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> However, the fact that this hand labeling is possible indicates in itself that the issue isn't a pure privacy violation. It's more that automating this in bul
by cbsmith 3y ago
> However, the fact that this hand labeling is possible indicates in itself that the issue isn't a pure privacy violation. It's more that automating this in bulk is now possible which was difficult before.
Except that it was previously possible, and could be done far more cost effectively, before. Ad targeting systems from fifteen years ago were already doing this with precision in the same neighbourhood.
- famouswaffles 3y agoAd companies are so valuable because not just any company can reach the scale or access of user interactions enough to perform this kind of inference accurately. Yes you could get precise information but not just from a few sentences said by one user. There's also the quality of information you could previously glean from just unstructured data (noticeably lower)
- cbsmith 3y agoThat's not exactly accurate. Ad companies definitely need to train using large data sets, but they could infer with very little information, and in most cases, "unstructured" and "low quality" data was actually quite helpful for inferences about a user. Just a free form text box where someone was prompted for "favourite movies" (with no validation of the content... you didn't even have to have any movie titles in it) could yield surprisingly accurate inferences about income, education, gender, religion, age, marital status, etc. Ironically it was more predictive than inferring from structured data.