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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

So they “reinvented” HTTP cookies but with only advertisers?

> Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.

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Sort of. Cookies track you as an individual with a unique identifier. The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.

> The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.

Combined with the other 200+ tracking points from your machine... Yes, yes you can be identified.

This sounds a lot like “you’re getting analyzed by AI/ML, tied to a specific bucket of similar users, then your continued data expands the bucket, splitting off into different adhoc buckets of similar users”

If so, you can’t be tied to a specific purchase but you can be so tightly grouped it’s basically the same.

Look up differential privacy. Done right, it is impossible to do what you said.

More importantly it's privacy preserving because it doesn't allow for bidirectional communication, which third party cookies could do.

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