How to Catch a Cardinal (Reckoning of the Pilar Event) - Part # 2
In How to Catch a Cardinal (Analysis of the Pilar Event) - Part # 1 we showed you how all your data, gps location, etc gets sent to advertisers. They have all of it and that’s a bit Orwellian.
Now we are going to show you how to buy that data and use it to, well Catch a Cardinal or whoever it is that you are out to catch.
- Step 1 – there are a bunch of data aggregators & brokers that sell advertising profiles and all the data points we mentioned. If you just purchase this data randomly, you could spend millions of dollars before you accidentally get the data for the cardinal or mark you want to catch.
Therefore, you need to have some idea of the kind of person you are looking for. If you are certain that your mark is a connoisseur of the Grindr or Ashley Madison platform, you can specify dating or affair and their age range in the advertising profile dataset requests.
Each data broker classifies their data differently, so you may need to contact a few and work with them to ensure you get as close as possible to the customer base you are looking for. See https://hbr.org/2020/05/buying-consumer-data-tread-carefully
If you know where the mark lives, some data brokers let you specify a zip code or a batch of zip codes that include both home and work to make it easier to snag the advertising profile of your mark.
- Step 2 – Once you make the selection, you need to shell out cash.
If you know a lot about your mark and can provide specific enough data points for the buy, you might get lucky on a $5000 spend and get your mark’s profile data. However if it’s a well populated region and lots of folks have similar profiles, you may need to spend $10,000 to $20,000 for a batch of data large enough to swoop up your mark.
- Step 3 – Once you make the buy and get the data, the first thing you need to do is load it into a database like Google’s Big Data or Microsoft’s Azure SQL. Once its loaded you can query it anyway you would like.
You’d need to to know the GPS coordinates for your mark’s home and office and that’s easy to get when you google the address.
Then you create and run some stored procedures or queries to get only the data where latitude and longitude falls within a 100 (or 50) foot radius of the centerline of the gps coordinates that corresponds to the home or office of your mark.
That will give you all the data when the mark is using his computer/phone/tablet in his home or office.
- Step 4 – Once you get that data, each row contains the UUID of the smart phone or tablet that accessed the data because the UUID is a data column in the same rows that you got via the centerline query.
If the mark has several devices, you will see those UUIDs and once you have the UUIDs you can query the rest of the data you previously discarded to see if any of those rows contain the UUIDs.
Every row that is returned with matching UUID will provide you with the geo-coordinate where the mark has been and every website app and other piece of information that the mark has managed to upload to the advertiser.
It’s that easy. You can read more information on advertising data here.
If you are an investigative journalist, editor, publisher, or other agency that is investigating corruption or need leverage you can use when dealing with someone who is causing you harm we can provide you with a service similar to what Pilar utilized to catch their mark.
In the next and final part on How to Catch a Cardinal, we will provide you with the details and specific actions you can take to protect your data so it is not so easy for data buyers to purchase and use to find out every detail about every area of your life.
Stay tuned for the 3rd and final segment in our series entitled How to Catch a Cardinal (Defensive Posture Required to Prevent the Pilar Event) - Part 3.
