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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I'm continually amazed and worried about what google knows about me, to the point where I use duck duck go half the time now. For example, I was just watching a car video on my tv (roku youtube app) and they had a random interstitial for a "ridge wallet". It didn't even appear officially it was just part of the video. So I pause it, grab my ipad, and type "ri" and sure enough "ridge wallet" is the first suggestion. Useful and powerful? No doubt. Creepy and uncomfortable? Immensely.

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When I worked for an advertising network (a little guy compared to the duopoly of Google/Facebook), we had a request from an advertising agency for: Women, 25-35, Latino, in the greater Los Angeles area, who have 2 children and are expecting their 3rd child. Creepy is an understatement.

The other part of the industry which was extremely upsetting was the amount of racism. Ad agencies will make blacklists of both domains and/or keywords where they don’t want any of their ads to run - regardless of campaign. There are many things on the list which are related to terroism/crime/etc, but there are some which are directly about race - keywords like “black”, “ebony”, “asian”. It is depressing to say the least.

This is the argument we need to press to stop it. How can it be constitutional to profit from the segmentation of people?

Nothing in the constitution says you're required to socialize or do business with every class of people. I don't know where people get these ideas from.

From the civil rights act.

Acts are not part of the constitution, they're part of the US code. I'm not even sure that forces you to do this (outside of certain situations like public school, housing, and employment.) In fact the constitutionality of that is questionable.

It is hard to say if something like that is racism or laziness. There are laws around advertising jobs and real estate when it comes to race. I can totally see small agencies not have the legal expertise to determine if an ad is in compliance with the law and just blanket banning anything related to race.

Was your client selling cars? That third car seat won’t fit in their customer’s current vehicle.

Oof, I don't think the world becomes a better place by shoving people into buckets. It also seems self defeating-- they're constantly reducing their audience. Im a 37 year old white male but maybe Im interested, how do they know? I've had to watch this horrible Ford commercial on youtube about 200 times, frequently like five times per video. It wouldn't hurt if they showed me ANYTHING else.

That's a particularly interesting example, because the ridge wallet is (supposedly) a tool for improving privacy, but your experience suggests that the process used for selling it is hardly respectful of privacy. I've also seen the ads, and I'm damn sure they're coming to me through "surveillance advertising" as OP calls it. Fear-based advertising that exacerbates the underlying cause of that (possibly quite legitimate) fear seems to be an accelerating trend.

Why are short-term relevancy features associated with your account particularly troubling?

Also, how would you rank completion candidates for almost information-free prefixes like ‘ri’?

Well, it's troubling because I don't want strangers watching what I do, which I think is normal. Saving me seven characters of typing isn't worth having an unaccountable corporation tracking every detail of my life.

How would I rank it? I wouldn't. I've never had trouble typing two words. I do have trouble when my words are creepily predicted. If you can't tell, my point is it's creepy and unnecessary.

And by the way, I don't think this is harmless. I never plan to, but what if I applied to google, and what, they have all my emails and two decades of search? I don't have much to hide, but fuck all Id never apply

duckduckgo sells you out to microsoft (as reported here recently), time to find a searxng instance you like (this one isn't bad: https://searx.be/) or try out brave search.

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