[chimeracoder]

> I'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.

Mozilla did this for Firefox, except a step better: the client pulled the same set of ads from the server regardless of the user preferences, but decided (client-side) what to display, so the server could never even infer behavior about the client from the requests.

Unfortunately, people didn't care, and they complained that this was an intrusion of privacy regardless, so they dropped it.

It turns out, there just really isn't market for privacy-focused advertising. People who care about privacy generally dislike advertising in all forms and block it, without regards to whether the advertising actually is an invasion of privacy or not.

[hnaccy]

>so the server could never even infer behavior about the client from the requests.

It reports click through so this isn't true.

[forapurpose]

> people didn't care

> there just really isn't market for privacy-focused advertising

My impression was that people just didn't understand it and Mozilla's communication about it was poor. That doesn't mean that there's not a market.