Am I missing something here? It sounds like what is going on is that some sketchy company (instantcheckmate.com) is willing to pay more than their competitors for Google ad slots for certain names. They may even be getting positive feedback in the machine learning sense from the scare tactic effect, getting people who pay to sign up just to see if their name is associated with an arrest record (as Dr. Sweeney did).
Of course media sites always overhype research with incredible titles, but I can't see that this tells us much about online ad delivery in general ... though it perhaps raises interesting (unanswered) questions about Google's ad delivery....
Comments
Am I missing something here? It sounds like what is going on is that some sketchy company (instantcheckmate.com) is willing to pay more than their competitors for Google ad slots for certain names. They may even be getting positive feedback in the machine learning sense from the scare tactic effect, getting people who pay to sign up just to see if their name is associated with an arrest record (as Dr. Sweeney did).
Of course media sites always overhype research with incredible titles, but I can't see that this tells us much about online ad delivery in general ... though it perhaps raises interesting (unanswered) questions about Google's ad delivery....