Re:Google I/O 2017
by webmaven on Thursday May 18, 2017 @10:13PM
(#14372575)
There are various ways the existing systems can be gamed to extract information through ancillary channels, particularly WRT AdWords/Doubleclick.
It would be really nice if I could know that Google guaranteed that for example I would never see any ad that was targeted at a cohort smaller than ~100k individuals, especially including geotargeting (eg. no ads targeted at mid-forties male Python developers, with a Github account, who are dual-national American citizens, are native speakers of Hebrew and English, in Albuquerque, with an Android phone, with Linux as their desktop OS, that have recently browsed Quora).
Also disallow targeting employees of specific companies entirely, and a few similar dodges.
This wouldn't eliminate the problem, but it would increase the effort/cost required to bisect cohorts, cross reference with external data sources, and incidentally reveal personal data.
It would be really nice if I could know that Google guaranteed that for example I would never see any ad that was targeted at a cohort smaller than ~100k individuals, especially including geotargeting (eg. no ads targeted at mid-forties male Python developers, with a Github account, who are dual-national American citizens, are native speakers of Hebrew and English, in Albuquerque, with an Android phone, with Linux as their desktop OS, that have recently browsed Quora).
Also disallow targeting employees of specific companies entirely, and a few similar dodges.
This wouldn't eliminate the problem, but it would increase the effort/cost required to bisect cohorts, cross reference with external data sources, and incidentally reveal personal data.