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Was it Cambridge Analytica that was going to pay 50MM for that data? ;)

• benreesman 4y ago
  No, it was features for a P(click|impression) model, which are surprisingly mundane: it is basically impossible to care much either way, let alone be outraged, if you look at the actual features used in these kinds of things and it’s not explicitly your field. It’s not a microphone listening on your smartphone! You can even read about it in this paper which publicly described the system contemporary to that event: http://www.quinonero.net/Publications/predicting-clicks-facebook.pdf http://www.quinonero.net/Publications/predicting-clicks-face... If you read it and are still steamed up, well, then you hold that opinion honestly, but I suspect most would be like, “cool story bro”.
  • tinco 4y ago
    Thanks that's interesting! Definitely not outraged, was just poking a bit for fun. 50MM is an insane amount of money/value that would bankrupt most companies and have a noticable impact on many industries. Funny that for Facebook it was probably just a small hiccup on the ad revenue gravy train.
    • eru 4y ago
      > 50MM is an insane amount of money/value that would bankrupt most companies [...] Well, it would probably bankrupt most companies, but it wouldn't bankrupt most people's employer. The average employee works at a larger than average company. Similar for the average customer or average investor. That's just because big companies have more employees / customers / investors to contribute to that kind of average.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    I'll just file it under "best minds of our generation are working on making people click 3% more often on ads".
    • benreesman 4y ago
      Bernoulli distributions are everywhere, and as a result binary classifiers are everywhere. COVID tests (any binary medical diagnostic), fraud/no-fraud credit-card processing decisions, loan decisions, spam filtering, “toxic” tweet management and other sentiment analysis, it just goes on forever. All of these things benefit from advances in binary classifiers, and have therefore been massively subsidized by click prediction R&D. Maybe those benefits outweighs the costs, maybe they don’t. We have GPUs because shoot-em-up games were “the big thing” in the 90s. Net win? Personal preference. But entertainment if one form or another often pushes advances in computing. The BOPR stuff from the linked paper originated on XBox Live matchmaking. It’s perfectly fair to be like: I don’t like the ad-funded internet. There are tons of plausible reasons why someone wouldn’t like the ad-funded Internet, but most reasonable objections to it are of the form: “my internet experience is worse than it would be without ad funding”, past that you rapidly wander into “other people’s preferences are inferior to mine”.
      • eru 4y ago
        Another example: we are finally getting rid of internal combustion in cars, because the phone industry paid for the battery research.