• 9 Posts
  • 248 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 20th, 2021

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  • drspod@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 days ago

    What a misleading headline. “You’ll probably be protected,” makes it sound like the method is mostly working, so don’t worry about it. But that’s not what the article is about at all.

    It should be titled, “You’ll be protected probabilistically, and most data-collectors are not telling you what the probability parameter is that they are using.” The study shows that users can only make good and informed choices about their data when presented with this parameter, and an explanation of its meaning.


  • drspod@lemmy.mltoFirefox@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 days ago

    It has been shown repeatedly that “differential privacy” can be exploited to de-anonymize the users whose data has been aggregated.

    If you read Mozilla’s description of their Private Audiences system you immediately ask, “what happens if an advertiser has an audience comprising a list of ‘known opposition party supporters’ and generates a new ‘audience’ based on that profile? Do they then get an expanded list of opposition party supporters to target?” Yes of course they do, because that’s entirely the purpose of this system.

    Waving their hands and saying it uses ephemeral machine learning models and differential privacy does not solve the inherent societal problems with allowing targeted advertising.







  • The feature looks like absolute shit. Their supposed use-case is “you opened a bunch of tabs and none of them have what you need” and yet they expect you instead to sit there with your mouse hovering over a link, while holding a shortcut on the keyboard, waiting for the AI summary to finish loading? That would slow you down about 10x versus just opening all the links and looking at the page?

    If they wanted link previews, why didn’t they just prefetch the page and render it normally in a preview thumbnail like the ones that you now get when hovering over an open tab?

    Mindless shoe-horning of AI into the product to check some kind of box for the overpaid C-suite. For shame.