3 ms·

The same way you buy electricity from a provider, but the grid doesn't know who you are.

by ccozan 11y ago

Klathmon 11y ago
But the company does know who you are, they have a meter on the side of your home that measures how much electricity you use, they know your address and often your banking information... The "grid" might not (i'm not even sure what that means?), but in this case the website doesn't know who you are, the ad itself doesn't know who you are (especially because it's not shown), only the ad-network-provider knows who you are.
random28345 11y ago
> but the grid doesn't know who you are. Sure, the grid only knows where you live, if you own or rent, size of your household, when you're home or away. Heck with a bit of data mining on "smart meters", I bet you could infer the energy usage of certain appliances such as hair dryer, curling iron, stove, etc., starting to give insight into age, gender, ethnicity, eating habits, you name it. By itself that data will only generate weak correlations, but I'd certain that energy companies are finding buyers for that data who could match it with your credit report, background check, etc. Face it, the only thing protecting your anonymity is your lack of notoriety.
- cbr 11y ago
  > I bet you could infer the energy usage of certain > appliances such as hair dryer, curling iron, stove ... https://sense.com/ https://sense.com/ does this, figuring out what different things you run at home and knowing when they're on.
cbr 11y ago
Trust works differently selling electricity. At each step in the chain from generation to distribution to consumption everyone involved can easily measure what they're getting. This means that each entity only needs information about the entities that it buys from or sells to. With ads this sort of verification is far harder, and passing lots of information back from the browser to each party involved is the only way the industry has figured out for keeping fraud down. There's actually a weird way that control over your devices and privacy on your devices are at odds here: if your device was running signed code from the ground up, where you were given a browser and had no ability to modify anything, then we could build an ad system that leaked no information to the various ad industry companies but still let them be sure that a view was a real view and a click was a real click. But of course we do want to be able to control the software we run, and we successfully rejected trusted computing for most uses in the '00s, so instead we have all this tracking.

The same way you buy electricity from a provider, but the grid doesn't know who you are.

by ccozan 11y ago

The same way you buy electricity from a provider, but the grid doesn't know who you are.

But the company does know who you are, they have a meter on the side of your home that measures how much electricity you use, they know your address and often your banking information... The "grid" might not (i'm not even sure what that means?), but in this case the website doesn't know who you are, the ad itself doesn't know who you are (especially because it's not shown), only the ad-network-provider knows who you are.

random28345 11y ago

> but the grid doesn't know who you are. Sure, the grid only knows where you live, if you own or rent, size of your household, when you're home or away. Heck with a bit of data mining on "smart meters", I bet you could infer the energy usage of certain appliances such as hair dryer, curling iron, stove, etc., starting to give insight into age, gender, ethnicity, eating habits, you name it. By itself that data will only generate weak correlations, but I'd certain that energy companies are finding buyers for that data who could match it with your credit report, background check, etc. Face it, the only thing protecting your anonymity is your lack of notoriety.

cbr 11y ago
> I bet you could infer the energy usage of certain > appliances such as hair dryer, curling iron, stove ... https://sense.com/ https://sense.com/ does this, figuring out what different things you run at home and knowing when they're on.

cbr 11y ago

Trust works differently selling electricity. At each step in the chain from generation to distribution to consumption everyone involved can easily measure what they're getting. This means that each entity only needs information about the entities that it buys from or sells to. With ads this sort of verification is far harder, and passing lots of information back from the browser to each party involved is the only way the industry has figured out for keeping fraud down. There's actually a weird way that control over your devices and privacy on your devices are at odds here: if your device was running signed code from the ground up, where you were given a browser and had no ability to modify anything, then we could build an ad system that leaked no information to the various ad industry companies but still let them be sure that a view was a real view and a click was a real click. But of course we do want to be able to control the software we run, and we successfully rejected trusted computing for most uses in the '00s, so instead we have all this tracking.