Thread · 4 tweets · 21 Nov 2020

This is an excellent @doctorow thread summarising @DinaSrinivasan's already classic paper on how Google cheats in the ad market (with all the negative impact on democracy, etc.). Just a couple of notes. 🧵

The "privacy" improvements that Google claims in its ad stack don't exist. Yes, they've prevented others from reidentifying - but not themselves! This means no better privacy for users. It's like saying your neighbour no longer spies on you, but the secret police still does. 🤷‍♂️

There is a path that avoids financialisation: slow down the bidding. The only reason to have real time bidding is if you're doing individual targeting. But with privacy, you can't. (And even today, it only works so well.)

That's one of the avenues which I think may be the most promising to get out of this bind. Dina's analysis is impeccable, but the risks of financialising such a key piece of infrastructure are high. (@timhwang has a good book on this.) Let's see if we can figure that out! 😎