Google Says It May Have Found a Privacy-Friendly Substitute To Cookies (axios.com) 158
Google says its new machine learning algorithms could replace cookie-based ad targeting without invading your privacy. Axios reports: Google has been testing a new API (a software interface) called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that acts as an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies. The API exists as a browser extension within Google Chrome. The company said Monday that tests of FLoC to reach audiences show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads when compared to cookie-based advertising. FLoC uses machine learning algorithms to analyze user data and then create a group of thousands of people based off of the sites that an individual visits. The data gathered locally from the browser is never shared. Instead, the data from the much wider cohort of thousands of people is shared, and that is then used to target ads.
It's a big deal that Google says it's close to coming up with a technology that will replace cookies, because one of the toughest parts of phasing cookies out of internet ad-targeting is that there hasn't been a great solution for what to replace them with. [...] Google has other proposals to replace cookies in the works, so it's not guaranteed that FLoC will be the answer, but the company said it's highly encouraged by what it has seen so far.
It's a big deal that Google says it's close to coming up with a technology that will replace cookies, because one of the toughest parts of phasing cookies out of internet ad-targeting is that there hasn't been a great solution for what to replace them with. [...] Google has other proposals to replace cookies in the works, so it's not guaranteed that FLoC will be the answer, but the company said it's highly encouraged by what it has seen so far.
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: So... (Score:5, Insightful)
To present ads that they think are relevant but nobody cares about.
If I search for washing machines and vendors then I have already passed the threshold for when a washing machine ad is relevant. If it was 15 years since I bought a washing machine and I still live at the same address, then maybe it's time for the ads.
But ad providers are braindead that way and continues to serve useless ads after the purchase.
Even worse with animated ads or even with sound - they tell me that I shouldn't buy that because they waste money on excessive marketing.
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Actually, when you're searching for a washing machine, ads that were informative would be useful. Ads that just gibber at you with enthusiasm are not. Those *might* be advantageous to washing machine vending companies prior to your decision to buy, but wouldn't be useful to you.
OTOH, "pepsi"'s (to quote a usage from Alfred Bester) aren't really useful to anyone. I still remember the jingle that inspired that usage, and it hasn't caused me to either buy, like, or recommend Pepsi Cola in about 60 years.
Re: So... (Score:5, Funny)
Fix your washing machine with this one weird trick.
Repairmen hate him! Fix your washing machine FAST!
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ads that were informative would be useful.
I don't see how that could be. Either the ad wants you to buy a model that you don't want, which is not useful for you, or it tries to inform you which model is best for you, which is probably not useful for the advertiser.
Re: So...why not treat yourself..... (Score:2)
Re: So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would advertising help me choose a new washing machine? I will look at consumer magazines for an opinion (understanding it might be biased). I will look at feature sets, prices, delivery and installation time frames. I will look at the lowest ranked reviews for the types of problems I might encounter. In all that, ads are a time wasting annoyance that instead of helping with the decision making will actually get in my way. Ads are just an annoying negative in life which I wish I could eliminate.
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But given that ads exist, it might make sense to suppose you and I are in the minority and for Joe Average ads do make a difference.
Maybe. Or maybe Google and other Internet advertisers are selling snake oil to companies. They're the only ones who have the data to find out.
I watched a lot of TV as a kid in the '80s. I still have positive attitudes toward a number of brands that ran good commercials. Can anyone say that about any online ad ever?
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I'm the same as you, but what if someone comes up with a clothes recycling scheme which means you never need to wash clothes again? How would you find out about it?
If it was a system where you put your old stuff into FusionMan and out comes a load of new stuff from the replicator, then you could expect to see it on the news at 10. More likely though it'll be a lot more low-key than that, and so you'd only hear about it through advertising of some sort - possibly paid articles in the magazines you read, or m
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I've got some sad news for you. All consumer-grade products are made by the same few companies, and they're ALL crap. I learned this the hard way by trying to really get serious about researching the appliances for a house I was having built, and the highest-rated units I could find from "Consumer Reports" and other reviews all -- ALL -- had serious breakdowns within 2 years. (I replaced the washing machine and dryer with used refurbs from a local shop. The guy wouldn't even take my old units on trade, beca
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Another example is TripAdvisor. 15 years ago I stayed in this shitty hotel, wrote a bad review about the experience and casually looked up my review a month ago. TripAdvisor then spammed me something like 8 times asking if I wanted to book there again and planned an entire itinerary around my stay. Fuck you TripAdvisor.
Anyway in the general sense, if I'm searching for a washing machine
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If I search for washing machines and vendors then I have already passed the threshold for when a washing machine ad is relevant. If it was 15 years since I bought a washing machine and I still live at the same address, then maybe it's time for the ads.
If your washing machine only lasts 15 years before you need to replace it maybe you have more problems than targeted ads. 8^)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
This one belongs in the trash heap. Here's the Github link [github.com]. They're making a new Javascript API that specifically supports advertising. It will tell the web host what "cohort" you are in based on your interests. Here's a quote:
"The browser uses machine learning algorithms to develop a cohort based on the sites that an individual visits. The algorithms might be based on the URLs of the visited sites, on the content of those pages, or other factors. The central idea is that these input features to the algorithm, including the web history, are kept local on the browser and are not uploaded elsewhere — the browser only exposes the generated cohort."
I have no intention of allowing my browser to waste CPU cycles on machine learning to serve me ads.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're making it a Javascript API in order to make it more difficult to for users to disable while simultaneously making it potentially more "critical" for web apps. Eventually it will be moved from an extension into Chrome proper, thus making it a properly insidious Trojan Horse that can't be thwarted by simply filtering HTTP headers.
This will have similar benefits for the internet at large as AMP did. That is, it will only benefit Google.
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while simultaneously making it potentially more "critical" for web apps.
I don't really know what you mean by 'critical'.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
He means that once you disable it, YouTube, GMail and Google Maps stop working.
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Google Fi is up next.
How are you going to replace that?
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I don't understand why anyone would use a web browser made by an advertising company.
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Hmmm, maybe because it's preinstalled on every freaking android phone and tablet out there? Or bundled with a shitload of other programs and burried under hidden menus when installing said programs?
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A Javascript API makes it EASIER to block. Any basic ad-blocker will have no trouble overriding those API functions entirely, or simply blocking any Javascript that attempts to access them. What could be easier than scanning a script for usage of a well defined API and blocking it on that basis?
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Stop talking before they realize they'll need to change extension rules again to keep their crap from being blocked!
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This means that your ads will ultimately be chosen by your browser, not by a server. This opens the door to abuse too. What if Firefox had a janky ML algorithm that decided you liked buying goat porn paraphernalia...? Going further, I guess you could even craft the browser to "place you" into such an obscure group of people that all they could show you would be public service ads.
I suspect then, this will require some DRM style protection. The information about your ad grouping has to be signed by an approv
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I don't think that's a good approach. I'd much rather see their advertising service split off.
solving the wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of cookies is to allow session parameters. It's not to fascilitate advertising. It's just that is what google cares about.
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I have no intention of allowing my browser to waste CPU cycles on machine learning to serve me ads.
Me neither, but this isn't about people like us who block ads and other unwanted stuff. It's about the great masses of people who don't, and for them this method is far better than cookies because it doesn't require the advertiser to do any tracking to assign a visitor to a cohort for advertising.
I'd like to know how this fits in with GDPR though. You could argue that the cohort assignment is personal data, especially if you get assigned to the "interested in sex toys and industrial lubricant" one.
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Then again, I also doubt that there's a significant gain from trying to target users instead of the more traditional approach of putting your ads on sites where they are relevant. If you want to advertise to IT people, don't waste your money paying google to target them, just buy ad space here!
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I was hoping to read about cakes or muffins myself.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
A GOOGLE only virtual virtual cookie. It protects your privacy from everyone but whom Google chooses to sell it to. That is not even the worst thing, selling wasteful mass consumption in an era of catastrophic climate change, being that number one advertising corporation, pushing people to consume, more, More, MORE, more you fuckers, buy more now, buy it you shit buy, buy, buy, SCREAMING at you every second you spend on the internet to consume more, now that is a evil as it gets. Think about the reality of it, what they are doing to generate profits, push climate change, accelerate it, whilst the scummy filth pretend to be so green.
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Dude you're not supposed to eat the whole peyote...
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It's a social problem that goes way beyond consumerism. People have been genetically wired to seek satisfaction in labor, but when a single man can feed an entire city with gps-guided drones and another dude can push a button to 3d print you a house... what other labor is there to do?
We got so productive that if everyone stopped useless consumerism and merely bought essentials and sought satisfaction in what they already have, 90% of mankind will find themselves jobless.
Society advanced way faster than what
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It's so sad that comments which have apparently not even read the summary get modded up as insightful. Both you and the GP.
It's nothing like cookies, it's actually the opposite of a cookie in that it removes the need for advertisers to store anything on your computer. And it's not a Google specific technology, it's going to be a web standard.
Let's be accurate and precise. Different from cook (Score:3)
I'm sure there are legitimate concerns and criticisms about this proposal. Let's be clear about what they actually are. There is also an aspect that is a major improvement over cookies.
A cookie tells the advertiser "I'm xlsior" - it identifies a specific user. Cookies can be correlated so third party advertisers know that you visited sites a, b, and c today. By "you", I mean the specifically identify you individually as user #93639473.
This new idea does away with the unique identifier.
Your browser wouldn'
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I'm a techie and can see a lot of the good stuff Google has done over the years, but man, talk about outright duplicitous behavior.
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"A cookie by any other name?"
Yes, they are now called 'biscotti'.
The Advertisers use 'hardtack'.
Re:So... [name your new poison] (Score:2)
A [poisoned] cookie by any other name?
FTFY?
Anyway, the substance is that gamers are gonna game, and if they can't play with your cookies they'll figure out some other way to get you by the balls. It's almost enough to motivate me to RTFA, but I must not have a sufficiently criminal mindset.
Any real solution would have to be based on the principle of letting us control our personal data, and you know they would NEVER allow that. The only reason to RTFA would be to see if the google offers some kind of feint to the principle or just the usual tai
remove the marketing speak (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Thank god! For a second there I really was worried that Google wouldn't be able to follow me around the internet and serve me only the most expensive ads to their buyers."
Targetted advertising is part of the problem (Score:2)
Yeah, it's funny, even people that don't have much of an opinion on privacy, do still notice the invasiveness of targetted advertising. It makes them suddenly have an opinion. Targetted advertising, alone, is part of the problem for sure.
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So, what Google should be doing is finding ways to ensure advertising is explicitly non-targetting of individuals. It's fine to target topics and sites and people that are promoting. ie: As a source of pull information for individuals. Targetted pushing to individuals, even within groups, is entirely unacceptable.
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Let them learn the hard way, the more they target people the more people block all adverts.
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It's as if people don't like being targeted.
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"Google has used machine learning to figure out the largest dataset that they can reliably de-anonymize and have set the size of the dataset ("cohort") to this value."
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I thought Chome was recording everything you did online and sending it directly to Google anyway? So logically they should want to make the cohort large enough to prevent other companies from de-anonymising it.
Your conspiracy theories aren't even consistent.
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have developed technology to track and identify users without the need of cookies
No. The goal is specifically to make it impossible for Google to track and identify users, in the sense of being able to distinguish anything at all about individuals.
Google doesn't actually want to know who you are or what you do, as an individual. That creates all sorts of risk, from the need to respond to subpoenas and warrants, to potential lawsuits if the information should leak, to negative user reactions -- like yours. People at Google have realized that it's possible to both make it impossible to
Tech for herding a FLoC of sheep? (Score:5, Insightful)
I already have such a thing (Score:5, Insightful)
it's called a cookie blocker. I guarantee it works better than some advertiser's vision of what constitutes "Privacy Friendly". Letting Google help you manage your privacy is like letting a bunch of foxes help you guard your hen-house. Fuck Google.
Re:I already have such a thing (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox has containers - confine Google, Facebook and other services to their own jailed tab(s).
A problem is they track you other than by cookies:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.or... [eff.org]
Re:I already have such a thing (Score:5, Informative)
It's not too hard to block the other means they use. I recommend:
uBlock Origin for general ad blocking and privacy blocking, make sure you add EasyPrivacy and uBlock's Privacy filters. I think the latter is enabled by default.
Cookie AutoDelete will remove cookies set by sites after you navigate away from them for a configurable number of seconds. It's a bit noisy by default so turn off the pop-up telling you how many cookies it deleted. It also clears out other site data and cache related to each site.
Decentraleyes caches popular Javascript frameworks locally so that the servers which normally host them never get pinged when they load.
Privacy Badger adds an additional layer of privacy blocking using machine learning.
Privacy Possom blocks a few other tricks, like referer headers and canvas fingerprinting.
Note that the EFF link you posted isn't entirely reliable. Like most of these checkers it flags up things like unique canvas fingerprints, even though they are unique because Privacy Possom is scrambling them and they change every time you reload the page.
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See, this is exactly why this is better. It's a browser extension, probably to be built into the browser in the future, so you won't be able to accidentally block it with one of those malware cookie blockers!
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If so, they will eventually detect and push all the bad actors into low value cohorts so as to increase the value of all the other cohorts.
Google's Ultimate Big Brother Push (Score:5, Insightful)
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It says right in the summary that the data is kept on your local machine, never sent up to the cloud.
The implementation will be open source as part of Chromium, so you can check. Compare the compiled binary to Google's. Get out your packet sniffer if you are really paranoid.
Re: Google's Ultimate Big Brother Push (Score:2)
The compiled Chrome binary will be different than anything from the chromium repo because Chrome also includes the non-free portions. It's not going to be that easy to verify.
That said, I'm optimistic about this approach as it could easily be replicated by other browsers that are more open.
I am a bit concerned about the FLOC cohort calculation is currently done (see the open source repo). They're currently taking a hash of the domain names that a user visits and using that as the cohort identifier.
This seem
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You won't get a 100% identical binary, but you can compare the free and non-free parts. Since this will be a web standard it should all be in the free parts. I suppose theoretically they could hide something nefarious in the non-free parts but it would be a hell of a risk - maximum GDPR fines at a very minimum and probably some heavy additional sanctions, antitrust and more.
Interesting point about large diverse content sites, but that might actually be an advantage. People find it creepy and annoying when g
That is the ANTITHESIS of 'privacy friendly' !!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh look, a puppy!
If you read even just the summary and don't feel like your intelligence has been mortally insulted, then you either don't understand it, aren't paying attention, or have had your brain so thoroughly twisted by companies like Google that you don't even *realize* you're being taken for a fool.
What they're describing is doing an end-run around cookies, which at least you could delete, and admitting that they're going to scrape as much user data as they possibly can to target ads at you in a way that you can't even stop! Go fuck yourself, Google!
Re:That is the ANTITHESIS of 'privacy friendly' !! (Score:5, Informative)
But they tell you how to avoid it. Just don't use the Chrome browser.
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or chromium, or any browser based on it, or, once this becomes standard, any competing browser that decided they also wanted their piece of the pie...
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chromium :: only if they open source the techniques. :: only if they either don't patent their approach or license the browsers...and convince them to pay for it.
other browsers
If they make the techniques publicly available, then competing uses will spring up. So they probably won't, even though in some measure it would be beneficial to them.
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Re: That is the ANTITHESIS of 'privacy friendly' ! (Score:2)
Yeah, just look at how amp doesn't work in chromium... Oh wait...
Devil's advocate here (Score:2)
There's also been another round of "Internet Advertising has been show to be worthless". Meaning Google needs to find
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Oh look, a puppy!
If you read even just the summary and don't feel like your intelligence has been mortally insulted, then you either don't understand it,
You've got that backwards. If you feel like your intelligence has been insulted, you don't understand it. Which is understandable, what Google is attempting to do is something that most people would have thought was impossible a few years ago, and is only enabled by some interesting new math.
I attempt an explanation through analogy here: https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
We need rotating VPNs/proxiws (Score:2)
Either that or generate so much bullshit traffic that it makes their shitty privacy-violating AI have a meltdown.
This shit has to stop.
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They're talking about the browser tracking you and ratting you out to the advertisers. "Hello website, my user is in the Slashdot cohort." There's nothing a VPN can do about that.
If it came from Google (Score:3)
you can be sure it will get all your data in ways you cannot imagine.
All advertisers must be thrown in prison. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or cast out from human society, to be fairer.
Not a single exception.
Because advertisement by definition is hostile manipulation of people's neurons via sensory input, for the purpose of having them make worse choices than they would not have made on their own and out of free will.
Google is nothing but organized crime. A enemy to all of humanity.
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I get where you're coming from, but as dishonest as marketing often is, advertising is just plain necessary.
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Sure he sounds insane. Except he's not wrong.
Re: All advertisers must be thrown in prison. (Score:2)
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Easy solution (Score:3)
because one of the toughest parts of phasing cookies out of internet ad-targeting is that there hasn't been a great solution for what to replace them with.
That's a feature. Phase out internet ad-targeting and the problem is solved.
Privacy Rapist Claims to have invented holy grail (Score:2)
Privacy Rapist Claims to have invented holy grail of privacy.
News at 11.
Just charge us 10 a query (Score:2)
Friends don't let friends use Chrome (Score:3)
Firefox and ad blockers, plus me being old, rural, and not rich, means I don't have to see any ads at all.
Advertisers are parasites (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising is ruinous to the internet and society at large.
Advertising dollars are what has made websites race towards the lowest common denominator. Advertising has allowed "blogs" and other shitty "news" sites to succeed while true journalism dies a slow painful death.
Your privacy is a thing to be bought and sold for advertising money. A core essence of yourself, used as a currency for what? Funny pictures of celebrities? Easy access to conspiracy theories? You don't even get to control this currency. You are a commodity, like pigs. Like chattel. You have no value to advertisers except as a number in their web portals.
It's disgusting. I will always block any advertising if I can, and so should everyone else - I say this as someone who used to work in an advertising company. They are utterly contemptible and without merit, a dark, fetid stain of humanity. If you work in advertising, sabotage it. Destroy it. Do the world a favour.
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Destroy the Internet With This One Weird Trick (Researchers hate him!)
Journalism's doing just fine (Score:2)
That said paywalls of real journalism are a problem. Advertising didn't work, so a lot of the big sites went behind paywalls. But that left fake news to run rampant. Real fake news, e.g. the crazy conspiracy theories and the like. These are smaller outlets, they don't need journalists just hack writers and they're happy to pull in a few hundr
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Do you like not having to pay a monthly fee to read /.? Would you like to be charged each time you post here, or is it better for everyone that someone else cover the cost of running the servers in exchange for showing us that there's some new
Another example of anti trust behaviour (Score:4, Interesting)
Subscription model (Score:2)
Even better than cookies or a tracking API, would be an ad-free subscription model. There are already plenty of Internet based services that work on this model: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc.
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Even better than cookies or a tracking API, would be an ad-free subscription model.
Sounds great, but who enforces that you dont get ads?
There are already plenty of Internet based services that work on this model: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc.
Netflix is the only one on your list.... that doesnt do any advertising to its users (and thats generously dismissing the pre-roll advertisements for other netflix content.)
Whatever subscription tier you have with Hulu, one of the following is true (A) Its always had advertisements, (B) It originally did not have advertisements but the jokes on you because now it does, or (C) Your tier will soon also have advertisements like the litany of previous tie
So google gets all the cookies... (Score:3)
...google really is becoming surveillance central.
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...google really is becoming surveillance central.
Becoming?
Anyway, yeah they'll have all your cookies, all your DNS data, all your location data, all your emails, everything you text to your friends.
What's the problem?
What is a cookie? (Score:3)
A cookie is simply a key/value data pair set by a web site. It's nothing more than temporary storage. If a 3rd party script is able to set or read data that it shouldn't be able to access, the "cookie" is not the problem -- the browser security policy is. If cookies were handled correctly, advertising analytics wouldn't work at all.
This is just a new magic black box that adds more complications to make up for the fact browsers are already totally shit at security and privacy. Well, of course this will solve the problem!
What part of Do Not Track do you not understand? (Score:2)
Fuck you, Google.
I realise... (Score:2)
And if this FLoC thing is on the client side, doesn't
You will not be able to ever escape this. (Score:5, Insightful)
tldr. However it would appear that this is taking social network manipulation to the next degree beyond Cambridge Analytica. They inverted the social graph. Without even knowing the graph, your computer will spy on you to figure out there is a graph node that includes you and tell Google which node it is.
What sounds like "oh we anonymized you" is really, "oh, we now can identify and target any minority and sub-sub-sub minority group of individuals, AND we know who you are and can sell that information to unidentified people at any degree of anonymity we desire."
- It is one supercookie factory to rule them all, and it could to a certain degree capture your psychological state with some accuracy, even identify traits that won't change over time. Worried about medical issue X? Looking for a house in a given area? What is your dating site profile? Your browser knows all that shit.
- Your own computer will be coopted into driving a creepy distributed stalking program which cannot be easily thwarted without breaking the modern web
- Cookies and cross-site coordinated supercookies will still be a thing and can now identify you in a cohort.
- Ethical AI is not an interest of cohort calculation. To turn the child porn scarecrow back on them, there will definitely be the cohort of "underage, uneducated, innocent children who like playgrounds" and every other nasty cohort you could imagine, virtually embedded in the machine learning algorithm. Parents viewing the same URL will not see the same ads or perhaps social media posts.
- Who is allowed to see the list of cohorts that have been generated, the keys that describe it, and whether or not such cohorts should even be allowed on an ethical basis?
- If weaponized it would make it child's play to target and radicalize cohorts with slanted news and devil's advocate posts that nobody else can see but the cohort. Think domestic terrorists, the people who pay for them now, and foreign state actors who are constantly looking for sweet targets to exploit.
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FYI Issue #36: General Concerns about FLoC-powered abuse
https://github.com/WICG/floc/i... [github.com]
FLoC just seems like it will turbocharge filter bubbles. MAGA extremists will see only MAGA ads and MAGA news, with white supremacists recommended by the algorithm. No need to even notice you are living alongside people of race, gender, etc. that you find objectionable. It doesn't sound healthy to me.
If it is from Google (Score:2)
Translation... (Score:2)
We have found a new way to track you and you can't block it this time
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You pay for it, of course. You just pay inefficiently. Instead of just paying for whatever you use, you also pay for a bunch of people to design ads, people to figure out which of those ads to send you, extra bandwidth for the ads, and some more people to figure out how to send you ads after you block the ads they were previously sending.
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The modern web doesn't really have that problem anymore. The javascript running on your browser can hold an authentication token and request and display content, and when you leave that site poof, it's gone. Cookies originated to solve the problem when most navigation involved replacing the entire page, code and all. Now they're just awfully convenient ways to avoid that "poof, it's gone" phenomenon.
Re:Remind me again, why do we hate cookies so much (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get anything for free. You pay for it all, you're just fooled into thinking it's free because you pay indirectly. All that money Ryobi gives Google they add to your bill for that drill.
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The ads would be worse and less relevant and since they'd have less value, they'd either have to run a LOT more ads or charge money in addition to showing ads.
I think part of the problem is that most of the young'uns on this site weren't around to see the web in the mid to late 90s, before Google invented targeted advertising. Blinking, flashing, jumping, pop-over, pop-under ads crowding out the content was the norm.
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I believe they said that it 95% as effective as cookie-based targeting.
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It uses AI. This gently sprinkles it with Magic Pixie Dust, able to read your whims even before they are the faintest of fuzzies in your brain. Eventually, it will seed your brain with the Magic Pixie Dust to autogenerate those faintest of fuzzies to contribute to advertisers' desires. A sly image here, a judicious phrase there, and before long you will cease to use your brain for thinking at all. Your brain will become the advertisers' fervent desire: theirs.