Private attributes: The meanings and mechanisms of “privacy-preserving” adtech
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study analyzes the meanings and technical mechanisms of privacy that leading advertising technology (adtech) companies are deploying under the banner of “privacy-preserving” adtech. We analyze this discourse by examining documents wherein Meta, Google, and Apple each propose to provide advertising attribution services—which aim to measure and optimize advertising effectiveness—while “solving” some of the privacy problems associated with online ad attribution. We find that these solutions define privacy primarily as anonymity, as limiting access to individuals’ information, and as the prevention of third-party tracking. We critique these proposals by drawing on the theory of privacy as contextual integrity. Overall, we argue that these attribution solutions not only fail to achieve meaningful privacy but also leverage privacy rhetoric to advance commercial interests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.033 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".