It is not only eminently possible to do high-quality display advertising in a way that respects the viewer’s privacy: it’s easier and cheaper and more reliable.

It is not only eminently possible to do high-quality display advertising in a way that respects the viewer’s privacy: it’s easier and cheaper and more reliable. Intrusive targeting just doesn’t create that much lift. Fairly course demographic n-grams actually optimize better than arbitrary sparsity. Knowing that this viewer is in such a zip code? Yeah, that can matter. Knowing their address? Those are bits I need to throw away before feeding them to the recommender anyways. If I’m trying to target ads I want neither the computational burden of the granular data nor the scope for getting hacked.