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You'd be advised to read their book, by Nissenbaum and Brunton that describes the theory behind privacy through obfuscation. It argues that by clicking all the
by 0xADADA 10y ago
You'd be advised to read their book, by Nissenbaum and Brunton that describes the theory behind privacy through obfuscation. It argues that by clicking all the ads, all useful information is lost in the noise. Simply put, the signal-to-noise ratio is so heavily biased to noise that the signal is lost. https://www.amazon.com/Obfuscation-Users-Guide-Privacy-Protest/dp/0262529866/ref=sr_1_1/151-1720456-9382733?ie=UTF8&qid=1487086183&sr=8-1&keywords=obfuscation+privacy https://www.amazon.com/Obfuscation-Users-Guide-Privacy-Prote...
- dguido 10y agoNeither of these people are technologists with any experience in the ad industry or data science. They're lawyers and artists. Why would I trust that they know what they're talking about in this domain?
- stult 10y agoWhy not evaluate their arguments on the merits rather than relying on authority (or lack thereof)? And it's not like this is a particularly technical subject anyway.
- dguido 10y agoAbsolutely, and I've outlined cases where I have technical disagreements with them in my original post and elsewhere in this thread. I was merely responding to the accusation that I should blindly listen to them because they wrote a book.
- mattmanser 10y agoHow is it not technical? You have to understand statistics, ad networks, etc. plus all the stuff that can be used to identify you online, cookies, e-tags, browser storage, browser property sniffing, etc. plus how all that works in regard to domains and sub-domains, what's accessible cross-domains, etc. The parent is alluding to that while all that ad clicking might obfuscate your reception to ads, it might have the downside of making it extremely easy to distinctly recognise your browsing habits and let every ad network uniquely identify you and link it to other data they have on you.
- falcolas 10y agoBy allowing their ads (and thus their software) on the web page in the first place, you've already provided all of that data to them. The click doesn't really provide any further, useful data.