"Part of the goal is to understand how ad targeting algorithms peg people in specific audience segments. "That's why it needs critical mass, because only when enough people are playing can we start seeing patterns in what kind of cookies or attribute-identifiers companies look for and discriminate with," she said."
Doesn't sound like she knows how ad serving companies operate. These days many companies are just storing one cookie with some sort of unique identifier for the user, then storing user profiles, targeting data, behavioral tags, etc in a server-side cookie store. You're not going to be able to gather much data about companies that operate like that by analyzing huge numbers of their cookies, since every user will have a unique cookie.
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"Part of the goal is to understand how ad targeting algorithms peg people in specific audience segments. "That's why it needs critical mass, because only when enough people are playing can we start seeing patterns in what kind of cookies or attribute-identifiers companies look for and discriminate with," she said."
Doesn't sound like she knows how ad serving companies operate. These days many companies are just storing one cookie with some sort of unique identifier for the user, then storing user profiles, targeting data, behavioral tags, etc in a server-side cookie store. You're not going to be able to gather much data about companies that operate like that by analyzing huge numbers of their cookies, since every user will have a unique cookie.