An update on our privacy sandbox commitments | Hacker News Reader

An update on our privacy sandbox commitments

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29 pointsinfodocket16 comments

> I don't particularly like the ads, but I understand they are needed to sustain many businesses (either online or elsewhere.) Would I prefer alternative payment methods? Maybe, depending on the publisher, and the price of the content.

The problem is not the ads but the way it is produced (Behavioral ads). The issue is always behavioural ads and not contextual ads. Duckduckgo has been profitable for so long with contextual ads. And not to mention, contextual ads which doesn't depend on lucrative data practices and privacy invasive tech has been proven to be much more effective than behavioural ads. Good read on it - [1][2].

Also, how is reactive ads (behavioural ads) useful to a user? Just think for a sec. Unless they are listening to everything you say which is ludicrous levels of privacy violation practice followed Google, FB and Amazon RIGHT NOW... behavioural ads are useless to many many topics and use cases. By the time you get a behaviour based ad, you would have stopped looking for it, found the item. And even when they are fast enough, after many hurdles of being reactionary, THE AD NEEDS TO APPEAL to the person. This again ignores the fact that users don't buy stuff based on behaviours but based on ratings and reviews from Yelp, Amazon, youtube reviewers and other influencing factors like ME! I am the tech nerd who helps my entire family and friends with purchases on electronic items like smartphones, computers and other items. And I know how to teach people to buy things by going through reviews and what not. Nothing I do is in favour of Behavioural ads. Meanwhile just by being proactive, contextual ads are more likely to be more appealing to user cos it depends on NOT YOUR BEHAVIOUR but behaviour of everyone who have searched the term/item. This means the ads are tested to work on more people IMO.

Also, behavioural ads miss the point that humans have strong opinions on things. But also that humans change their opinions from time to time. I might move from iOS to Android or vice versa. Behavioural ads also miss that a lot of the purchases are rare purchases and once in a life time purchases. So reactive ads based on my behaviour could be useless. Sure, you might be able to sell something based on this particular rare purchase. But why risk the resources wastage, data privacy and data breaches? This is not in favour of the user at all. Contextual ads are more effective in all the above scenarios than behavioural ads.

Behaviour data is not that effective to SELL ADS. But you can offset all these risks and ineffectiveness by selling your data to thousands of third parties or governments even. THE DATA ECONOMY MAKES BEHAVIOURAL ADS SUSTAINABLE. The data economy needs to stop. That is it. NOT ads. Ads have been present in media and everywhere else long before Google was there, nobody was up and arms about them, were they? They were annoying, yes. But not threatening like it is now.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/facebook-google-p...

[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-... (Thanks user iou)

PS: Writing this as a separate response (Instead of a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29357427) cos I don't want this to be tucked away from other users. There will be more people who sympathise with ads but miss the point of behavioural ads vs contextual ads.

Well google don't sell behavioral ads to user, they sell to companies. Without extensive knowledge and experience, companies executives are more likely to lean for behavioral ads even it's more expensive or inefficient.

And behavioral ads can show conversion metrics, which higher ups like to see, even though we/they don't know whether the conversion is really correct.

> Well google don't sell behavioral ads to user, they sell to companies. Without extensive knowledge and experience, companies executives are more likely to lean for behavioral ads even it's more expensive or inefficient.

Yes. Third parties === companies if you have read my entire comment. Now that you mention this... if you are like me and read privacy policies, you know that there is nothing stopping a company/third party to sell those data that they got from Google to another third party. And in turn that third party to another third party in an endless chain. We have no idea. There are no laws and policies in places except the policies that are set out by companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon (Ironically these are policies set out in place IN RESPONSE TO THEIR THIRD PARTY GETTING HACKED OR MAYBE SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACKS).

This means your behavioural data is like covid. It can be spread to endless entities. Not the initial number of people Google sold the data to. This means... Google sells to 100 entities -> Those of the each hundred entities CAN share/sell this data to 100 entities each and on it goes. These are 100's and 100's of companies apart from their practices (shady or otherwise) which needs to protect your behavioural data from getting hacked and data breaches. And for what? Because I searched "What is NFT?" ? Ridiculous and wasteful.

Exactly what data do you think Google sells about you, and to whom?

Exactly. On the subject of contextual vs behavior based, it was sad that summary of this study was we gave up all that privacy for just 4% improvement );

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...

My biggest person problem with ads is that, in the current web scape, I often find myself FIGHTING the ads to view the content (article or video). The ads business has gone way to far and now actively makes me pissed at products that get pushed relentlessly in my face.

I believe that the fixation around behavioural ads is that it creates a moated ecosystem.

"Look at current page content and display a relevant ad from inventory?" You could probably do that yourself on a Rasbperry Pi.

"Amass yottabytes of profile data across a galaxy of sites, run the sort of deep learning analysis you'd expect three-letter agencies to be applying to terrorist chatter, perform real-time auctions, fallback on retargeting..." You need a huge infrastructure for that. Only a Google or Facebook could possibly deliver such a competitive offering in that space. Sure, the ad ends up being the same a fair amount of the time, but dare you risk going with some Brand X ad network that can't do that?

It probably also helps to justify their price as middlemen. The ad revenue that doesn't end up in publisher wallets is going somewhere. Considering bandwidth and compute are cheaper than ever, they need to present some huge value add over being a dumb inventory exchange.

> You need a huge infrastructure for that. Only a Google or Facebook could possibly deliver such a competitive offering in that space. Sure, the ad ends up being the same a fair amount of the time, but dare you risk going with some Brand X ad network that can't do that?

I don't think you need that middleman. https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ does this by selling ads directly. This also means relevant ads for users of your product and not pay cuts to middleman. But it does take more initial effort. Which you need to think about only if you make good enough user base anyways irrespective of Google ads or self managed ads.

Duckduckgo does this too. This is in the best interest of the creator and the user IMO. Don't you think?

Slightly tangential, but I got curious how is Google selling the whole "Privacy" Sandbox idea. Found this little nugget right on the homepage[1]:

"Tailored content is critical for the open web and this includes showing people relevant ads."

Regardless of the amount of word-soccer they play (including in the article linked above), it is visible how scummy of a corporation Google is in the current day.

Additional reading for the folk who seem upset with my remark and have resorted to downvoting: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-priv...

[1]: https://www.privacysandbox.com/

I don't particularly like the ads, but I understand they are needed to sustain many businesses (either online or elsewhere.) Would I prefer alternative payment methods? Maybe, depending on the publisher, and the price of the content.

I'm not completely sure what's the end goal of Google here, but if it this can reduce privacy invasion and tracking (as performed by most sites these days), and be similar to iOS' IDFA, where you can opt-out or reset the token, I'd prefer that.

That would essentially end targeted advertising and the companies that benefit from ads will fight that to the death.

I would be ok with every company dependent on advertising finding a different business model (or going out of business)

The problem is, there is not really a rational reason why you would not want to opt-out. The only practical reasons are:

- You don't know you can.

- You don't know how.

- You don't bother.

This is what irks me about this and similar "personal choice" solutions that try to get you to internalise the conflict: If there was an actual risk of a significant number of users opting out, the companies wouldn't offer them. (Or pull them back - see how quickly DNT died when a player attempted to remove the friction from it)

I don’t like ads but also accept some ads are required. What I think shouldn’t exist is targeted ads - call them tailored or whatever the hell you like, but ads should be a static ad for a company/product just like they were on billboards and in newspapers before the internet, and it doesn’t matter if I see it or someone else. They shouldn’t use information about me to target an ad.

I much prefer relevant ads to irrelevant ads

I much prefer for it to be a choice by me rather than my vendor.

You don't have to spy on people to give them relevant ads; you can just match the content on the page rather than their entire history. For instance: If they're on a page for computer hardware, show them computer hardware ads instead of mining the last few years of their search history to decide to show them an ad for soap on that hardware page.

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