
Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway - zdw
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201
======
endofcapital
The only social networking I do anymore is twitter. The list of the thousand
people I follow is so intimate, I feel like just flipping through that would
reveal everything about me and be a huge violation of privacy.

But even on this platform I've spent almost 10 years curating the perfect feed
on, the one that should know absolutely everything about me, I still get
served endless garbage ads for junk food and pickup trucks. I can't think of
two products I care about less.

Amazon is a similar story, they seem convinced that I'm a woman despite having
some pretty detailed purchase history going back to 1998 suggesting otherwise.

The targeting algorithm is often wrong, they just don't seem to know it be
willing to admit it.

~~~
meditate
I think it's a common misconception that "the algorithm" is responsible for
this, when what is actually happening is that an advertiser is bidding on the
wrong users and effectively buying bad ads.

~~~
pdkl95
I think it's a common misconception that "targeted" advertising in any way
involves the ad viewer's interests. Showing you only ads for things you are
interested in was never a goal. The advertiser targets who should see the ad,
which may or may not match what the viewer's interests.

Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two
products I care about less" isn't an _error_. It's an attempt to make you care
(if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if opinions
change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future.

~~~
lazyjones
> _Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two
> products I care about less" isn't an error. It's an attempt to make you care
> (if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if
> opinions change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future._

This sounds just like what people in the ad industry would tell worried
clients. The actual reason is likely to be more mundane: the guy is, according
to the tracking database, in an age and income group with high statistical
correlation with interest in junk food and pickup trucks. Not all targeting is
as detailed and personal as everyone thinks after reading scary articles.

~~~
baddox
I don’t know, I suspect it’s in ad agencies’ interest to keep people under the
impression that _they_ aren’t susceptible to ads and the ads must be for those
_other_ people who are.

------
AndrewKemendo
Honestly, Instagram is pretty spot on with their ads for me.

I've always taken pride, like I think most tech nerds of being "ad resistant."

However I've probably bought more stuff as a direct result of ad exposure on
Instagram (3 things in three years) than in the entirety of the 25 years I've
been on the internet.

~~~
rsync
"However I've probably bought more stuff as a direct result of ad exposure on
Instagram (3 things in three years) than in the entirety of the 25 years I've
been on the internet."

Could you specifically describe the ads and the products involved ? I am very
curious and would love to have a sense of what they succeeded with (for you).

I have been of the mind that targeted ads are terrible and that ad firms and
ad-tech firms and (that entire ecosystem) are fleecing the ad buyers who will
eventually wake up to that fact...

It's 2019 and if I search for "volkswagen emissions scandal" I will get banner
ads for new volkswagen cars. For a week.

Or, I would, if ublock origin was disabled ...

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Well most recently it was for a service for knife sharpening called knifeaid.
You mail in your knives and they sharpen them for a flat fee, comparable to
what I pay now to drive to a sharpener.

I can only assume cause I've posted stuff about me cooking and have searched
knife sharpening in the past. Not that hard to target really.

~~~
kstenerud
Going off on a bit of a tangent, but some time ago I bought a sharpening stone
for $30. It takes about 10 minutes start to finish from dull blade to sharp
blade, which is a lot more convenient than going to the knife sharpener or
mailing your knives. I also use it to sharpen my hair clipper blades once a
year.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I'm actually very handy with a whetstone, however I'd contest the 10 minutes
part, and as much I use mine its a non trivial amount of work. Professional
sharpening is just way better in my situation

------
manigandham
1\. Targeting is rarely as sophisticated as you think. Many campaigns are run
wide and cheap (all users in a region, maybe some particular hours, etc). It's
easier to optimize after this initial run based on actual performance rather
than trying to figure out the exact people who would respond.

2\. Some companies are also taking ad auction bidding in-house and running
their own algorithms with their 1st party data, like upselling their own
customers. This doesn't need any relevance matching since they know exactly
who they're going after.

3\. Targeting is not free. There is a continuum of price vs precision and high
precision is rarely worth the costs, especially if the product itself cannot
support those margins. Again this is why optimizing after a wide start is
better than targeting upfront, and also why if you're trying to reach a very
narrow audience it's easier to just send them email, or even direct mail.

4\. People only notice the bad ads, not the good ones which they like or are
influenced by. This is no different than complaining about bad CGI in movies
when your average sitcom is 50% artificial but nobody notices because it just
works.

5\. Recommending movies as entertainment with cost in a subscription plan is
nothing like finding relevant ads on the internet.

6\. The adtech industry has 2 of the most valuable companies in the world and
generates petabytes of data and billions in profit proving how well ads work.
A random blog post by an outsider who has no idea how the industry works but
claims it's all broken in direct contradiction to the data just comes across
the same as a flat-earth conspiracy theorist.

~~~
ghthor
I think it's a little harsh to relate this to someone who thinks the earth is
flat.

~~~
askafriend
No, I think it's actually pretty spot on.

A flat earth makes sense if you only spent 5 minutes thinking about it and
have no background in or exposure to basic science.

Similar to this blog post. It makes sense if you read it, think about it for 5
minutes, and have no background in the advertising industry or the dynamics of
effective/efficient advertising.

Not to mention that advertising and content recommendation engines for a paid
service are each wildly different in their underlying dynamics and economics.
But who cares about nuance anyway.

~~~
pdkl95
> A flat earth makes sense if you only spent 5 minutes thinking about it and
> have no background in or exposure to basic science.

Not that I particularly want to jump to the defense of people that believe in
a flat earth, but they are _not_ people that "only spent 5 minutes thinking
about it". A _lot_ of time has been spent trying to back up their beliefs and
to form a coherent theory. They're _wrong_ , of course, for many reasons, but
it's incorrect and dismissive to call them intellectually lazy.

The core of flat earth and similar beliefs is often a legitimate reaction
against the large established systems in society that, from their perspective,
appear to be failing in obvious ways while lying to them regularly that
everything is fine. The are recognizing a problem, and attempt to apply
something resembling science to try and find answers.

I recommend hbomberguy's recent investigation into recent flat earth belief:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gFsOoKAHZg)

~~~
askafriend
Oh wow I had no idea it went that deep! I concede my point then.

I guess the flat earthers I’ve heard have been media personalities who had
very few arguments to articulate.

------
cortic
>Let's be clear: the best targeted ads I will ever see are the ones I get from
a search engine when it serves an ad for exactly the thing I was searching
for....I don't know anybody who complains about this sort of ad.

This has actually _nerfed_ search engines in my lifetime. It used to be a
crawler returned _as much as it could_ and you could search through the
results; Now i get to only search through the big players who pay for their
rankings.

>Never give positive feedback to an AI.

Funny; i wonder how Google profiling handles me occasionally using Google as a
spell check.

~~~
ilovetux
> using Google as a spell check.

I do that all the time!

~~~
arkitaip
Same here. I sometimes use incognito mode if the spellchecking is... off
pattern.

~~~
cortic
I sometimes blank on words that sound the same, like typing through when i
mean threw, and of course google won't correct it unless its in context, so i
type something like 'i through a bomb' which corrects to threw, i know I'm on
a watch list somewhere.

------
ThrustVectoring
The point of ad targeting isn't to generate relevant ads. It's so the
advertising platform can put you in a more expensive targeting cohort,
increasing the revenue from serving the ad. The "optimal" bid for serving you
an ad to your cohort is proportional to the product of expected relevance and
the revenue per conversion.

If a programming placement firm makes $100 per lead (after various filter
steps) on your targeting info, and a witty t-shirt makes $10, your cohort has
to convert ten times as often on t-shirts to match the recruiting firm's ad
bids.

~~~
zozbot123
This seems fallacious. The whole reason for that "more expensive targeting
cohort" becoming available after tracking _is_ its increased relevance.
Otherwise, everyone would be getting the $100 ad in the first place-- the $10
ad would simply be uncompetitive!

~~~
ThrustVectoring
I'm not saying relevance is meaningless. I'm saying it's scaled by the
_profitability_ of a conversion as well. This business logic works on
traditional non-targeted ads as well, like on broadcast TV.

For example, do you remember seeing ads along the lines of "if you or a loved
one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, call the law offices of such and
so"? Mesothelioma affects less than 30 people per million. Why run an ad that
so few people care about? Because the payoff is so high for reaching the
people that do care, and the higher the payoff, the less people have to care
for the ad campaign to be worthwhile.

------
yellowapple
A-fucking-men. YouTube's recommendations are effectively worthless to me
because they're full of garbage I'll never watch instead of videos actually
relevant to the one I'm watching (no, YouTube, just because I watched an
antivax conspiracy video because it was linked on reddit and I want to laugh
at it doesn't mean it's something I want to watch every day after watching
entirely-unrelated things).

On another note:

"But everyone sucks, except Pandora."

No, they suck, too. Thumb-up one song and it'll commandeer the station. Half
the songs are live recordings (and I haven't checked if they finally added the
option to exclude them, but given that it hadn't been added many years after
the original feature suggestion by the time I switched to Spotify, I don't
have high hopes); thumbing down said live recordings doesn't actually stop
them from showing up (in fact, my "fuck this, I'm switching to Spotify" moment
was when Pandora queued up three live recordings in a row, all of which I
thumbed down, then on the fourth in a row wouldn't let me thumb it down
because I had too many "skips" today).

Fuck Pandora. Spotify's radio feature is just as good (which ain't saying
much, but it _doesn 't_ bombard me with live recordings, so that's a start),
and of course Spotify supports use-cases besides procedurally-generated radio
stations. Way more useful.

~~~
_bxg1
I've used Pandora for nearly a decade. For half of that time, I've also kept a
subscription to an on-demand music streaming service. But I always kept using
Pandora for the auto-stations.

------
intopieces
The last time I was on Facebook (2015) I accidentally logged on without an ad-
blocker. The best it could come up with was a package discount on gay scuba
diving. I admit I was intrigued, but I did not click, simply because I could
not discern what the product actually was.

~~~
flomo
Had a similar experience a few years ago. I cleared cookies and visited
YouTube a couple days later. It showed me an advert for an oven starring
Florence Henderson (Brady Bunch mom), who died not long afterwards. Google has
all this data on me, but you take away their cookies once in a while, and they
think you are a housewife.

~~~
manigandham
What did you expect when you cleared cookies? How do you think they know who
you are otherwise?

~~~
flomo
My IP address is surprisingly stable. (Know this because I have to update a
work app when it changes.) I'd logged into and used many google properties
after I cleared cookies. What I searched for on Youtube was not oven or
housewife related.

My guess is these targeters are maybe too sophisticated and rely on reams of
data, social media logins, and etc. If you run a adblocker and clear cookies
once in a while, you can "hide in plain sight".

~~~
scarejunba
People over attribute things to The Algorithm. In truth, with little
information to go on, it's often the case that no valuable ad was available to
be shown and so it falls back. It's not that it's oven or housewife related.
It may even be a wholly untargeted ad.

------
buboard
What a wonderful article. I like the part where you don't need to rely on too
much data to be good at something. Same goes for science in general. You dont
need a million of experiments to do something great, you need ingenuity.

~~~
anonytrary
Ingenuity gets you from 0% to 90%. Millions of dollars and little experiments
gets you from 90% to 99%. All of the money in the world won't get you from 99%
to 100%.

------
kgwxd
"Targeted ads" is just a euphemism for "tracking". The not-so-threatening term
allows the practice to exist in the first place. It may have been the initial
plan, and the promise made some people a lot of money, but ads are no longer
the primary goal or the only way the data is monetized. We should be using the
term "trackers" when talking about targeted ads, it's more accurate and sounds
scarier.

~~~
nsnfkdjsnbf
So when Zuckerberg says users want targeted ads, he actually meant users like
being tracked.

------
smsm42
> the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest
> thing to porn that is still Safe For Work

Loved this part. About 99% accurate for "read this next" suggestions I've
seen.

------
doublekill
Advertising was not made for OP. It was made for people who do not see the
difference between ads and search results. It was made for people who impulse
buy to improve their mood. For people who care about pictures, not stats.

Personalization tech for ad tech is top of the line. Really pushing that part
of ML forward. It drives the internet with billions worth of profit. Ad tech
companies can know more about you than intelligence agencies, and sometimes
they are one and the same.

Targeting is changing how people vote. It is influencing social mobility. It
can turn startups into money printing machines. It is not something you can
debunk in a single blogpost, just because it does not apply to you.

You are the vocal minority.

~~~
prophesi
I wouldn't say OP is a vocal minority; certainly you've heard your non-techie
friends talk about the ridiculous recommendations these algorithms have
wrought. I'd like to think that this is the majority, and the minority who
can't tell an ad from their search query would make those impulse purchases
even without ML. You're just swapping out their random impulse purchase with a
different impulse purchase, and neither side knows why they met.

The key point in this blog post, I think, is the ineptitude of ML algorithms.

~~~
princeofwands
> the ineptitude of ML algorithms.

Computer vision can show greater-than-estimated-human-performance, while still
failing hilariously unhuman once in a while. People remember the 1 in a 1000
wonky recommendation that made them do a double-take. Recommendation engines
work best for the mean and stereotypical person. That way, you can use
information of similar profitable people to effectively recommend.

Facebook, for instance, got mined for "suckers". If you are scummy, you want a
list of gullible people who click the most stupidest, poorly designed, and
shady ads. Ad tech knows where they are and delivers them on a silver platter.
Going back 2 decades to serving ads without ML would kill a business. You
don't think they thoroughly test a new recommendation engine and see relevant
stats go up before they deploy it? You don't think they can serve you more
relevant ads when they know you are a 17 year old male vs. a 42 year old
woman? Both the data gathering and the algorithms have improved year over
year. To say ad tech personalization is terrible, is akin to complaining we
don't have AGI.

~~~
prophesi
Yes, as OP mentions, machine learning can be applied quite well in other
fields "like image processing or winning at strategy games."

And yes, they test out their new ML algorithms to see how effective they are.
But they don't need the machine learning to create their list of "gullible
people." Rather, they don't even -need- that list. If you just serve stupid,
shady ads that look as close to porn as that platform can get away with, you'd
get your desired click-through rate. The actual personalization aspect is just
a myth to validate our invasion of privacy.

~~~
doublekill
They need that list for max profit. Just serving ads without an intelligent
platform behind it to know where and when to serve them, will hurt the CTR
(which hurts both the ad tech platform and the advertiser).

Why would ad tech companies gather data and invade your privacy, and then not
use it to sell more profitable ads? That makes no economic sense, but is a
costly form of voyeurism. The "myth" you refer to sounds like a poorly thought
out conspiracy theory.

------
3xblah
If I understand this correctly he is saying that much of the private
information collected is actually not needed in order to achieve the desired
outcome ("everybody wins").

He points out that tracking companies pay websites to allow them to collect
this information, but (through examples) he argues that companies do not
actually need the information that is being collected.

This begs some questions: Do these tracking companies remain solvent? Who is
buying the information they collect? Are the buyers happy with the
product/service? Is their usage of the data effective or just experimental?

I am willing to bet those tracking companies are operating based solely on
investments, not licensing/sales of the data. That is, their future is
uncertain.

We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Whether or not the data works for
the purposes it was collected, copies of the data will still exist. If the
tracking companies fail, who gets the data then?

An ongoing effort will continue in trying to find a use for all this collected
personal information by whomever shall come into possession of it.

How do you all think that will turn out? Should there be more regulation on
how that data can be used?

BTW, another nice bit of work from this author which only got two points when
it was posted on HN a few weeks ago:

[https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook/container/](https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook/container/)

------
j0e1
User data has become a currency that has intrinsic value without having to
prove itself in any way. Not sure how long this is going to last but I suspect
as long as there is this feeling of 'potential' in tracked data, it is always
going to sell. On the other hand, the existence of pervasive tracking
especially those done unethically, exposes people to a new attack surface that
not only malicious (in the traditional sense) actors but govts. are prone to
exploiting.

------
jiveturkey
> This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement:
> almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply,
> using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand

lol, too true

------
rjf72
A major issue this does not consider is that ads which are too accurate are
often deemed 'creepy'. Turns out there was some recent research on this topic
[1]. In another thread on digital advertising a user shared an anecdote of a
company that met with poor response after targeting locals who were pregnant
with new baby related promotions. But after masking the promotion in a packet
of otherwise unrelated offers, it met with much better results.

Another thing here is that this information isn't going anywhere. All the
information that you give up to companies can be exploited at their whim and
to whatever end they choose. In this regard I think Cambridge Analytica was a
really great thing. They were, all things considered, probably a very small
player. But for people to realize that their personal information could be
used for more than to try to sell them crap was an important lesson.

There are also things like the NSA who are now hoovering up immense amounts of
information, facilitated by participating companies including Apple,
Microsoft, and Google. Recent issues should show the problem here. The NSA is
not immune to hiring people they should not (from their perspective) hire.
Their secret tools get leaked. They themselves get hacked. And now there is
this immense trove of potentially sensitive information that they're sitting
on. That data is going to eventually end up in the wrong hands. It's also not
out of the question that the NSA themselves eventually end up being the wrong
hands. Without invoking Godwin's law here, it should suffice to say that bad
people can get into positions of power and do very bad things. Pair this with
profiles on everybody in the nation, and increasingly even the world, and it
opens the door to some really catastrophic scenarios in the future.

So no, don't forget privacy.

[1] -
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150408171201.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150408171201.htm)

------
_bxg1
Weirdly comforting.

~~~
andrewflnr
It's a long series of epic burns somehow delivered in a calm style. It offers
peaceful resignation with a world of insanity. Or something like that. I see
what you mean, though.

~~~
_bxg1
I meant because it suggests an eventual end to the world of insanity, when all
the emperors realize they don't have any clothes

~~~
andrewflnr
Ok, I guess I didn't see what you mean. :)

------
aquarin
I am guessing the targeting can be done better. The problem is, there is more
products supply than eyes demand. As a result, the companies have to push down
the throat products, even if they don’t match users' preferences.

------
lordnacho
I've noticed this with recommendations, too. Something about it seems off.

I'll watch a documentary about World War II, and then next thing you know it's
recommending another 50 hours of Hitler and Nazi stuff. Or other war
documentaries.

Medium is similar, too. I read a couple of articles about cryptocurrency, and
then there's nothing but crypto articles. I ended up having to actively find a
bunch of stuff to follow to get some variety.

I thought one of the key ideas in stats and ML was intelligent sampling? That
would suggest you should sometimes throw in something the person hasn't
expressed interest in, just to see if maybe you're on a local minimum. But I
rarely see that.

I often wonder if it would be smarter for Netflix to just hire a guy who
watches a lot of content, and he can just tell you what's similar to what.

------
jtms
OP is my spirit animal

------
ltr_
I'm poor so no ad is for me. plus I have an ad block in every browser. also
I'm kind of ad blind

