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

fundingchoices.google.com

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

#111

Post by [deleted] »

simias wrote: post #107
magicalhippo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I do. Sometimes there's a product or a service that can provide value in a way I haven't thought about, or I haven't come around to specifically seek out yet. I don't mind seeing ads for such things. What I do mind is seeing ads for stuff I don't care about at all, and if the ads get in the way of what I'm doing.

I've been considering buying a 3D printer lately. I don't have a lot of experience in the domain and I'm not sure where to start, so clearly I'm actively looking about information regarding 3D printers. What I'm definitely not looking for is ads. Actually I try to avoid anything that might remotely look like one, from official websites (obviously) to comparisons of 3D printers that look like they could be biased one…

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by nine_k »

rock_hard wrote: post #109
ThePhysicist wrote: post #8

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. 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…

Star Wars of all things provides a interesting vision here. Did you ever notice that for the most part the machines/robots are not networked? That AI seems to exist but is intentionally kept dumb (C3PO). I think this is a interesting model. To as society come to the conclusion that more connection of devices, smarter AI is not the right solution. That what works best is the right amount of connection and AI

See also: Butlerian Jihad.

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

#113

Post by chimeracoder »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #8

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. 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.

Mozilla did this for Firefox, except a step better: the client pulled the same set of ads from the server regardless of the user preferences, but decided (client-side) what to display, so the server could never even infer behavior about the client from the requests.

Unfortunately, people didn't care, and they complained that this was an intrusion of privacy regardless, so they dropped it.

It turns out, there just really isn't market for privacy-focused advertising. People who care about privacy generally dislike advertising in all forms and block it, without regards to whether the advertising actually is an invasion of privacy or not.

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

#114

Post by nine_k »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #76
ThePhysicist wrote: post #8

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. 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…

Or just show ads relevant to the content? What better indicator of what the user is interested in right now?

An ad which is relevant to 1% viewers still sells, likely enough to keep it published.

But it's irrelevant to 99% of the viewers, and it's impossible to tell them from the 1%: among other things, because the viewers are not keen to share too much data about themselves.

I think we should see ads as the (annoying) cost of commercially-produced free content. I wish a micropayment solution would take off to allow for easy and reliable paid opt-out on multiple sites I might visit. (I already have Youtube Red, and it's great.)

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

#115

Post by hnaccy »

chimeracoder wrote: post #113
ThePhysicist wrote: post #8

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. 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. Mozilla did this for Firefox, except a step better: the client pulled the same set of ads from the server regardless of the user preferences, but decided (client-side) what to display, so the server could never ev…

>so the server could never even infer behavior about the client from the requests.

It reports click through so this isn't true.

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

#116

Post by madrox »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #8

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. 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 idea keeps coming up. There’s a few reasons it hasn’t happened:

1. To really leverage the personal data, you need to run it through a model and correlate it with ad inventory. Those are two things you don’t tend to want to deliver to an insecure client. Then you need to collect data on how those ads performed to update the model.

2. For all that, it’s still more convenient to manage GDPR opt-in. Don’t underestimate the convenience of centralized management.

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

#117

Post by MoBattah »

magicalhippo wrote: post #52
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I specifically seek them out, I have no interest in learning about new products or services ever. Thus, an ad would never be relevant enough to be content for me.

Well I do. Sometimes there's a product or a service that can provide value in a way I haven't thought about, or I haven't come around to specifically seek out yet. I don't mind seeing ads for such things. What I do mind is seeing ads for stuff I don't care about at all, and if the ads get in the way of what I'm doing.

Right - a certain segment of the population is incredibly valuable for exactly this service.

I include myself in your description - love seeing relevant ads. There's a sweet spot there between those with high disposable incomes, high open mindedness and high affinity for novelty.

This population is by far the most attractive consumer for advertisers.

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

#118

Post by lucb1e »

drewmol wrote: post #92
bo1024 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits another big point I've been wondering about GDPR. If site X has third-party JS from Google, Facebook, or so on, who does GDPR apply to? Is site X the one collecting the data, or is it the third party?

from Article 4: (7) ‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law; (8)…

+1 for actually mentioning (let alone citing!) the article. There is so much information floating around, much of which slightly exaggerated, misinterpreted or misremembered, and if you want to check it you basically have to go and search through the whole thing. Even Dutch data protection authority has lots of info and FAQs without any reference to the law at all. So whenever I refer to it, I often have to go "at least, that's what our national authority says, I have no idea which article in the international law this is based on. Here, go and read some Dutch!"

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

#119

Post by criddell »

cirenehc wrote: post #40
dx87 wrote: post #27

Gotta love their choice of wording, "recover lost revenue from ad blocking users", like blocking ads is equivalent to stealing money from the site owner.

But that's true isn't it? What's with this entitlement that sites should be ad-free while still providing value? I own a blog, there is no way I could have a profitable subscription based model (believe me, I tried).

There's an entitlement problem, but it isn't on the part of readers. Advertisers, ad networks, and publishers have made so many terrible decisions that they drove readers like me to ad blockers.

I'm not against ads, but I don't want to be tracked. I don't want a 500 word article to download megabytes of crappy javascript.

Publishers are probably costing their audience more in battery life and bandwidth than they are ever making from the ad they are showing.

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

#120

Post by tzs »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #8

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. 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…

In the late '90s there was a place that did something like that. That was a time of slow internet connections, with a majority still on dial-up.

They had a product for Windows computers that provided a caching, prefetching web proxy. The deal with it was that if you let it show you adds occasionally (I think it was whenever you launched your browser to your homepage or once a day if you visits to your homepage were less frequent) you could download all of the company's other Windows programs and use them free as long as your browser was configured to go through the proxy. These were programs that normally were sold on floppy or CD-ROM for $20-40 each.

The way the ad delivery worked is that the proxy would download ads, which consisted of an HTML page and some additional data. When you went to your homepage the proxy would serve up one of the ads instead, with a link inserted to take you to your real homepage.

There was a Forth-like language built into the proxy. The additional data for an add could include code written in this language, which would be run when the proxy was choosing an ad to show. The code had access to various things the proxy knew about the local system and user. It did not have any access to the internet. The code would decide how strongly the ad would like to be shown at this time.

The only thing that went back to the internet in regard to ads, as far as I remember, was counts of how many times each ad was shown. (Not that it would have mattered much if more went back. As far as I know the proxy didn't really know much about you other than the physical characteristics of your computer and your internet connection. I don't think they had gotten to the point of trying to infer interests from browsing habits).

This particular approach would probably not be feasible today. They only had a handful of ads available at any one time, with the inventory changing slowly by today's standards. It did not take much resources, even for modem users, to download the entire ad inventory and keep it up to date.

Can you imagine trying to put Google's entire ad inventory on every PC, and keep it up to date, so that the client can choose the ad entirely locally?

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