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Comment by ulber | Hacker News Reader

This post got me into looking up what Google's privacy sandbox actually is. One proposal I found quite interesting was TURTLEDOVE, which proposes to move ad bidding onto the user device [1]. The current proposal of course uses bidding logic delivered by the ad seller. However, if this were to gain wide adoption, the step to imposing user control over bidding gets a bit smaller.

Imagine being able to tell advertisers "ok I'll look at any ad that pays me at least 50 cents" (~100X the typical price of an impression currently). If anyone wants to show you an ad at that price you know they think its going to be relevant. That's the kind of targeting I could get behind.

No chance that would actually happen though.

[1]: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/master/FLEDGE.md

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That would be interesting. One option that might be more practical would be to enable users to buy out the auction with a limit order. Users could say “I’ll pay at most 50 cents to view this ad-free.” Most of the time users who want to avoid ads end up paying a fraction of a cent. Sometimes users pay a little more. And occasionally somebody actually wants to target a user so they offer an actually valuable bid.

> One option that might be more practical would be to enable users to buy out the auction with a limit order.

Google built this, but users turned out not to be interested in it and they discontinued it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Seems like they're storing the user based stuff from here:

https://adssettings.google.com/

in the browser, and letting publishers configure their own bidding logic based on that data.

Not sure how that is going to play out since publishers want clicks and users don't want ads.

> "ok I'll look at any ad that pays me at least 50 cents"

Personalised advertisement industry is inherently harmful. Remember, the end goal is to charge the user as much as they are willing to pay.

How is that inherently harmful? Doesn't charging a large sum for something offered by an ad mean, that the ad provided something of value to the user? My issue with personalized ads isn't that users end up spending money on what they offer; it's the potential for the collection of that pervasive data to negatively impact the user and broader society.

>How is that inherently harmful?

Aside from collected data being used for other purposes besides advertisement, when efficient, it allows charging the individual more than they "should" be paying. If an industry "knows" that your washing machine broke, it "knows" that you would be easier manipulated into paying a higher price (sorry for the simplification and the amount of quote marks).

>Doesn't charging a large sum for something offered by an ad mean, that the ad provided something of value to the user?

If a user was to be compensated, the payment for watching the ad is most definitely coming out from the product price in the end, so on the big scale there is no compensation.

>potential for the collection of that pervasive data to negatively impact the user and broader society.

Absolutely agree.

> Aside from collected data being used for other purposes besides advertisement

In the case of the Turtledove API proposal (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove) the collected data stays in the browser and can only be used for privately targeting ads.

(Disclosure: I work for google, speaking only for myself)

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