Google’s GDPR Workaround

Post by samantohermes » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

billyc74 wrote: post #68

amelius wrote: post #64

Targeted ads are already a serious leak of information. If somebody looks over my shoulder and sees the ads presented to me, they can infer things about me. Also, if a malicious actor targets an ad to a group of people, and some of these people buy the advertised items, then the actor can infer things about those people not necessarily related to the items sold.

if someone looked over your shoulder and saw you browsing HN they could infer things too

Post by lovecg » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

vasilipupkin wrote: post #530

lovecg wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a thought experiment, let’s replace “really hot” with “poison”. Do you think it’s reasonable to blame the customer for inadvertently drinking poisonous coffee from a chain when all other chains sell poison-free coffee? What if it comes with instructions like “just wait 20 minutes and the poison will evaporate”—does this sufficiently clear the company in your view? How is unusually hot temperature significantly dif…

That’s not a valid analogy, since it’s pretty obvious when something is very hot or not, which is not the case with poison.

Post by brettz » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

phreack wrote: post #326

hobofan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely the cleverest engineers to walk the planet can come up with a new way of making money that doesn’t involve psychological manipulation. If they could, they would've already done so. One of the things "the cleverest engineers to walk the planet" would probably need to do is to increase consumers willingness to pay for good content by a factor of ~10 for e.g. online newspapers with quality journalism to be prof…

Not that I think their proposition is better but the Brave people particularly are trying to push a different model with their attention token scheme, so it's not that no one can think of something different, just that it's enormously hard to get people on board when the old advertisers are holding on to everyone using every single way at their disposal, legal or not.

Post by msbarnett » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 3:07 AM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #517

bluesign wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering google_gid is valid for you for 14 days only. It is very unlikely to build a profile around it.

I have no doubt that if you had a record of my browsing habits for 2-3 days you could readily identify who I am the next time you have my browsing habits for that period of time. I wouldn't be surprised at all if 2-3 hours of active browsing was enough for this.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #542

filoleg wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it isn't about giving ad-tech any chance of anything, it is about websites that are liked and used by people (most of whom have either no means or no desire to support those websites with money directly) being able to sustain themselves in order to exist.

That's pretty much a false dichotomy: a site must either support itself via ads, or cease to exist. There are other ways to get money to support your work, and if those ways are too painful right now, that's just an opportunity for disruption. Even better, it's an opportunity to prove that disruption doesn't have to be exploitative.