> provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form?
If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users.
There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking).
> My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum).
It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.
If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users.
There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking).
> My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum).
It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.