Is there any reasonable response to this besides, "yeah, go fuck yourself"?

This is bullies crying that their victim didn't show up by the flagpole at 3pm for his beating.

I sincerely hope they go out of business -- these companies are toxic and canerous. But that's a rant long enough to fill a book.

There will be people exploiting that.

AdBlock works pretty well though.

The real problem is that people don't have the intrinsic need of blocking those fucking ads, because they are dumb as fuck :(

But we have YouTube and a lot of sites that live off ad revenue. (That search engine thing too, you might have heard about it.)

Right now, you had an option to opt-out, by setting cookies to block. You were relatively safe.

Now the default will become a net of machine learning algorithms which can track you cross-device without requiring cookies. It is not possible to safeguard against that, unless you completely randomize your online browsing behavior.

What techniques exist in that space? Anything beyond browser footprints ( https://panopticlick.eff.org ) and super cookies?

Any reasonably realistic suggestions for evading tracking in that scenario?

Deterministic assigns a unique device identifier to each device and then uses more data to connect device IDs to an individual.

Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities. For this they can use basically any data that you happen to give them, including behavioral data (you check a website both at home and during transit on your mobile phone, you use the mouse to select text during reading an article, you accidentally gave an application access to your location data and they have resold this, etc.). Probabilistic cross-device tracking can work with and without cookies. Of course ad companies employing these techniques for their customers claim very optimistic accuracy, but know that the accuracy is at least accurate enough to provide them with useful tracking data on individuals. This accuracy will go up if you push ad companies in a corner and confront them with a 10% (or whatever marketshare Apple browsers have) non-cookie-able surfers (as opposed to a fringe small sample of users that block cookies and did so for years).

When cookies got banned/required permission in Europe, European websites just started buggering everyone to accept cookies before you were able to read what you were coming for. While everyone already had the option to only allow cookies from trusted domains, now everybody gets pestered with giant pop-ups. Companies also switched to server-side analytics/tracking, or started requiring log-in to track you.

If cookies were accepted, one could just join a cookie swap program to mess with the advertisers. Probabilistic cross-device tracking is very hard to avoid, as not using javascript and a general browser like TorBrowser is also an informative fingerprint. And you can't realistically change your browsing habits, which exposes you to gender and age identification (they need this to identify individuals in a household using a single IP).

Is there any application of machine learning that isn't evil? Genuine question. It seems to be exclusively used to exploit people.

We've mostly gotten used a world with search -- in the past it was a big political controversy that powerful groups could scan huge volumes of data for advertising, tracking, or criminal activity. There were jokes in chatrooms about using the word bomb because the FBI would pick up on it. Or that your search queries and web history would be scanned for keywords and used for ads.

Now there's this new tool that allows people/things to be grouped and classified very precisely by imprecise rules. Combine the hype about the different problems this new tool will help people solve and the inexperience that people have with the ethical ramifications of the things they build, with the crudeness of the initial implementations and it's easy to get the sense that ML will be a net bad for society -- just like search.

All good uses of ML, but maybe not so sexy.

I bet the majority of ML is used neutrally: to add business value to a company. Depending on your view of capitalism of course.

Sure that's what IBM says with Watson but that's just exploiting people too.

Especially in third world countries where there is no eye doctor in sight, these cheap automated methods can be deployed on a mobile phone and achieve near-human expert level accuracy. [2]

Then organizations like Watsi can use data science and predictive modeling to reduce fraud and get both detection and treatments to those most in need. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_retinopathy

[2] http://blog.kaggle.com/2015/09/09/diabetic-retinopathy-winne...

[3] https://dssg.uchicago.edu/

About IBM Watson, the entire thing is unfortunate, I completely agree. Their marketing department upsold IBM Watson for cancer treatment. But I know that a lot of great research scientists worked at IBM on Watson. What they were doing was legit advancing machine learning too. That's the thing about marketing: if IBM were to deploy 10.000 phones with a neural net to improve early detection of disease in a third world country, I probably won't even hear about it, and I work with ML. But for IBM Watson, everybody and their grandmother goes: That's the AI that beat Jeopardy. It's a thin line between being majorly successful in marketing and crossing the line into damaging your reputation and goodwill (or in this case: the entire ML industry).

Unfortunately, because most people don't visit us in a first-party context, we are classified as a tracker, so we can't read our cookie anymore. The result being that our customers have a worse experience. If they want to get prefilled, they'll now have to go through this weird redirect song and dance so that we can interact with them in a first-party context.

So yeah, while I'm generally for enhanced privacy, I think this specific implementation is harmful. I think that all it achieves is that it consolidates the ability to track users to a small number of giants that you routinely interact with in a first-party context on a daily basis (Facebook, Google, etc).