Mental-health information 'sold to advertisers'
I can&#x27;t separate what actually happened from the sensationalizing in the article.<p>It says the websites had Google cookies and others. OK, anybody using Google Analytics has Google cookies. Anyone using FB plugins has FB cookies. Yes, websites certainly have a lot of cookies these days, and the information inferred by use of these can be in a generic fashion to target and rank ads. That&#x27;s worthy of scrutiny -- but this isn&#x27;t what the article is about. What is the evidence of &quot;mental health&quot; being treated in some scary specific way?<p>The only substantial thing in the article supporting the headline is one charge that a site sent quiz answers to Player.qualifo.com -- which appears to be an unregistered domain.<p>OK, so what information was sold? When did money change hands? Is there any hard evidence that mental health information was &quot;sold to advertisers&quot;, as is claimed in the headline? Or is this just bullshit they made up to get clicks?<p>For that matter, even if you wanted to do some evil psychographic ad thing, why would anyone sell that info to advertisers? What are they gonna do with it? Like, why hand them the literal data, when you could allow them to just bid on ads that may be targeted&#x2F;ranked using your painstakingly collected psychographic data (a la Cambridge Analytica)? Why sell cow when you can sell the milk?<p>The fearmongering and disinformation around adtech and privacy numbs us to legitimately scary things being done that should be covered more.<p>Makes me think of this Blake Ross rant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@blakeross&#x2F;don-t-outsource-your-thinking-ad825a9b4653" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@blakeross&#x2F;don-t-outsource-your-thinking-...</a>