Re: Potential privacy issues of not showing suggestions in certain contexts

On Saturday, April 25, 2015 at 7:35:35 PM UTC-7, Andrew Sutherland wrote:
> Use a probabilistic mechanism like bloom filters tuned to err on the
> side of false positives to determine when to not show the suggested
> tile?
Hey, that's pretty clever. ;) I believe what you're getting at is false positives for "negative matches" ends up causing us to show fewer times than we would have -- potentially leading to less money, but brands are protected and user data isn't leaked because there's so many possible false positives.

We wouldn't be able to use this directly for "positive matches" because a bloom filter matching "web developers" would accidentally include some non web developer sites. But if we had some metrics to figure out which false positive sites were leading to low engagement (more blocks / less clicks), we could just add those false positives into the "negative matches" bloom filter.

Ed Lee