Fortune teller: Give me your "cohort ID" and I will tell you your future!
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2021
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Privacy
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This horrible and awful and shouldn't happen, obviously, but I'm curious about what these 256 groups that we'd be funneled into would be. They also mention a 16bit identifier which would be a lot more groups and I imagine some of those groups would be really niche. Like, how different would these cohorts be when the organizing principle behind them is "How likely is the person to buy this thing that we want to advertise" from when we consciously choose our communities online.
Edit: Just thought I'd add. What would the effects of exposing people to ads based on their cohorts be in the long term? Sort of an ad-echo chamber and the common thread between people becoming the fact that they get a certain kind of ad. Horrifying.
online behavior is linked to all kinds of sensitive characteristics—demographics like gender, ethnicity, age, and income; “big 5” personality traits; even mental health.
in the 2020s, you don’t browse the web, the web browses you!
Fundamentally, we want to limit how much information about individual users is exposed to sites so that in total it is insufficient to identify and track users across the web, except for possibly as part of large, heterogeneous groups.
the creepiest thing to me is the implication that they already have a trove of information and they will only let competitors have slices, as if Google is the personal information broker. maybe I don’t understand the privacy budget fully...
More data gather with less effort than cookies (that are already isolated from website to website only, since v86 Firefox)