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Comment by patrickthebold | Hacker News Reader

Looks like everyone gets the same model. So it won't be used for things like targeted ads.

Cynical view is that it's only used when Google doesn't want your individual data. This will help muddy the waters in discussions about privacy.

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Sure, it doesn't address that problem head on, however if they moved most stuff to a federated model, they're only a hop, skip, and a jump away from doing ad-selection on-device too, right? I think that if the model proves successful, it could end up proving out the concept enough to incentivize at least trying it out.

There are other reasons not to do things on-device. For instance, being able to pick your own ads might hinder the ability to defend against ad-viewing bots. Also, traditional ad-tech also has to deal with meeting global target spend rates (e.g. if client A pays for 1000 impressions, and client B pays for 9000 impressions, then 90% of the ads must be for client B even if every device would prefer ads for client A). Usually there are realtime databases keeping track of impression counts for all the campaigns and it would be infeasible to synchronize that with every device so that they could make local targeting decisions.

I.e. you can't necessarily make the decision locally if it's not local problem, and ad-targeting usually isn't a local problem.

Just because everyone gets the same model doesn't mean you can't have targeted ads. It just means the prediction model isn't modeled specific to your behavior. It can still make personalized predictions based on your search input, email content, etc.

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