You can't go to Google and say "I want to buy a dataset (anonymous or otherwise) of males aged between 18 to 34 who likes cars and drink beer".
You can go to Google and say "here's an ad I want you to show to a group of people, none of whom will ever be identifiable to me in any way, who are male aged between 18 to 34 who like cars and drink beer."
That's what I don't understand about all this outrage - nobody, not Facebook or Google or Amazon or Apple, is selling your personal information to anyone for any reason, all they're doing is providing a platform that lets advertisers specify broad categories of people to show ads to. What's the problem with that? Ads will be slightly more relevant to my interests? So what?
To be clear, I completely understand why people don't want Google collecting their data in the first place, and that's a perfectly legitimate concern, I'm saying that once the data is collected, what difference does it make if that data is used to refine which adverts you see?
For me the reason is that things change. They find new and innovative ways to use that data. Ways that I may not agree with. Ways that I may not be asked about.
But what doesn't change is they have the data. So my preference is they don't have it in the first place. Then I don't have to be concerned about the changes.
I guess the issue is that many people did not know Google was already collecting their history.
Also, in my opinion there is a difference between collecting data and exploiting said data. You can store items at your friend's place, but you might not want your friend to look into the stuff you stored (for instance, your high school diary).
So you might be fine with Google storing your history (it's better for you when you want to retrieve the website you visited last week), but you might have concerns with this data being actually used by Google.
Even if the data is anonymized, isn't there a risk of a data leak, someone inferring your identity based on your browsing preferences? Like imagine someone who lives in a small town who's really into model railroads, and nobody else around is. Whoever from xyz location has done lots of browsing about model railroads, is likely that person and now we can see what else he/she's been browsing.
It seems that there's a split between people who are complaining because the ads are "relevant" to only one aspect of their history, and do not change often enough, and people complaining that the ads are not at all relevant to their history. I can get how the first category would be frustrating - it's a primary motivator for my own not using hulu video for a while. I got very sick of seeing the same 3 commercials over and over again. I use adblock, save for certain websites, but when I have it off, as long as the ad makes no sound, I tend to mentally filter it out, but if I was unable to do that, I would probably be frustrated by constant repetition, as well. The second category confuses me, though. These are ads. If they're not relevant to you, they are easily ignored. Sure, it's strange that they suck at targeting you, and maybe that just means you're hard to target, but why is it so bothersome to just look away?
I do have my own concerns about bulk data collection. I've mentioned in other posts that I used to do everything I could to avoid being tracked online, but have since changed course to allowing google to track as much as they want. My reasoning is that if I am at risk of being deanonymized in a way that would make me uncomfortable, it's the service that gets the most information from me that is going to notice first. If that is a service that is responsible in its reporting (e.g. I can look at what is tracked about me and make my own conclusions), I'm better able to protect myself from harm. I am, of course, concerned with giving even a responsible corporation all of that information for the bare reason that even responsible corporations hire people who are not quite so responsible. But I would rather have knowledge of what can be known from my history, than fight off everyone who attempts to track me online. At least, as long as there is a strong incentive to track people who do not want to be tracked.
because it is very annoying to see everywhere on your computer ads for pillows for a month only because you've searched for pillows on google shopping. and i'm not talking only about browser, but every app that has ads, like skype.
I was going crazy. never search on google shopping again on chrome.
This isn't meant to be snarky, but what ads do you want to see? If you don't care for ads in the first place, does it even matter what is advertised? NSFW and personal material withstanding of course.
Edit: To better explain, I also don't care for ads. Thus, I don't care if all my ads are from products that launched 5 years ago. Or for a new Hotmail account. Or a new PalmPilot. I would eventually notice, but I'd just shrug and continue browsing.
So don't opt in to targeted ads. Google, Facebook, etc all provide ways for you to opt out completely.
Also, from what I can tell, the parent post is about a Google program that's opt-in rather than opt-out so it's not even on by default anyway, I can't see what's so bad about it.
You can go to Google and say "here's an ad I want you to show to a group of people, none of whom will ever be identifiable to me in any way, who are male aged between 18 to 34 who like cars and drink beer."
That's what I don't understand about all this outrage - nobody, not Facebook or Google or Amazon or Apple, is selling your personal information to anyone for any reason, all they're doing is providing a platform that lets advertisers specify broad categories of people to show ads to. What's the problem with that? Ads will be slightly more relevant to my interests? So what?
To be clear, I completely understand why people don't want Google collecting their data in the first place, and that's a perfectly legitimate concern, I'm saying that once the data is collected, what difference does it make if that data is used to refine which adverts you see?