[scrollaway]

When I last checked my google ad profile (and this was a while ago; now it contains a lot less info probably because I opted out of a bunch of stuff), it was full of errors. Google did get my gender right but they put me in the wrong age range and a bunch of interests were out of whack. Good thing this was for ads, rather than a heuristic to ban me.

Best of the best, top of the class is not infallible. It's good enough to sell, because even something as low as 80% accuracy is good enough for things like "Do you want to subscribe to weekly pop tv news", it's not good enough when at the other end you get your account banned.

Google has, on this very site, built up a horrible reputation of using automated processes and having too many users to give those affected by those processes some good recovery. What you're describing is a recipe to replicate that.

99% is not good enough. 99.99% accuracy gets you 0.01% false positives. That's crazy low, right? It's also 100k users when you have 1bn users. Those fancy AI processes are nowhere near that.

[ImSkeptical]

I have the same experience with ads all the time. Like, I get ads from Google to buy the Pixel XL 2 while I'm browsing the web on the Pixel XL 2 I recently bought from Google on the same account I'm currently signed in to Google with... Or Amazon will give me ads for books and things I recently purchased through Amazon.

I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.

[reaperducer]

It's not Google's fault. It's the people buying the ads who are too lazy or don't know how to do proper targeting.

I've met three people in my life who were employed primarily to place ads on the internet. All three were glorified secretarial drones who fell into the position because nobody else wanted to do it.

[rspeer]

"Lazy"? It seems to me that the ad ecosystem is incredibly complicated (for example, not even Google understands how malvertising gets on Google's ad network).

Any person who knows how to effectively place Internet ads has such high-status skills that they don't have to actually do it.