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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

that doesn't provide everything though. at the very least, it doesn't have all the advertising dossier they have on me.

Perhaps that is because they are unable to join your advertising profile with your account, under various terms of services and agreements.

"We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent."

So you can't really expect them to be able to cough up the contents of profile 0x3f47d0387acb94857 when asked for the history of your account, if they are forbidden from joining the two domains together.

> Perhaps that is because they are unable to join your advertising profile with your account, under various terms of services and agreements.

You should read this and reconsider. From the article: "The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer." https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-droppe...

So? "Users were prompted to opt-in" != "Everyone chose to opt-in".

in my past experience google is a master in disguising these opt-in prompts as mandatory, with a tiny tiny X somewhere or a "skip" button only showing up when unticking the correct checkboxes

You mean deeper analytics they infer from your behaviour (queries, time, cursor...) and the kind of ads they end up showing ?

Yes

Like https://www.google.com/settings/ads ?

According to this, google doesn't know if Im male or female. It must not be showing what they really know about me.

Never attribute to malice, what can be easily explained by a lack of technological progress.

Maybe they've just not got enough data on you?

And ML can be a bit of a black box like that. Google knows what kind of ads to likely work, but that doesn't mean they have an explicit binary judgement or cluster figured out on any one of the dimensions.

That's a real good point. It doesn't really matter if I'm male or female as long a they know what to sell me.

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