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When I last checked my google ad profile (and this was a while ago; now it contains a lot less info probably because I opted out of a bunch of stuff), it was full of errors. Google did get my gender right but they put me in the wrong age range and a bunch of interests were out of whack. Good thing this was for ads, rather than a heuristic to ban me.

Best of the best, top of the class is not infallible. It's good enough to sell, because even something as low as 80% accuracy is good enough for things like "Do you want to subscribe to weekly pop tv news", it's not good enough when at the other end you get your account banned.

Google has, on this very site, built up a horrible reputation of using automated processes and having too many users to give those affected by those processes some good recovery. What you're describing is a recipe to replicate that.

99% is not good enough. 99.99% accuracy gets you 0.01% false positives. That's crazy low, right? It's also 100k users when you have 1bn users. Those fancy AI processes are nowhere near that.

I have the same experience with ads all the time. Like, I get ads from Google to buy the Pixel XL 2 while I'm browsing the web on the Pixel XL 2 I recently bought from Google on the same account I'm currently signed in to Google with... Or Amazon will give me ads for books and things I recently purchased through Amazon.

I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.

It's not Google's fault. It's the people buying the ads who are too lazy or don't know how to do proper targeting.

I've met three people in my life who were employed primarily to place ads on the internet. All three were glorified secretarial drones who fell into the position because nobody else wanted to do it.

"Lazy"? It seems to me that the ad ecosystem is incredibly complicated (for example, not even Google understands how malvertising gets on Google's ad network).

Any person who knows how to effectively place Internet ads has such high-status skills that they don't have to actually do it.

> We have absolute shitloads of data on everyone, whether they use our platform or not.

We^W They may have shitloads of data, but I'm very skeptical we^W they can use this data in any meaningful way. At least, for now.

I don't know what's wrong but despite all that data giant AD companies are supposed to have, I never ever saw any relevant ads, even when I've specifically wanted to see one. Unless I've already bought something - then, sure thing, I'm spammed with more of the same (which is, again absolutely useless - I've already made a purchase).

> We don't need a passport or state-issued ID to determine if someone is a real user.

I don't think we are even capable to come to a consensus what does this mean - to be a "real user".

Am I? What about my alter ego, posting about something I don't feel like publicly associating with (like, porn)? What about a whistle-blowing throwaway account I may create if I learn something fishy? Or what about a "thoughts are my own but went through editorial" corporate representative persona account? And that's just the obvious cases.

You underestimate the difficulty and complexity of that problem.

I'm increasingly seeing this annoying trend of people hand waving about how a given problem can be solved with data/AI/ML/DL.

"I mean... we are the best of the best of the best, top of the class when it comes to technology and especially creative solutions enabled by technology. We have world-leading machine learning capabilities and hundreds of engineers working around the clock for money that, not that long ago, would have been completely unheard of. We have talent. We have time. We have money. We have passion. We have absolute shitloads of data on everyone, whether they use our platform or not."

- now just imagine the speech was pointed at the bad actors. and that's why this is not as easy as you make it sound.

>We're the best software engineers the world has ever seen

Maybe some of you are, but people like me read HN too ;-)

As with my estimate of real-world influencers on HN ("a handful"), I'd suggest there's probably the same amount of "world best software engineers" on HN (and no, I'm definitely not including myself in that.)