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Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

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Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#41

Post by wirthjason »

Aardwolf wrote: post #2

> Additionally, there are features such as Protected Audience that can serve you ads for “remarketing” (for example, Chrome tracked you visiting a listing for a toaster, so now you will get ads for toasters elsewhere), and Attribution Reporting, that gathers data on ad clicks. Why is this actually effective? When you bought a toaster (which is a likely reason why you visited the listing), why would ads for other toas…

Hot take (as it applies to toasters): many appliances are crap, they break quickly and are not user repairable.

The odds of buying a toaster a year later might be higher than it sounds.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#42

Post by finite_depth »

alexvitkov wrote: post #24

> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. fuck off

It isn't wrong. These things COULD be useful - just like a camera in your shower that warns you if you have a problematic-looking mole on your ass could be. We could do amazing things if not for bad actors.

But bad actors are a much harder problem than computer vision or AI or recommendation engines or just about anything else non-adversarial. It's why discovering climate change 50 years ago hasn't led to a solution since. It's why we can't just educate people out of misconceptions, we have to actively fight against people trying to keep them wrong and make them wronger (and it's why institutions have lost so much trust that this becomes possible).

The only defense against this is virtuous people in power, but our system has done an incredible job - somewhat intentionally - of making sure that they aren't. Investors aren't lining up to support someone who'll make 10% less profit to avoid some horrible externality.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#43

Post by n_ary »

vladharbuz wrote: post #31

Delete Chrome. “The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.” https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...

In other words, google knows so much about the visitor to be screwed by regulation, hence they want to wrap the coarse-grained moat as helpful topics for advertisers. Meanwhile not exactly share that info with anyone to not lose their moat benefit either by removing third-party cookies effectively killing other data harvesters’ moats and become the one true eye of sauron(or politely called as monopoly).

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#45

Post by smarkov »

mlnj wrote: post #23
sshine wrote: post #14

https://getfirefox.com

Consistently working as the better browser. Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience. Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data. Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants. Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.

> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime

Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it. I don't know what's going on at Mozilla but they seem to lack any vision, they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#46

Post by n_ary »

Aardwolf wrote: post #2

> Additionally, there are features such as Protected Audience that can serve you ads for “remarketing” (for example, Chrome tracked you visiting a listing for a toaster, so now you will get ads for toasters elsewhere), and Attribution Reporting, that gathers data on ad clicks. Why is this actually effective? When you bought a toaster (which is a likely reason why you visited the listing), why would ads for other toas…

There is a likely chance that you didn’t buy it, so bombarding you with other toaster ads(preferably much cheaper) raises the chance of you actually buying it.

There might be other cases where you bought one and is really happy about the benefits and want your friends to enjoy too but may be they can buy a different brand/price/featured ones to compare experience.

There are lots of possible such cases ad and sales people think up.

Src: worked in adtech for few years and yes am not proud.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#47

Post by madeofpalk »

alexvitkov wrote: post #24

> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. fuck off

it's such a terrible example because you could make a case for interest-based tracking + advertising. Whether you're okay with it is seperate.
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