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Comment by rwc | Hacker News Reader

Understand where you're coming from and agree there are real benefits to using your data to improve experience.

I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged.

Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy.

When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.

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> but also for the betterment of their advertising products

I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it?

I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life (that mystery box company). Maybe if everything advertised to me was that interesting (to me), it would be a net win for everyone?

Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to advertising.

Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong.

HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.

Less than 1% of Facebook ads get clicked. Not sure what sort of roi marketing folks have come up with to convince purse strings their ads are actually producing, but if the "marketing" department can't spin numbers to look good, might be time find a new marketing department.

Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on.

All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).

The number is far less than 1%. Other than that, your layman's perspective is correct.

I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.

advertising is manipulation. It's not even always about a trying to get you to hand over your money, sometimes it's about pushing politics or changing opinions and public perception. You can filter advertising out of your immediate consciousness, but you can't keep it out of your subconsciousness and the ads you can't even remember have an impact on your decisions and your beliefs.

I'm trying to figure out what you're suggesting here. That we should ban advertising? That untargeted advertising is somehow socially better than targeted advertising?

Practically every commercial interaction (and most social interactions) are "manipulation" of some sort. At the moment we're trying to manipulate each other into adopting the other person's perspective. I don't understand what you find insidious about sales pitches; I'm sure they've been with us almost as long as prostitution.

> I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it?

Because of the impact of advertising on everyone's lives and the society at large.

An incomplete list of issues: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

> I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

Google also has been moving to federated learning for their products such as Translation, Keyboard, Voice Recorder where the data doesnt leave the phone. Your point is fair though reply

Some data could still leave the phone with federated learning. Although it is said to not be stored in the cloud.

> It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.

> https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...

awesome, thanks for sharing.

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