New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data
Here&#x27;s a really naive question.  The article talks about collecting data for some audience segments.  Are they talking about letting users check checkboxes for the segments they might be interested in, or are they going to try to do what the third-party advertising companies do, which is try to guess what segments their users fall into by hoovering up what data they can find about them?<p>It&#x27;s crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar industry focused on trying to guess what ads I might be interested in, using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I do my best to counter.  Did they ever think to just ask me?  I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in, at least if I could be convinced that that&#x27;s all I would see and that the crazy privacy violations would stop.