<story><title>Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization</title><url>https://fundingchoices.google.com/start/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;d love to support more websites through ads if two conditions could be met:&lt;p&gt;- A way to ensure that ads don&amp;#x27;t try to harm me by e.g. leading me to websites serving malware or abusing my computer&amp;#x27;s resources (e.g. miners)&lt;p&gt;- A way to keep my privacy and control what data is collected about me (and who has access to that data)&lt;p&gt;Currently I simply can&amp;#x27;t turn off the ad-blocker even if I wanted as most sites become completely unusable and outright obnoxious by showing large, blinking or content-hiding ads, videos, popups or fake overlays. That&amp;#x27;s why most people use ad-blockers (IMHO). If ads are decent, relevant and non-obtrusive I personally would be happy to see them.&lt;p&gt;Also, go to any large website these days (without ad-blocker enabled) and check how many third-party trackers they load. There are many sites that send my data to more than 50 (!) different ad networks and partners, which is just insane.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BrendanEich</author><text>Brave, with the Basic Attention Token (BAT), is building exactly the client-side anonymous contribution + ad-matching system you describe. We will take BAT to other apps after proving the model in Brave.&lt;p&gt;BAT in Brave is opt-in -- each user consents before anything local happens with data or zero-knowledge&amp;#x2F;blind-token attestations -- and users can get _gratis_ BAT grants right now using the stable desktop browser (this is coming to mobile in about a month). The anonymous contribution system is the basis for the also-opt-in Brave Ads system, which uses local data only, local machine learning agent, and no cookies or user tracking by any server (even ours). Ads match against a catalog fixed daily or less frequently for a large set of users in a region who speak the same language. Attribution and confirmation use Chaumian blind tokens.&lt;p&gt;Users get 70% of revenue for opt-in, user-private (in tab), high quality ads at user-configurable frequency. We are working with publishers to provide user-opt-in ads for sites too, 70% revenue to the publisher, 15% to the user. User ad trial is under way right now, ping me if you want to be included. System should be available in Brave 1.0 in a couple of months.</text></comment>
<story><title>Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance and content monetization</title><url>https://fundingchoices.google.com/start/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see. The quality of such a system should be comparable or better to server-side technologies with the right amount of tuning, and much less privacy-invading than existing approaches.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;d love to support more websites through ads if two conditions could be met:&lt;p&gt;- A way to ensure that ads don&amp;#x27;t try to harm me by e.g. leading me to websites serving malware or abusing my computer&amp;#x27;s resources (e.g. miners)&lt;p&gt;- A way to keep my privacy and control what data is collected about me (and who has access to that data)&lt;p&gt;Currently I simply can&amp;#x27;t turn off the ad-blocker even if I wanted as most sites become completely unusable and outright obnoxious by showing large, blinking or content-hiding ads, videos, popups or fake overlays. That&amp;#x27;s why most people use ad-blockers (IMHO). If ads are decent, relevant and non-obtrusive I personally would be happy to see them.&lt;p&gt;Also, go to any large website these days (without ad-blocker enabled) and check how many third-party trackers they load. There are many sites that send my data to more than 50 (!) different ad networks and partners, which is just insane.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ketzu</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side and let the client itself pull appropriate ads for the user to see.&lt;p&gt;When I was at Middleware2017 I saw a poster&amp;#x2F;demo about this, MoCA+: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;koreauniv.pure.elsevier.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;demo-moca-incorporating-user-modeling-into-mobile-contextual-adve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;koreauniv.pure.elsevier.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;demo-moc...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I guess the problem is the same as with privacy techniques in general. If you ask companies to restrict their access to data, they just tell you no(1), as it might be worth a lot of money or open up new business oportunities they haven&amp;#x27;t thought about yet.&lt;p&gt;(1) This is anecdotal from projects of my colleagues in privacy research</text></comment>