This horrible and awful and shouldn’t happen, obviously, but I’m curious about what these 256 groups that we’d be funneled into would be. They also mention a 16bit identifier which would be a lot more groups and I imagine some of those groups would be really niche. Like, how different would these cohorts be when the organizing principle behind them is “How likely is the person to buy this thing that we want to advertise” from when we consciously choose our communities online.

Edit: Just thought I’d add. What would the effects of exposing people to ads based on their cohorts be in the long term? Sort of an ad-echo chamber and the common thread between people becoming the fact that they get a certain kind of ad. Horrifying.

Hope the dentist doesn’t mind a “Floss Weekly!” magazine, I think they’d prefer something like “Your Daily Floss”