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I would expect that it's practical to reverse engineer the cohorts into a browsing history. This means that an interested party could derive browsing informatio

• morelisp 6y ago
  Cohorts could be reverse-engineered to give you a probability space of browsing history, which would be identical for any user in the cohort given a single sample. > There isn't really any hard bound on how much information could be leaked via these algorithms. With ~33k cohorts, there is literally a hard bound of just above 15 bits per visit. That's still theoretically a lot if you have some other stable identifier, but practically speaking most users on most sites will have an identical cohort and it will drop off rapidly as cohorts stabilize into groups appropriate for ad targeting. Barring the other considerations I've mentioned in the comments here, that's still immeasurably better for individual privacy than ~infinite bits per visit from stable third-party cookies.
  • benatkin 6y ago
    Except the privacy conscious just won, so there is no need to compare it to the former status quo. Why squander our victory?
    • mavhc 6y ago
      If you want to pay to visit every site you go to, or see 10x as many ads because you'll be 10x less likely to find them useful, then you've won
      • benatkin 6y ago
        Yes please! We're already mostly there, so it's an empty promise!