I appreciate that Google appears to have reached out to local newspaper sites (qctimes.com, napavalleyregister.com), for Contributor. But if I were a major content publisher, the relatively small and mostly non-notable list of current Contributor sites [0] would make me think that Google isn't highly invested in this project. Which is not a good first impression considering that many people think that Google is too quick to abandon projects. They should have booked a few more major sites and media brands; right now, the 2 sites that are highlighted are the National Post and Popular Mechanics.
Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
11–20 of 173 posts
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#12I would not trust any opt-out offered by a company who's bottom line is directly dependent on violating people's privacy. The only opt-out that can be trusted is one that does send any network requests to the stalking company until consent is given. That's the same reason why you wouldn't want to ask an alcoholic to guard a warehouse full of vodka at night, as you'd probably find a few empty bottles the next day. Sam…
Unless you let that alcoholic guard two warehouses, and allow him to have a few bottles from one of them. In that case, he'd be stupid to take from the one where's he not suppose to.
Man, there must be the really good stuff in that other warehouse. Won't do any harm to go look...
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#13So to give Google info about my visitors and later compete with me? No thanks.
Presumably, these sites already use Google ads (and probably Analytics too).
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#14I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches. Personally I'd love to support more w…
> I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see.
When I was at Middleware2017 I saw a poster/demo about this, MoCA+: https://koreauniv.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/demo-moc...
I guess the problem is the same as with privacy techniques in general. If you ask companies to restrict their access to data, they just tell you no(1), as it might be worth a lot of money or open up new business oportunities they haven't thought about yet.
(1) This is anecdotal from projects of my colleagues in privacy research
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#15I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches. Personally I'd love to support more w…
This is the big idea I always pitched at hackathons (like startup weekend). I think it’s a great idea. 100% opt-in ads. My tagline was “a sufficiently relevant ad is indistinguishable from content.” It’s meant to be aspirational. The idea is that if you are looking to buy something, awareness of choices or information about that choice should be so valuable that it’s considered to be a benefit by the user. It’s basicallt an inversion of control approach to ads. The cpc’s and cpm’s would be amazing. :)
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#16Nice!! Another Google product that will be EOL'd in a few months, leaving both users & website owner unprepared... Really: Google became so unreliable on the business side these days that I wouldn't use their product for anything but playing
Ironically, I believe they actually did already shut this down once before. I think this is a revival of it: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-contributor-progr...
Yes, they re-launched contributor as a "opt out of ads on a per site basis" instead of the old global "show me kittens or blank space instead of all Google ads". The reasoning given was it was a " better experience" to have no ads on a page at all instead of a mix of Google ad kittens and non-Google regular ads.
Fine, but there are only two sites that support it, so it's fairly useless. Maybe Funding Choices will make it more useful.
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#17I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches. Personally I'd love to support more w…
I worked on this a while ago at Mozilla. There was a presentation at ACM CCS '16 on what we did. Unfortunately the effort was discontinued, but we definitely solved a lot of the technical issues.
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#18I would not trust any opt-out offered by a company who's bottom line is directly dependent on violating people's privacy. The only opt-out that can be trusted is one that does send any network requests to the stalking company until consent is given. That's the same reason why you wouldn't want to ask an alcoholic to guard a warehouse full of vodka at night, as you'd probably find a few empty bottles the next day. Sam…
Unless you let that alcoholic guard two warehouses, and allow him to have a few bottles from one of them. In that case, he'd be stupid to take from the one where's he not suppose to.
I assume you are extending the analogy by implying that one "warehouse" would be paying users, and the other "warehouse" is free to use / advertising / giving up private data users.
This analogy falls flat, because unlike an alcoholic which can be satiated at some point, FAANG can never be satiated. More information is always good. Thus taking data from both warehouses is better than restricting yourself to only one.
Secondly it also falls flat because your paying users is often the more juicy targets (from an advertising point of view), since they are already well enough off to pay for ad-free internet services, thus also well enough off to target for more lucrative advertising.
Getting back to the analogy, it is like an alcoholic guards two warehouses, one stocked with free budweiser beer, and the other stocked with the finest scotch, and hoping he wont take a swig from the scotch.
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#19Bit off topic, but AngularJS 1.6? Why is Google still using an old version of their own framework, is upgrading that hard?
Re: Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you let that alcoholic guard two warehouses, and allow him to have a few bottles from one of them. In that case, he'd be stupid to take from the one where's he not suppose to.
Man, there must be the really good stuff in that other warehouse. Won't do any harm to go look...
I hear so-and-so's private stash is in that warehouse. A lot of people can get in that warehouse. They'll never know it was me.