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

On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 7:35 PM, Andrew Sutherland <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 23, 2015, at 02:23 PM, Ed Lee wrote:
> > Do people have thoughts on the privacy issues raised here and potential
> > solutions?
>
> 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?  (And which can be additionally permuted to further increase
> false-positives.
>

I love me some bloom filters, but if you want false positives, why not
just inject some directly?

-Ekr


> This could also be beneficial because if the brand has a very large list
> of sites they don't want to be associated with, all of that information
> doesn't need to be downloaded.  And the side-effects of (don't show)
> false positives is beneficial in that it decreases the information from
> a tile not being shown.
>
> A possibly good/possibly bad side effect is that this could allow the
> brands to not explicitly say which websites they don't want to be
> associated with.  If this is a desirable characteristic, even Mozilla
> potentially need not know what the list of sites was.  If this is not a
> desirable characteristic, the Mozilla automation could automatically
> derive the filter from the total list of domains and make that available
> as part of the data.
>
> I would think that letting brands not explicitly reveal the websites
> with 100% certainty that they don't want to be associated with is good
> and acceptable since it provides parity with server-side solution and
> the historical nature of ads.  (Just because a company doesn't advertise
> in a certain TV show/magazine doesn't mean they have explicitly decided
> not to advertise there.)  And interested users could still run
> brute-forces against the filters and assign probabilities to certain
> sites or clusters of sites being intentionally excluded in a similar
> fashion to how they could notice what sites a company is not running ad
> campaigns on.
>
> Andrew
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