Comment by sgc
13 days ago
If I were extremely cynical, I would suspect they might have intentionally falsified that response to make it seem like they were more naive than they actually were.
13 days ago
If I were extremely cynical, I would suspect they might have intentionally falsified that response to make it seem like they were more naive than they actually were.
I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.
[0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...
This. They would have been better off just tagging you with a GUID and it would have been less confusing. "This GUID is your bubble"
I think its their currently targeted ad demographic or whatever. Its probably a "meaningless" label to humans, but to the computer it makes more sense, he probably watches the same content / googles the same things as some random person who got that label originally, and then anyone else who matched it.
Yeah somewhat like "likes football" might just be a proxy for "male".
male, lives in this region, has an income between X to X+40000, and has used the following terms in chat or email, regardless of context, in the last 6 months: touchdown, home run, punt, etc. etc.
the ad game is not about profiling you specifically, it's about how many people in a group are likely to click and convert to a sale; they're targeting 6 million people, not you specifically, and that's balanced by how much the people who want the ads are willing to pay.
palantir or chinese social credit, etc., is targeting you specifically, and they don't care about costs if it means they can control the system, forever.