By providing misleading cookie info, couldn't you make the targeted ads even worse?
For example, suppose that the cookies are arbitrarily altered, and they make advertisers think that I'm an older man who's extremely wealthy and takes vacations.
Now, whenever I visit travel websites, I'll see higher prices, whereas if I hadn't mislead the advertisers, I might see prices that are more reasonable and appropriate for my age / income bracket.
There's a mention about selecting a "shoe lover profile" when shoe shopping or something along those lines so it seemed to me that this was accounted for.
"For instance, if a user decides to go shoe-shopping for summer, he or she could equip their browser with the cookies most associated and aligned with shopping, shoes and summer"
You could do the same thing by trial and error switching profiles or some kind of way of sharing "this profile gives low prices at X travel site" information between users.
That wouldn't affect differentiated pricing based on user profile information. It would get you more ads in that vertical but wouldn't get you the cheapest prices.
Comments
By providing misleading cookie info, couldn't you make the targeted ads even worse?
For example, suppose that the cookies are arbitrarily altered, and they make advertisers think that I'm an older man who's extremely wealthy and takes vacations.
Now, whenever I visit travel websites, I'll see higher prices, whereas if I hadn't mislead the advertisers, I might see prices that are more reasonable and appropriate for my age / income bracket.
There's a mention about selecting a "shoe lover profile" when shoe shopping or something along those lines so it seemed to me that this was accounted for.
"For instance, if a user decides to go shoe-shopping for summer, he or she could equip their browser with the cookies most associated and aligned with shopping, shoes and summer"
You could do the same thing by trial and error switching profiles or some kind of way of sharing "this profile gives low prices at X travel site" information between users.
The shoe shopper could also just go to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ and add it under the "Interests" section.
That wouldn't affect differentiated pricing based on user profile information. It would get you more ads in that vertical but wouldn't get you the cheapest prices.