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Comment by munchler | Hacker News Reader

I’m a non-Hispanic male in my mid-50’s and I occasionally get diaper ads on YouTube, or random ads in Spanish. I’m moderately privacy conscious, but I don’t do anything drastic to mask my activity. If the big tech companies are surveilling me so thoroughly, they’re not always doing a great job using that info.

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People are very bad at understanding how large scale data collection works: namely, that it's entirely based on the law of large numbers. No one except under very specific circumstances cares who you are specifically, they care that they're right about that somewhat better then 50% of the time.

Accidentally misfiring an ad has no consequences if it doesn't happen in place of a better targeted ad and you don't reliably abandon the platform as a result.

This is why the idea you sometimes see floated that we should be able to sell our own personal data isn't really much of a solution. One person's data doesn't have much value on its own. If you were able to sell it, it'd be worth a few cents at most. Your data is only valuable as part of a large data set. I get the appeal of using capitalism to rein it its own excesses, but I really don't see anything short of strong regulation having a shot at regaining and maintaining our privacy.

I had a pretty long period where all my Google ads were in Spanish and a lot of them implied my demographic profile was set to think I'm a 50+ year old gay Filipino (I am none of those things, as far as I know). It just gets really off target sometimes.

People essentially bid on ad space, and when no one is particularly interested in bidding on you, you tend to get odd ads.

Company I worked for a decade back used to show charity ads when there was no relevant ad campaign.

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