Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization

Out of curiosity, how familiar are you with how ad systems work? Generally there's a huge inventory of ads, each with different criteria attached to them and metadata about bids. When a request comes in, ads whose criteria are met are selected out and an instant auction takes place. The resulting ads are then shown.

I cannot think of a way that allows for both honoring the ad criteria and keeping personal interests and preferences solely client-side. You can't even take advantage of any form encryption here, as the results of the filtering would allow the server to infer the private data. This means you'd almost certainly have to get all the data to the client to allow querying locally.

OK, fine, that's workable. Then you just track impressions and so on to figure out when advertisers get charged. A potential drawback is that it's very possible that with impression and click data it could be possible to reconstruct most or all of the data a user might wish to protect. And there's no way to get away from this, either - pretty much all online advertising models rely on tracking one of impressions, clicks, and actions.

As for your two conditions:

> - A way to ensure that ads don't try to harm me by e.g. leading me to websites serving malware or abusing my computer's resources (e.g. miners)

Policing the contents of ads can be quite the task. Ensuring the contents of arbitrary external websites is next to impossible. There are no good ways to do this in a fully automated system at scale when someone else controls the other server and can change what content it serves at their discretion.

The best way I can think of to ensure this is to limit access to this hypothetical advertising platform to entities with the expertise and resources to protect themselves and anyone who comes into contact with their servers. Works for me, but being shut out of access to the biggest and best advertising systems might be a problem for many groups.

> - A way to keep my privacy and control what data is collected about me (and who has access to that data)

You know what? I think I know exactly what you want. You want the newspaper model. Collects no data from you, preserving your privacy. Only accepts advertising from partners that can be trusted, ensuring your safety. Doesn't need to closely track impressions, views, or actions.