## Metadata - Author: [[apenwarr]] - Full Title:: Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway - Category:: #🗞️Articles - URL:: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 - Read date:: [[2023-10-16]] ## Highlights > A former co-worker told me once: "Everyone loves collecting data, but nobody loves analyzing it later." This claim is almost shocking, but people who have been involved in data collection and analysis have all seen it. It starts with a brilliant idea: we'll collect information about every click someone makes on every page in our app! And we'll track how long they hesitate over a particular choice! And how often they use the back button! How many seconds they watch our intro video before they abort! How many times they reshare our social media post! ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwtxg14jyqc73fzvv4hxbt5)) ^7fcd49 > being a data analyst is difficult and mostly unrewarding (except financially). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwtz044160xppeh5qwnkec4)) > the problem is there's almost no way to know if you're right. (It's also not clear what the definition of "right" is, which I'll get to in a bit.) **There are almost never any easy conclusions, just hard ones, and the hard ones are error prone.** What analysts don't talk about is how many incorrect charts (and therefore conclusions) get made on the way to making correct ones. Or ones we think are correct ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwtzhe958sa4ce8pjnfrbcz)) ^c4794c > A good chart is so incredibly persuasive that it almost doesn't even matter if it's right, as long as what you want is to persuade someone... which is probably why newpapers, magazines, and lobbyists publish so many misleading charts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwtzs0rzc6h37m8k339n2ny)) ^b8daa1 > 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. (Someone else said you can reverse this to make a porn detector: any link which has a high click-through rate, regardless of which query it's answering, is probably porn.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwv1t76w7j7zwr3hbhe1mwh)) > the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work. In other words, celebrities (ideally attractive ones, or at least controversial ones), or politics, or both. They walk that line as closely as they can, because that's the local maximum for their profitability. Sometimes they accidentally cross that line, and then have to apologize or pay a token fine, and then go back to what they were doing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwv27qjtrqpb7bn0qnn633a)) > 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. Everybody wins: I find what I wanted, the vendor helps me buy their thing, and the search engine gets paid for connecting us. I don't know anybody who complains about this sort of ad. It's a good ad. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hcwv32zfsv46cgjsp1psr9mn)) > This whole ecosystem is amazing. Let's look at online news web sites. Why do they load so slowly nowadays? Trackers. No, not ads - trackers. They only have a few ads, which mostly don't take that long to load. But they have a lot of trackers, because each tracker will pay them a tiny bit of money to be allowed to track each page view