back to you, is essentially a highly sensitive listening device (with digital speech interpretation) which people are paying good money for and willingly centralizing in their homes. This is so Orwellian it is astonishing.

Though Amazon claims the Echo only records audio for 60 seconds at a time and has refused to give data to the government in two separate instances for use in court prosecutions, the fact is that Amazon does have the data. And, if Amazon has access, then the NSA has access. It is foolish to assume otherwise. The federal pursuit of warrants to gain the data for use in court cases is nothing more than a show designed to normalize the practice of exploiting these devices and make the idea more palatable to the public. If the data can be used to solve a crime, then how can such surveillance be bad, after all?

What Schmidt envisions, and I think what the globalists envision, are millions of households filled with devices like the Echo. Not only this, but they also envision every human being reliant on the “internet of things” every moment of every day. They want a world in which you can’t accomplish any necessary activity without interacting with the network. They want a world in which everything you say and do is recorded and modeled and profiled. We are not quite there yet, but we are not far off, and if such a world comes to pass, then the elites will, in a sense, be able to predict individual thought and behavior.

Countering The Surveillance Grid

In my next article I will be outlining more methods for countering establishment intrusions into your life. Not only that, but I will also be explaining how you can turn the tables and predict the behavior of the elites.

In the meantime, the best solution to the problem is to distance one’s self from the grid wherever possible. This means doing simple things, like leaving your cell phone at home when it is not really necessary. I grew up in an era without cell phones. Trust me, we got by just fine without them.

It also means being more present-minded on the technology in your home and what it does. Do you really need your webcam overlooking your house all day long? Does your computer really need to be operating every second? Do you really need to take pictures of your entire life and post them on Facebook? Can you not limit your desire for every new gadget that happens to come along?

Humanity needs a healthy distance from technology. This doesn’t mean we go back to using a horse and buggy, but it does mean there is wisdom in moderation. Mass surveillance potential by the establishment is not just a threat to people who might be “up to no good”; it is a threat to everyone. For the ability to predict a population’s behavior makes that population highly controllable. NO ONE is morally benevolent enough to be trusted with that kind of power. Anyone deliberately seeking to obtain such power should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Only the worst of men desire the means to intrude on the lives and minds of men.