281–290 of 294 posts
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How does that hide the data from Mastercard and Visa? Surely they must know who is behind every card number, otherwise who would they charge?
Disclosure: I work for privacy.com You can use pseudonymous billing info for the transaction. We then debit your underlying account afterwards.
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> the most obvious reasons that Google does not sell user information is because it would not make good business sense On the contrary, it is a good business model and Google does it. They sell ad targeting, and targeting ads is based on accessing personal user data and making its results available to anybody who wants to pay. With each targeting of an ad the ad buyers can track more profiled users.
(I work at Google). "selling your user data" implies that someone else has access. They don't.
I provided money to Google. Google provided [people, or perhaps bots] and told me they were left-handed Hungarian mimes. The user's information has passed from Google to me. I just tagged that person "left-handed Hungarian mime" in my database.
Now, you can invent new words and call that something other than a sale, but...
The tech industry is great. Package up software, give it a SKU, put it in a store, have people come in, exchange money for it, and walk out: They're very happy to call that a sale, not a license, but a license is what it is. Happy to use the word "sale" when it confuses the customer and benefits them.
But start talking about selling user data to advertisers, nope, don't like the word "sale" any more, even though the advertisers are handing over money and walking away with data they are free to use. Odd.
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(I work at Google). "selling your user data" implies that someone else has access. They don't.
If I target my ads to left-handed Hungarian mimes, and someone clicks on that ad and comes to my site, what do I know about that person? What user data has Google told me about them? I provided money to Google. Google provided [people, or perhaps bots] and told me they were left-handed Hungarian mimes. The user's information has passed from Google to me. I just tagged that person "left-handed Hungarian mime" in my da…
>If I target my ads to left-handed Hungarian mimes, and someone clicks on that ad and comes to my site, what do I know about that person?
Nothing, unless they register there, and if your goal is to convert left-handed Hungarian mimes, then you probably know about your target audience already. You've learned something about a tracking cookie. That's only valuable if you can continue to track the user.
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The privacy aspects are important, but it is also worth considering the impact this sort of stuff has on society. We like to think of ourselves as semi-immune to advertisement (and manipulation), but we really aren't. The 2016 presidential election proved that. Putting more and more data into the hands of Google and others just gives them more power over the public at large. Are we OK with that? Is the discussion eve…
I think it is obvious we are not immune to advertisement, that's why advertisement exists in the first place. For the election, politics is 100% advertisement. Candidates have no legal obligation to keep their promises (and that's a good thing). An election won by something that isn't advertisement is not democratic. Now for the 2016 presidential election specifically, the fact that Trump won despite having most of t…
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That's not true either, but that's a common misconception. Google makes the bulk of it's ad revenue from search ads. Two people issuing the same search query will see the same ads (for the most part). Hence, Google could still make money without user targeting - unlike Facebook.
Two people making the same search query wouldn't even produce the same search results, let alone adverts.
I said "for the most part". There are multiple reasons why different users can see different ads:
Ads might be geo targeted ("Only show this to users in New York.").
There is some stochasticity in the serving process. Ads can run out of budget. Different data centers might have cached different things in cache.
Different advertisers that are eligible to show for a certain query can bid different amounts depending on the user, for example though RLSA [1].
But anyway ads personalization is not essential to Google's business model (except display ads and maybe youtube ads).
[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2701222?hl=en
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Disclosure: I work for privacy.com You can use pseudonymous billing info for the transaction. We then debit your underlying account afterwards.
Wouldn't that cause weird issues with rebates for faulty products?
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Not sure how this works specifically, but usually you step back a bit and say that what you actually want to determine is not whether a user performed a transaction, but how many users who saw a specific ad bought a product, and then you develop a (statistical) zero knowledge proof/protocol to achieve this. I don't actually know how to do this, so this is a bit like the "draw the rest of the owl" meme :)
The article mentions there is an opt out on google, so surely they must be able to correlate the transaction to an individual user, otherwise how do they know what transaction to exclude?
If you assume there is an algorithm where Google can provide some "encrypted" form of their "users who have seen this ad" list such that the amount spent can be computed without knowing the intersection, you could exclude people who have opted out from the list Google inputs into the algorithm.
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Two people making the same search query wouldn't even produce the same search results, let alone adverts.
I'm surprised that this comment was downvoted so much. I actually work at Google. I don't know if anyone is still going to read this, but I thought I would comment just in case. I said "for the most part". There are multiple reasons why different users can see different ads: Ads might be geo targeted ("Only show this to users in New York."). There is some stochasticity in the serving process. Ads can run out of budge…
I'm old enough to remember when we had the same arguements about supermarket loyalty cards which track your purchases and sends out personalised deals. Now people just accept that happens but there was a massive uproar about it back in the 80s or 90s (I forget precisely when but it was a good few years ago now).
I honestly don't blame Google for doing what they're doing. It makes perfect business sense. What I do object to is Google employees (assuming you are who you say you are) trying to argue that Google don't make a business from personalised ads when it's pretty easy to prove they do and nearly every single member of HN has observed that it action. For the record, I also object to people argue who "X is definitely not y" while acknowledging that there are a whole plethora of examples where their arguement isn't completely factually accurate - that kind of dumb get out clause is just insult on everyone's intelligence.
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> It's true that cash is king in Germany for instance, Sure, Germany is a bit behind the times when it comes to paying with plastic. > but Scandinavians pay almost exclusively by card Same goes for the Netherlands where I live, but we don't pay by credit card, we pay by debit card.
To clarify, in US even debit cards are primarily Visa or Mastercard, whereas in Europe they're not. E.g. Norway uses BankAxept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankAxept