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Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remembers just 5 years ago, Microsoft had a huge campaign about how everyone got "scroogled" by Google? Especially this ad about Google reading your mail to devliver you ads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI1ominSL_c

Oh, how the time has changed!

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There is still no evidence that they are reading your emails so it's not the same. I am fine with ads, just as long as they don't mine my data and follow me around.

>I am fine with ads, just as long as they don't mine my data and follow me around.

Pretty much every ad platform out there does exactly that

Duckduckgo does not. Hacker News does not. There are many examples. Ads on blogs such as Daring Fireball and Coding Horror do not. I gladly whitelist these sites.

Do Hacker News and Daring Fireball have ad platforms?

Until march of last year Daring Fireball had The Deck[0]. Now it's just weekly sponsors, AFAIK.

0 - https://daringfireball.net/2017/03/the_deck_adieu

HN has in-feed ads for Y Combinator businesses. A great example of benevolent, win-win advertising, in my opinion.

Sure there are fringe cases where it's not true. In substance ad platforms are now tracking & targeting mechanisms. That's the "value" they sell, not their ability to deliver ads.

Really? You can do the experiment yourself by sending certain emails and eventually getting ads target off what words were in them. I don't think this was controversial.

Parent comment is talking about the Mail app, I believe.

To be fair, from the article:

> although these ads are interest-based, they do not look at your emails to display ads based on data from your email.

Well, everyone thank Satya Nadella, it's a miracle we were able to draw the line somewhere! /s

I'm sorry, this snark is not really directed at you, but how exactly are they determining your interests if they're not reading your e-mails? Where does that data come from? I'd be happy to take back my /s if someone can tell me it was all voluntarily collected, but I suspect the answer is really "they just found a different way to spy on you other than reading your email."

There are plenty of ways to spy besides email... Bing searches, for instance. I believe anything you type into the start menu is sent to Bing by default, so that could be more data than you think.

I personally use Bing, but not Windows. Looking on my interests page for Bing, I see they have a decent chunk of info on me, nothing too crazy personal though.

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