Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There are some very important distinctions there.

Maybe you said your free version would use targeted ads - which I'm fine with personally.

It's selling data or being dishonest about how the data is used that I have a problem with, so maybe the problem is that your users trust you so they are comfortable with you having and using their data.



How, exactly, are the ads supposed to be targeted if data isn't being sold? How is Fiat supposed to learn that you are interested in buying a car, if there's no tracking and sale of your browsing history? Not saying that being tracked is good. Just that saying "I'm ok with targeted ads, but not ok with tracking" doesn't make a lot of sense.


Ad personalization can be handled by the ad network. The network contract they are interested in buying a car, and Fiat can request their ads be shown to people interested in buying a car. Fiat only learns that you are in the "people interested in buying a car" category if they win the bidding to show you an ad. Not great, since showing an ad, especially well out of the viewport, is pretty cheap.

We can take this one step further with the proposed TURTLEDOV browser API (https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove), at which point the ad network doesn't learn your interests and Fiat only learns you were interested in buying a car if you click on an ad.

Or with the proposed FLoC browser API (https://github.com/jkarlin/floc) where your browser uses on-device clustering to present an interest category instead of the ad network learning interests server-side.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, and am friends with the folks behind these proposals)


In my survey, I didn't say anything about the type of ads or how we would use the data. We are very trustworthy, and part of that is that we don't monetize user data in any way. But of course if we created a free tier that was funded by monetizing user data, this would no longer be the case!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: