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I'm no longer convinced the Google actually stores very much personal information. A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers I started wat

by tzs 2y ago

I'm no longer convinced the Google actually stores very much personal information. A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers I started watching YouTube without one to see if it was tolerable. That test is ongoing. In all that time the only ads that were not completely worthless to me have been: 1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information. 2. A few ads for products or services that I already use and already intended to continue using. 3. Ads for Verizon Visible which were completely worthless to me at the time, but a couple months later I was looking for a new carrier because I was about to upgrade from an Apple Watch 4 without cellular to an Apple Watch 10 with cellular and my carrier, T-Mobile Connect, did not support Apple Watch. I ended up picking Visible and there is a chance that seeing those ads made that more likely. If they knew anywhere near as much about me as people think they do they should be able to do a much better job with the ads.

ramraj07 2y ago
They have a metric ton of data about you. I think they just don’t use it much because they probably realized that unless you get super creepy about it, most of this data is worthless from an advertising point of view. Except on YouTube they don’t really know what you actually like - most of us don’t tend to express our real desires in the web but only in instagram or TikTok or YouTube. YT has ads but it doesn’t seem to have devolved into a cesspool of content only designed to sell you things as Insta and others have become. Your location could be useful but it becomes creepy if google used that to target you with ads so it seems to have bowed out of it (they don’t even seem to store location history in their servers anymore). Clearly they’re happy with the money they make from AdWords and andsense. So they’re leaving us alone with the rest of the data for now.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  It could be that the wow factor of ai/ml/data/whatever came about because of these examples like Zappos increasing sales 1% because of changing the colour of the website or Netflix making better recommendations and ever since then that has kind of set the expectation. Both of those were great examples of what to do with data and algorithms but there's a catch, neither is really tailored to the individual in a way that it will consistently work over time. Netflix recommendations work because you will eventually pick something to watch and they increase the likelihood that you like what you pick. It works the other way too , knowing what people like helps them decide what new shows to make. But the only way they know this is that your profile matches a set of profiles. And this aggregate way of doing things will always have too much variance to be able to consistently be applied to an individual because different people are different even when they are similar. This is the ultimate conclusion that foundation model people have come to, at least implicitly, as they hope that by putting all data available such as the entire internet they will arrive at a combination of things that will consistently meet everyone's needs on demand whatever they may be. But the complexity of life is still higher than that and people are quick to notice when things are being averaged and then served to them.
jerf 2y ago
"1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information." Well, not knowing they existed is perhaps the preferable state. Such products turn out to be borderline scams. I call them borderline because whether they are completely useless is somewhat debatable, but certainly they do not just ingest food, hum for some period of time, and emit compost, despite the well-produced videos to the contrary. You can find a number of YouTube videos not selling them analyzing their performance.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers People have been talking about this for almost a year now, I think, but I still haven't seen anything substantive. My ad blockers work fine, and so does SmartTube. Sure, some days I'll start up SmartTube and videos won't play, but then I'll see "Update" in the main menu, go there, see there's a new version with a changelog line like "Fixed [issue] with videos not playing", do the update, and then everything works fine again. I've seen absolutely no evidence that YouTube is actually successful at blocking ads, or that they ever will be unless they resort to some very extreme measures that probably have feasibility issues. It all seems like fear-mongering to me.
- fsflover 2y ago
  > My ad blockers work fine How did you measure that? AFAIK they become practically useless. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    How did I "measure" it? I didn't, I just kept using YouTube. Nothing's changed: everything still works just fine. What's to measure? Why don't you just try it out for yourself instead of reading what other people have to say about it?
    - fsflover 2y ago
      I was thinking more about ad tracking, which probably works reasonably well with your setup.
gitaarik 2y ago
So you used an ad blocker before, now you disabled it and you're surprised you don't get relevant ads? Ad blockers also often block tracking cookies and scripts, which prevents Google from collecting information about you. So it might very well be because of your previous use of ad blockers protected your privacy, resulting in you not getting relevant ads now you disabled your ad blocker. Also, do you use Google Search as your main search engine? Are you logged in with your Google Account when you do that? I prefer search engines that don't store any personal data from me, so if you use that, Google will also miss relevant information about you. But yeah I'm quite positive that if you keep your experiment going that you will get more and more relevant ads.

by tzs 2y ago

ramraj07 2y ago

They have a metric ton of data about you. I think they just don’t use it much because they probably realized that unless you get super creepy about it, most of this data is worthless from an advertising point of view. Except on YouTube they don’t really know what you actually like - most of us don’t tend to express our real desires in the web but only in instagram or TikTok or YouTube. YT has ads but it doesn’t seem to have devolved into a cesspool of content only designed to sell you things as Insta and others have become. Your location could be useful but it becomes creepy if google used that to target you with ads so it seems to have bowed out of it (they don’t even seem to store location history in their servers anymore). Clearly they’re happy with the money they make from AdWords and andsense. So they’re leaving us alone with the rest of the data for now.

mnky9800n 2y ago
It could be that the wow factor of ai/ml/data/whatever came about because of these examples like Zappos increasing sales 1% because of changing the colour of the website or Netflix making better recommendations and ever since then that has kind of set the expectation. Both of those were great examples of what to do with data and algorithms but there's a catch, neither is really tailored to the individual in a way that it will consistently work over time. Netflix recommendations work because you will eventually pick something to watch and they increase the likelihood that you like what you pick. It works the other way too , knowing what people like helps them decide what new shows to make. But the only way they know this is that your profile matches a set of profiles. And this aggregate way of doing things will always have too much variance to be able to consistently be applied to an individual because different people are different even when they are similar. This is the ultimate conclusion that foundation model people have come to, at least implicitly, as they hope that by putting all data available such as the entire internet they will arrive at a combination of things that will consistently meet everyone's needs on demand whatever they may be. But the complexity of life is still higher than that and people are quick to notice when things are being averaged and then served to them.

jerf 2y ago

"1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information." Well, not knowing they existed is perhaps the preferable state. Such products turn out to be borderline scams. I call them borderline because whether they are completely useless is somewhat debatable, but certainly they do not just ingest food, hum for some period of time, and emit compost, despite the well-produced videos to the contrary. You can find a number of YouTube videos not selling them analyzing their performance.

shiroiushi 2y ago

>A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers People have been talking about this for almost a year now, I think, but I still haven't seen anything substantive. My ad blockers work fine, and so does SmartTube. Sure, some days I'll start up SmartTube and videos won't play, but then I'll see "Update" in the main menu, go there, see there's a new version with a changelog line like "Fixed [issue] with videos not playing", do the update, and then everything works fine again. I've seen absolutely no evidence that YouTube is actually successful at blocking ads, or that they ever will be unless they resort to some very extreme measures that probably have feasibility issues. It all seems like fear-mongering to me.

fsflover 2y ago
> My ad blockers work fine How did you measure that? AFAIK they become practically useless. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  How did I "measure" it? I didn't, I just kept using YouTube. Nothing's changed: everything still works just fine. What's to measure? Why don't you just try it out for yourself instead of reading what other people have to say about it?
  - fsflover 2y ago
    I was thinking more about ad tracking, which probably works reasonably well with your setup.

gitaarik 2y ago

So you used an ad blocker before, now you disabled it and you're surprised you don't get relevant ads? Ad blockers also often block tracking cookies and scripts, which prevents Google from collecting information about you. So it might very well be because of your previous use of ad blockers protected your privacy, resulting in you not getting relevant ads now you disabled your ad blocker. Also, do you use Google Search as your main search engine? Are you logged in with your Google Account when you do that? I prefer search engines that don't store any personal data from me, so if you use that, Google will also miss relevant information about you. But yeah I'm quite positive that if you keep your experiment going that you will get more and more relevant ads.