13 ms·

I remember a small story, decades ago, about a company/univeristy which was left holding the bag when the government cancelled their contract. They were constru

I remember a small story, decades ago, about a company/univeristy which was left holding the bag when the government cancelled their contract. They were constructing a lens system to go into a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk. It was something like $15M. The implication was that the government had found something even better, and gone with that instead. If Google is publicly giving up on a particular, unpopular technology to buy some PR, I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes. There's a lot of confusion over what this story is actually saying, and, given the obscurity with which Google deals with it's tech, I don't think this is going to get cleared up, leaving room for a lot of speculation. But one thing is absolutely certain: There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...

sn_master 6y ago
That's true for the B1 bomber. During the presidential campaign, when Reagan complained about the jobs lost due to its cancellation, Carter arranged for security clearance for him to know about the F-117 and stealth technology which rendered the B1 obsolete. Later on, Reagan restarted the B1 production anyway.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  heavy bombers reached their ceiling, i think with the b-52. developing new bombers, as far as i can see, is a criminal waste of resources, post Cold War.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    The B-52 can be detected with COTS equipment by anyone who can solder and watch a Youtube video. The B-2 could not be detected by the most advanced radar equipment available to the time of its launch, and even today most equipment not fielded by or funded by Russia or the US could not detect it. Your mailbox key literally has a larger RCS than the B-2.
    - marshmallow_12 6y ago
      russia doesn't need bombing anymore. The stealth bomber has had the rug pulled out from beneath its feet. It was effectively obsolete from day one.
    - Stratoscope 6y ago
      Forgive my ignorance, but I'm probably not the only one who is wondering what COTS and RCS mean here?
      - joshyeager 6y ago
        Commercial Off The Shelf Radar Cross Section
      - cjhockey 6y ago
        COTS: Commercial off the shelf, stuff you can buy easily. RCS: Radar Cross Section - how big of a reflection an object makes at radar wavelengths.
      - KMag 6y ago
        COTS -> Commercial off-the-shelf RCS -> Radar cross section
      - whiw 6y ago
        "Customer Off The Shelf" and "Radar Cross Section"
      - bee_rider 6y ago
        COTS = Commercial off the shelf (stuff you could pick up in a Radioshack before they became mini-Bestbuys, basically). RCS = Radar Cross-section (a bit more field-specific, more or less how "big" the thing looks on radar, but it is a bit jargony -- it depends on things like the material and radar wavelength).
- cturner 6y ago
  There is some overlap, but the planes serve different purposes. The B1 is still in service.
SquareWheel 6y ago
Having a system that's almost as good but less offensive to some people (the Privacy Sandbox) seems like a reasonable enough justification to change tactics. Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble.
- insert_coin 6y ago
  > Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble. Google cares on their own. And current advertisers may not care but who knows what kind of technology they may come up with in the future where that data might be valuable, having extra data has never been a problem for google.
btown 6y ago
Yep - without having read the article due to paywall, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/FLoC/FLOC-Whitepaper-Google.pdf https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/... https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir... Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hurt them, because it allows them to thread the needle in a privacy-conscious world.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Would that method benefit from Googles existing people database? I'm thinking it would, and maybe disabling current tracking will kick the ladder out from potential competitors! Still probably a step in the right direction.
- josefx 6y ago
  > that they are not giving people unique identifiers How far can this data be reversed? If I have a group of ten people can google tell with high reliability that probably three of them are homosexual, two have Alzheimer's and none are pregnant?
- darren_ 6y ago
  > Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. If you've searched for baby clothes in Google there's absolutely nothing in the FLoC proposal that stops Google from inferring that you're a parent from that search and, idk, storing a bit in your profile or something. This proposal is about allowing ad targeting to interests or whatever without tracking your visits across the web - your browser generates the cohorts clientside (idk how the cohort assignment algorithms get standardised on, I guess that's where the 'tuning' would go). And yes, you could just tell your browser not to do that, or have it only use the most recent n days' data, or randomize your cohort, or freeze your cohort in time, or blocklist certain sites from ever entering your cohort, and so on. Where this ties into tracking if you're a parent is that while it doesn't prevent tracking that, it does lessen the incentive - if you're a parent, you're likely going to wind up in a parent-y cohort. Is the signal from the original search still going to be useful enough to warrant keeping around? (obligatory: googler, but nothing to do with ads)
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. I know this sounds laughable given how toothless regulators have been thus far, but let's not forget that a) fines under GDPR have been growing and are likely to continue to do so, with ad tech in a particularly awkward spot, and b) both the EU and US governments and regulators have started nosing around big tech on a variety of fronts, including privacy and antitrust concerns. Given that, the cost-benefit analysis becomes pretty complicated. They may feel a shift to a scheme which lowers revenues while avoiding regulatory scrutiny now makes sense.
usrusr 6y ago
Or it could mean that they have data showing that all that tracker targeting isn't actually providing the value to advertisers that they claim it provides and want to move on before that becomes common knowledge. I'd love to see my scenario be true, but I'm afraid that it's much less likely than yours.
shadowgovt 6y ago
> Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it... My guess is that they smell a change in the regulatory wind (EU and possibly US as well) and anticipate that if they get out ahead of it, those regulations will serve as a competitive moat against other advertisers. That, or their A/B testing has confirmed ad quality isn't remarkably improved over the combination of search-tuned ads, adsense topic ads tuned to the site the user is browsing, and display ads tuned by data the site owner vends to Google about the user to fine-tune ad selection for them. They have enough data to know one way or another, and if it turns out there's not enough value-add to justify retaining all that user browsing state, dropping collation and storage of it can free up room for dozens of new projects. It's easy to forget that one of the major constraints on what Google can do, at their scale, is storage and processing; they're so big that from most people's vantage points, those resources seem limitless, but inside Google, they know exactly how much they aren't doing because the machines and networking they already own are already pushing petabytes of data around and are already near max peak capacity for their mission-critical applications. Sometimes, the cheapest way to get more space for a new bet or an existing mission-critical task is to just stop doing something else.
amelius 6y ago
> a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk. In the future, you don't have to rely on serendipity to find money on the street. You just use a satellite to find it for you.
- vmception 6y ago
  this legend is decades old actually the US hegemony relies on a perception of omnipotence, so there will always be a lot of boisterous claims
  - ARandomerDude 6y ago
    Two-service veteran here. In my observation, most people also "learn" about the military from Hollywood, which is almost always comically bad at portraying the kinds of people, cultures, technology, tactics, etc. actually in the military/government. What would 24 have been without Chloe's ability to hack the video camera on a 1980s alarm clock by logging into a GPS satellite?
    - vmception 6y ago
      Yeah, I feel like there were technological surprises by the federal government up to the 1980s but not really since then, but perception has been riding off of that Even the NSA presentations and code leaks this century didnt really have surprises more just angst about their lack of accountability
- ChristianGeek 6y ago
  Some of us already use them to find Tupperware in the woods!
somedude895 6y ago
> There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker To be fair, Google's biggest money maker is their SEA, which doesn't rely on your behavioral data, since user intent is given through a search query.
babypuncher 6y ago
Google owns the operating system running on half of all Americans' phones (and an even larger share overseas). On top of that, Chrome OS is continuing to gain market share. I think this is your answer right there.
notatoad 6y ago
it's important to remember that google's goal isn't to track you, it's to make money. So finding something that works better isn't necessarily a better way to track you, just a better way to make money. tracking, including the costs of collecting and storing all that data as well as the PR cost of people being creeped out by all that data you store, is expensive. Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very) it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that ads will be just as effective and just as revenue-generating if their tracking becomes a bit less granular.
- visarga 6y ago
  > Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very) I think the problem is not ad targeting, but ad inventory. They want to sell things we don't need, that's the real cause of the low efficiency. They should better focus on things people actually need at the time of search.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    it's the same end result though - whether they don't have the ad inventory to make use of hyper-detailed tracking, or they're just not very good at turning the tracking into targeting, then either way performing the hyper-detailed tracking is a waste of money and they can make more money by spending less on tracking me.
0_____0 6y ago
not to rain on the parade here but reading the date on a dime puts you well into sub-milliarcsecond territory, well past what is possible to resolve with even a diffraction limited optical light telescope of any kind from space. Bigger telescope systems can resolve smaller objects, but even if you were to yeet an enormous, optically perfect, 10m telescope into the very lowest earth orbit possible (not maintainable due to atmospheric drag) you would still be a couple orders of magnitude away from being able to read the date on a dime.
- burnte 6y ago
  I believe his intent, especially with the word "purportedly", was so infer that the proposed system had amazing abilities, less than it was intended to be a perfectly accurate description.
  - 0_____0 6y ago
    I agree that it wasn't intended to be literal fact, just figured I'd take the opportunity to flex my mediocre optical systems knowledge. :p
    - jerzmacow 6y ago
      Could you describe what size of optical telescope you'd need to put in space to read the date on a dime? I'm very curious
      - 0_____0 6y ago
        Check out this chart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system#/media/File:Diffraction_limit_diameter_vs_angular_resolution.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system#/me... I would guess that you'd need 0.25mm resolution, which at 200km would require 250microarcseconds angular res, which doesn't even register on that graph at any wavelength or size of telescope lol edit: this is a very 'spherical cow' analysis. i'm pretty sure that atmospheric effects will kill your ability to image stuff like this well before angular resolution will.
jedimastert 6y ago
> their biggest money maker Correction: if you go by the profit reports from Alphabet, Google Display Ads is not their biggest money maker by a long shot. That's still Search Ads
- ppod 6y ago
  Point of information: that's a point of information.
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    You right
laurent92 6y ago
Yep, third-party cookies must be very inefficient by now, as well as the js GA script that enables tracking. This is probably the first two things ad-blockers block. Of course they move away from this, the must have brainstormed and tested new ways for years. OTOH, it is stunning that we’ve invented tech that is stable even when an ad-blocker interferes with the webpage, cookies, js, requests, etc. Try that with binaries! (which is probably where they plan to move the code)
oxfordmale 6y ago
It is known that personally yargeted advertisements are relatively ineffective compared to advertising targeted at a group. For example, advertising for luggage on a travel website tends to lead to higher click through rates rather than showing a personalised advertisement. Personalized ads often try to market products you just have bought.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  (I've worked in adtech for over 15 years.) Advertising is just applied sociology, and sociology is just applied statistics. So statistically significant and unbiased sampling is what makes advertising work. Highly-targeted and personalized ads are a crutch due to the fact that unbiased sampling is pretty much impossible on the internet. (There's a joke about this: "an online poll has shown that internet penetration has now reached 100 percent".) Neither advertisers nor publishers actually want to collect high-resolution data, it's a huge cost with very little benefit.
danielrhodes 6y ago
There are probably a few things going on: * Google sees the writing on the wall: people are becoming more privacy conscious, but more importantly governments in many countries are making motions to suggest this sort of tracking could be regulated in the future. They need to stay ahead of the curve. * The value of tracking people in this way may be less than everybody seems to think - not all data about a person's activities is equally monetizable. Just because you read an article about Julius Caesar and then looked at some clickbait article about Britney Spears doesn't mean an advertiser can sell you a chariot. * Google in making the first move can create an advantage for itself in the market * Much of Google's revenue comes from their own properties -- in the case of search, they are already well positioned to show you relevant ads because you have shown intent. No need for cookies there. * Google has a dominant position with Chrome and the article suggests they want to do fingerprinting of a person's browsing behavior and put people into different cohorts without sending the raw data to Google. This is similar to how Apple does machine learning on device. If Google has exclusive access to these cohorts, they have a strong incentive to move to a cookie-less model because it puts other ad networks at a disadvantage.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  It seems like you could get most of the benefits by just doing content aware adverts? Is the advert showing on a page about guitars? Show an advert about guitars and music accessories. We don't need that advert to follow us around for the next month. It also completely eliminates the creep factor and conspiracies around adverts. "How did they know I was interested in this, are they listening to my phone?" goes away when its the same as the content you are looking at currently.
  - danielrhodes 6y ago
    Yeah it's unclear to me that having a list of all the pages you've visited (or similar) provides a strong enough signal that advertisers will bid higher or result in greater conversion. In some cases it surely will, but then it becomes a question of what proportion of Google's revenue is dependent on this scenario. If it's not a significant portion, Google might just say the potential regulatory and PR headache is not worth it.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Spot on. They're not going to abandon their core, their bread & butter, their monopoly without a new & improved Plan A. Full disclosure: I'm reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I get more skeptical (and fearful) with each page turn. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
cratermoon 6y ago
Do you know our Lord and Savior Unified ID? https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/knowledge-center/what-the-tech-is-unified-id-2-0 https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/knowledge-center/what-the-te...
LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
I think your last paragraph is the answer. Targeting ad with personal information is questionably profitable to me. I am almost not caught by the ads in websites but by some search results (google search first page) or article in forums like here or reddit or some people I followed. Maybe Google just find out they actually do not need such garbage personal information. I said garbage because lots of them are really caused by random events (sometimes you are interested in something. But after that period of time, you would not ever get in touch with it again) or fake information. And, the ecosystem to store these information is expensive.
oiirewr234324 6y ago
> I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes. Oh stop it with these conspiracies. Google (like Facebook) has been pushed in this direction for ~2-3 years by changes in Safari to the point that Google has started preparing for this pro-actively Why do you think Google hasn't complained like FB about the upcoming changes in ios ?
moksly 6y ago
In my completely anecdotal experience, Facebook has been far, far, better at targeted advertising than google. Facebook seems to know what Kickstarter products I’ve backed, what specific miniature paints I like and seemingly which I’ve already bought. Possibly because a lot of my miniature hobby socialising takes place in messenger and on Instagram. Google by contrast is so bad at advertising, that I often have to re-search on duck duck go to find a webshop that I can actually use post-brexit. Maybe because google knows I don’t speak Spanish, Italian and suck at German? But I mean, I still buy stuff from Spanish websites using the translate function in chrome, so, shouldn’t they know better? Anyway, for me personal and anecdotal, it seems google is really bad at predicting what I want. I mean, even for content. The front page of YouTube is full of videos I’ve already seen...

sn_master 6y ago

That's true for the B1 bomber. During the presidential campaign, when Reagan complained about the jobs lost due to its cancellation, Carter arranged for security clearance for him to know about the F-117 and stealth technology which rendered the B1 obsolete. Later on, Reagan restarted the B1 production anyway.

marshmallow_12 6y ago
heavy bombers reached their ceiling, i think with the b-52. developing new bombers, as far as i can see, is a criminal waste of resources, post Cold War.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  The B-52 can be detected with COTS equipment by anyone who can solder and watch a Youtube video. The B-2 could not be detected by the most advanced radar equipment available to the time of its launch, and even today most equipment not fielded by or funded by Russia or the US could not detect it. Your mailbox key literally has a larger RCS than the B-2.
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    russia doesn't need bombing anymore. The stealth bomber has had the rug pulled out from beneath its feet. It was effectively obsolete from day one.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, but I'm probably not the only one who is wondering what COTS and RCS mean here?
    - joshyeager 6y ago
      Commercial Off The Shelf Radar Cross Section
    - cjhockey 6y ago
      COTS: Commercial off the shelf, stuff you can buy easily. RCS: Radar Cross Section - how big of a reflection an object makes at radar wavelengths.
    - KMag 6y ago
      COTS -> Commercial off-the-shelf RCS -> Radar cross section
    - whiw 6y ago
      "Customer Off The Shelf" and "Radar Cross Section"
    - bee_rider 6y ago
      COTS = Commercial off the shelf (stuff you could pick up in a Radioshack before they became mini-Bestbuys, basically). RCS = Radar Cross-section (a bit more field-specific, more or less how "big" the thing looks on radar, but it is a bit jargony -- it depends on things like the material and radar wavelength).
cturner 6y ago
There is some overlap, but the planes serve different purposes. The B1 is still in service.

SquareWheel 6y ago

Having a system that's almost as good but less offensive to some people (the Privacy Sandbox) seems like a reasonable enough justification to change tactics. Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble.

insert_coin 6y ago
> Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble. Google cares on their own. And current advertisers may not care but who knows what kind of technology they may come up with in the future where that data might be valuable, having extra data has never been a problem for google.

btown 6y ago

Yep - without having read the article due to paywall, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/FLoC/FLOC-Whitepaper-Google.pdf https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/... https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir... Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hurt them, because it allows them to thread the needle in a privacy-conscious world.

phkahler 6y ago
Would that method benefit from Googles existing people database? I'm thinking it would, and maybe disabling current tracking will kick the ladder out from potential competitors! Still probably a step in the right direction.
josefx 6y ago
> that they are not giving people unique identifiers How far can this data be reversed? If I have a group of ten people can google tell with high reliability that probably three of them are homosexual, two have Alzheimer's and none are pregnant?
darren_ 6y ago
> Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. If you've searched for baby clothes in Google there's absolutely nothing in the FLoC proposal that stops Google from inferring that you're a parent from that search and, idk, storing a bit in your profile or something. This proposal is about allowing ad targeting to interests or whatever without tracking your visits across the web - your browser generates the cohorts clientside (idk how the cohort assignment algorithms get standardised on, I guess that's where the 'tuning' would go). And yes, you could just tell your browser not to do that, or have it only use the most recent n days' data, or randomize your cohort, or freeze your cohort in time, or blocklist certain sites from ever entering your cohort, and so on. Where this ties into tracking if you're a parent is that while it doesn't prevent tracking that, it does lessen the incentive - if you're a parent, you're likely going to wind up in a parent-y cohort. Is the signal from the original search still going to be useful enough to warrant keeping around? (obligatory: googler, but nothing to do with ads)

CarelessExpert 6y ago

> There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. I know this sounds laughable given how toothless regulators have been thus far, but let's not forget that a) fines under GDPR have been growing and are likely to continue to do so, with ad tech in a particularly awkward spot, and b) both the EU and US governments and regulators have started nosing around big tech on a variety of fronts, including privacy and antitrust concerns. Given that, the cost-benefit analysis becomes pretty complicated. They may feel a shift to a scheme which lowers revenues while avoiding regulatory scrutiny now makes sense.

usrusr 6y ago

Or it could mean that they have data showing that all that tracker targeting isn't actually providing the value to advertisers that they claim it provides and want to move on before that becomes common knowledge. I'd love to see my scenario be true, but I'm afraid that it's much less likely than yours.

shadowgovt 6y ago

> Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it... My guess is that they smell a change in the regulatory wind (EU and possibly US as well) and anticipate that if they get out ahead of it, those regulations will serve as a competitive moat against other advertisers. That, or their A/B testing has confirmed ad quality isn't remarkably improved over the combination of search-tuned ads, adsense topic ads tuned to the site the user is browsing, and display ads tuned by data the site owner vends to Google about the user to fine-tune ad selection for them. They have enough data to know one way or another, and if it turns out there's not enough value-add to justify retaining all that user browsing state, dropping collation and storage of it can free up room for dozens of new projects. It's easy to forget that one of the major constraints on what Google can do, at their scale, is storage and processing; they're so big that from most people's vantage points, those resources seem limitless, but inside Google, they know exactly how much they aren't doing because the machines and networking they already own are already pushing petabytes of data around and are already near max peak capacity for their mission-critical applications. Sometimes, the cheapest way to get more space for a new bet or an existing mission-critical task is to just stop doing something else.

amelius 6y ago

> a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk. In the future, you don't have to rely on serendipity to find money on the street. You just use a satellite to find it for you.

vmception 6y ago
this legend is decades old actually the US hegemony relies on a perception of omnipotence, so there will always be a lot of boisterous claims
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  Two-service veteran here. In my observation, most people also "learn" about the military from Hollywood, which is almost always comically bad at portraying the kinds of people, cultures, technology, tactics, etc. actually in the military/government. What would 24 have been without Chloe's ability to hack the video camera on a 1980s alarm clock by logging into a GPS satellite?
  - vmception 6y ago
    Yeah, I feel like there were technological surprises by the federal government up to the 1980s but not really since then, but perception has been riding off of that Even the NSA presentations and code leaks this century didnt really have surprises more just angst about their lack of accountability
ChristianGeek 6y ago
Some of us already use them to find Tupperware in the woods!

somedude895 6y ago

> There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker To be fair, Google's biggest money maker is their SEA, which doesn't rely on your behavioral data, since user intent is given through a search query.

babypuncher 6y ago

Google owns the operating system running on half of all Americans' phones (and an even larger share overseas). On top of that, Chrome OS is continuing to gain market share. I think this is your answer right there.

notatoad 6y ago

it's important to remember that google's goal isn't to track you, it's to make money. So finding something that works better isn't necessarily a better way to track you, just a better way to make money. tracking, including the costs of collecting and storing all that data as well as the PR cost of people being creeped out by all that data you store, is expensive. Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very) it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that ads will be just as effective and just as revenue-generating if their tracking becomes a bit less granular.

visarga 6y ago
> Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very) I think the problem is not ad targeting, but ad inventory. They want to sell things we don't need, that's the real cause of the low efficiency. They should better focus on things people actually need at the time of search.
- notatoad 6y ago
  it's the same end result though - whether they don't have the ad inventory to make use of hyper-detailed tracking, or they're just not very good at turning the tracking into targeting, then either way performing the hyper-detailed tracking is a waste of money and they can make more money by spending less on tracking me.

0_____0 6y ago

not to rain on the parade here but reading the date on a dime puts you well into sub-milliarcsecond territory, well past what is possible to resolve with even a diffraction limited optical light telescope of any kind from space. Bigger telescope systems can resolve smaller objects, but even if you were to yeet an enormous, optically perfect, 10m telescope into the very lowest earth orbit possible (not maintainable due to atmospheric drag) you would still be a couple orders of magnitude away from being able to read the date on a dime.

burnte 6y ago
I believe his intent, especially with the word "purportedly", was so infer that the proposed system had amazing abilities, less than it was intended to be a perfectly accurate description.
- 0_____0 6y ago
  I agree that it wasn't intended to be literal fact, just figured I'd take the opportunity to flex my mediocre optical systems knowledge. :p
  - jerzmacow 6y ago
    Could you describe what size of optical telescope you'd need to put in space to read the date on a dime? I'm very curious
    - 0_____0 6y ago
      Check out this chart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system#/media/File:Diffraction_limit_diameter_vs_angular_resolution.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system#/me... I would guess that you'd need 0.25mm resolution, which at 200km would require 250microarcseconds angular res, which doesn't even register on that graph at any wavelength or size of telescope lol edit: this is a very 'spherical cow' analysis. i'm pretty sure that atmospheric effects will kill your ability to image stuff like this well before angular resolution will.

jedimastert 6y ago

> their biggest money maker Correction: if you go by the profit reports from Alphabet, Google Display Ads is not their biggest money maker by a long shot. That's still Search Ads

ppod 6y ago
Point of information: that's a point of information.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  You right

laurent92 6y ago

Yep, third-party cookies must be very inefficient by now, as well as the js GA script that enables tracking. This is probably the first two things ad-blockers block. Of course they move away from this, the must have brainstormed and tested new ways for years. OTOH, it is stunning that we’ve invented tech that is stable even when an ad-blocker interferes with the webpage, cookies, js, requests, etc. Try that with binaries! (which is probably where they plan to move the code)

oxfordmale 6y ago

It is known that personally yargeted advertisements are relatively ineffective compared to advertising targeted at a group. For example, advertising for luggage on a travel website tends to lead to higher click through rates rather than showing a personalised advertisement. Personalized ads often try to market products you just have bought.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago
(I've worked in adtech for over 15 years.) Advertising is just applied sociology, and sociology is just applied statistics. So statistically significant and unbiased sampling is what makes advertising work. Highly-targeted and personalized ads are a crutch due to the fact that unbiased sampling is pretty much impossible on the internet. (There's a joke about this: "an online poll has shown that internet penetration has now reached 100 percent".) Neither advertisers nor publishers actually want to collect high-resolution data, it's a huge cost with very little benefit.

danielrhodes 6y ago

There are probably a few things going on: * Google sees the writing on the wall: people are becoming more privacy conscious, but more importantly governments in many countries are making motions to suggest this sort of tracking could be regulated in the future. They need to stay ahead of the curve. * The value of tracking people in this way may be less than everybody seems to think - not all data about a person's activities is equally monetizable. Just because you read an article about Julius Caesar and then looked at some clickbait article about Britney Spears doesn't mean an advertiser can sell you a chariot. * Google in making the first move can create an advantage for itself in the market * Much of Google's revenue comes from their own properties -- in the case of search, they are already well positioned to show you relevant ads because you have shown intent. No need for cookies there. * Google has a dominant position with Chrome and the article suggests they want to do fingerprinting of a person's browsing behavior and put people into different cohorts without sending the raw data to Google. This is similar to how Apple does machine learning on device. If Google has exclusive access to these cohorts, they have a strong incentive to move to a cookie-less model because it puts other ad networks at a disadvantage.

SilverRed 6y ago
It seems like you could get most of the benefits by just doing content aware adverts? Is the advert showing on a page about guitars? Show an advert about guitars and music accessories. We don't need that advert to follow us around for the next month. It also completely eliminates the creep factor and conspiracies around adverts. "How did they know I was interested in this, are they listening to my phone?" goes away when its the same as the content you are looking at currently.
- danielrhodes 6y ago
  Yeah it's unclear to me that having a list of all the pages you've visited (or similar) provides a strong enough signal that advertisers will bid higher or result in greater conversion. In some cases it surely will, but then it becomes a question of what proportion of Google's revenue is dependent on this scenario. If it's not a significant portion, Google might just say the potential regulatory and PR headache is not worth it.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Spot on. They're not going to abandon their core, their bread & butter, their monopoly without a new & improved Plan A. Full disclosure: I'm reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I get more skeptical (and fearful) with each page turn. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

cratermoon 6y ago

Do you know our Lord and Savior Unified ID? https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/knowledge-center/what-the-tech-is-unified-id-2-0 https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/knowledge-center/what-the-te...

LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago

I think your last paragraph is the answer. Targeting ad with personal information is questionably profitable to me. I am almost not caught by the ads in websites but by some search results (google search first page) or article in forums like here or reddit or some people I followed. Maybe Google just find out they actually do not need such garbage personal information. I said garbage because lots of them are really caused by random events (sometimes you are interested in something. But after that period of time, you would not ever get in touch with it again) or fake information. And, the ecosystem to store these information is expensive.

oiirewr234324 6y ago

> I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes. Oh stop it with these conspiracies. Google (like Facebook) has been pushed in this direction for ~2-3 years by changes in Safari to the point that Google has started preparing for this pro-actively Why do you think Google hasn't complained like FB about the upcoming changes in ios ?

moksly 6y ago

In my completely anecdotal experience, Facebook has been far, far, better at targeted advertising than google. Facebook seems to know what Kickstarter products I’ve backed, what specific miniature paints I like and seemingly which I’ve already bought. Possibly because a lot of my miniature hobby socialising takes place in messenger and on Instagram. Google by contrast is so bad at advertising, that I often have to re-search on duck duck go to find a webshop that I can actually use post-brexit. Maybe because google knows I don’t speak Spanish, Italian and suck at German? But I mean, I still buy stuff from Spanish websites using the translate function in chrome, so, shouldn’t they know better? Anyway, for me personal and anecdotal, it seems google is really bad at predicting what I want. I mean, even for content. The front page of YouTube is full of videos I’ve already seen...