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Comment by jqpabc123 | Hacker News Reader

Hello OpenAI,

Please avoid "personalized" ads.

DuckDuckGo has proven that personalized ads are not necessary for success.

DuckDuckGo injects affiliate links into eBay search results, depends on Bing for its search index and has MS trackers in its app (or at least use to, I stopped caring). You should take a look at Brave Search instead for an independent, privacy-friendly search engine.

Other than the MS trackers, how does any of that impact privacy?

As for the MS thing, they did fix it:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-track...

and they were never part of the apps. They previously whitelisted microsoft ad and tracking domains in their browser.

I read through the linked article, and although they did seem to address the MS tracking somewhat, it looks like the state of DDG is even worse. It has all sorts of MS tracking stuff baked into the search itself with the whole thing seemingly just based on MS doing a pinky promise not to use the data they're getting.

That's not true - there's no way for to make search histories from DDG searches: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

> Despite this expansion of DDG’s ability to block Microsoft tracking requests, there are still instances where Microsoft ad scripts are not blocked by DDG’s tools by default — related to processes used by advertisers to track conversions (i.e. to determine whether an ad click actually led to a purchase).

...

> DDG says it wants to go further to protect user privacy around ad conversion tracking — but admits this won’t happen any time soon. In the blog post Weinberg writes that “eventually” it wants to be able to replace the current process for ad conversions checks by migrating to a new architecture for assessing ad effectiveness privately.

From the linked article. Which points us to the ad disclosure[0]:

> If you click on a Microsoft-provided ad, you will be redirected to the advertiser’s landing page through Microsoft Advertising’s platform. At that point, Microsoft Advertising will use your full IP address and user-agent string so that it can properly process the ad click and charge the advertiser.

followed with

> Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile. It also does not store or share that information other than for accounting purposes

Hence the pinky promise. I'm good on all of this personally.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ads-by-...

Brave is not secure or a valid option imo

Care to elaborate?

So far OpenAI has bet that people are simply willing to pay for good services. We'll see if that holds.

Hopefully they'll also allow people to use it in logged-out / memory-less mode.

Duck Duck Go proved search works fine without user profiling, and Google proved personalized search is a clusterfsck.

Logged-out is not really compatible with a paid service, unless you're doing something with anonymous crypto.

There is a big difference between "logged out" and "private mode" - paid VPN services offer privacy by (purportedly) not tracking or logging traffic from their users. They still get paid using traceable payments systems.

This is simply not possible. When I left Google AAR per North American users was $1200/y. I’m betting it’s close to 2k now.

Try turning down that money for 20 bucks a months. Subscriptions will never scale due to one simple fact. When a subscriber pays only one party pays and has a ceiling. When advertisers pay an infinite number of parties can pay per user with no ceiling other than performance.

Ad tech is just getting started.

Surely that can't be right? The US + Canada together have a population of under 380M. Even your low-end ARPU number of $1200 per year would imply North American revenue above $450B, far higher than Google's entire 2023 annual revenue of $300B [0].

(Even correcting for market share isn't enough, as Google Search has over 90% penetration in the US [1].)

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/engines/united-states/

Definition of user is doing a lot of lifting here, if I remember it was like signed in, 1da, 2+ products. Scope and scale at google made things really different than other places.

They defined users from a business sense as something we wanted to achieve within the product ecosystem -- not just randos using the product occasionally

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