Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway

Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway

Someone who works on web search once told me that they already have an algorithm that guarantees the maximum click-through rate for any web search: just return a page full of porn links. Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can’t just give you porn links all the time, because that’s Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work. The hottest recommendations have nothing to do with me

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.

Source: apenwarr.ca