You can choose whether to have location tracking enabled, though? I have it on, because I like having a record of where I’ve been and I trust Google to handle this information securely, but I could turn it off if I wanted.
keeps a detailed log of maybe half of the web articles I have ever looked at (depending on what ads they serve and whether I used a blocker)
That’s what the second half of the post is about: a project I’m working on to serve targeted ads without letting advertisers know all the sites you visit.
With advertising, if I accidentally click on the link, I already paid. …even if 3 seconds after opening the page they regret having clicked on the link, the ad was already shown, the author of the page made the profit
Mostly not. Advertisers know whether their ads were viewed and aren’t especially interested in paying for ads no one sees. If you read the whole article the publisher will have many more “viewable” ads than if you click “back” right away. Similarly, if you go back right away you’re probably not going to click on ads.
Another big force behind clickbait is that platforms like Facebook will see a click as evidence that the link is interesting, and show it to more people.
Gmail announced they would no longer use the contents of email to target ads in 2017: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
You can choose whether to have location tracking enabled, though? I have it on, because I like having a record of where I’ve been and I trust Google to handle this information securely, but I could turn it off if I wanted.
That’s what the second half of the post is about: a project I’m working on to serve targeted ads without letting advertisers know all the sites you visit.
Mostly not. Advertisers know whether their ads were viewed and aren’t especially interested in paying for ads no one sees. If you read the whole article the publisher will have many more “viewable” ads than if you click “back” right away. Similarly, if you go back right away you’re probably not going to click on ads.
Another big force behind clickbait is that platforms like Facebook will see a click as evidence that the link is interesting, and show it to more people.