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"Serial killer may have found a life-friendly substitute to knives." No but seriously, does being in a group of "thousands" of people really preserve privacy p
by dilap 6y ago
"Serial killer may have found a life-friendly substitute to knives."
No but seriously, does being in a group of "thousands" of people really preserve privacy particularly well? It seems quite likely that with groups that small, membership itself could be considered privacy-compromising, e.g., a group of people that all have some medical condition.
At the most fundamental level, I feel like if you know which advertisments are targetted to me, and those advertisements are well-targeted, then my privacy has been invaded.
It seems to me there is a fundamental conflict between good targetted ads and protection of privacy.
- f430 6y ago> The company said Monday that tests of FLoC to reach audiences show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads when compared to cookie-based advertising. FLoC uses machine learning algorithms to analyze user data and then create a group of thousands of people based off of the sites that an individual visits. The data gathered locally from the browser is never shared. Instead, the data from the much wider cohort of thousands of people is shared, and that is then used to target ads. If I was an advertiser I would have serious doubts about this, especially after the fact that ad spend on popular platforms have had no impact on many firm's bottom line. I guess this is a response to all the pushbacks and dwindling PPC revenues from an increasingly wary advertisers who have quite possibly been duped into transferring their cash to Google & others over the decade.
- joshuamorton 6y agoWhat? No. It's a response to potential bans on same site cookie access. The thing you quote says that this is worse than conventional targeted ads.
- dataminded 6y agoGoogle isn't sharing your individual data but they are still collecting it and storing it. This feels like a non-improvement to me.
- ignoramous 6y ago> It seems to me there is a fundamental conflict between good targeted ads and protection of privacy. True, but it is too much to ask Google to throw "the baby out with the bath water", as it were. For all their faults, I am encouraged that Android and Chrome, if no other product team at Google, is pioneering Federated Learning [0], Differential Privacy [1], and now are pushing ahead with Privacy Sandbox [2]. I wholeheartedly agree it simply isn't enough, but it is substantially better than what's in-use right now. Like everyone else though, I am worried for the same reason I dislike AMP (accelerated mobile pages) despite it bringing noticeably better user-experience for many: Google has this nasty tendency to make things seem more "open", "benevolent", and "private" than they really are. [0] https://federated.withgoogle.com/#learn https://federated.withgoogle.com/#learn [1] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/rappor https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/rappor [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20767891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20767891
- Super_Jambo 6y ago> True, but it is too much to ask Google to throw "the baby out with the bath water", as it were. No it isn't, the 'baby' of targetted adverts is a net negative for society. We'd be net better off if most googlers just retired and spent their days digging holes and filling them in again. It is not "too much to ask" that people stop messing up society even if it's making them billions.
- fooker 6y agoYou mean, you would be better off. The 3 billion people who can not afford to pay 200$ per month for various software will not be better off.