Eric Seufert, on Threads:

Regarding Taboola’s partnership with Apple: I’ve seen people claim that this is somehow hypocritical from a privacy perspective, assuming that Taboola’s somewhat obnoxious, clickbait-style ads must invasively target user profiles and browsing histories.They don’t. They are targeted entirely contextually. That’s the point.

This is absolutely, 100% wrong. Taboola doesn't just target on context – ie based on the topic of the page a user is looking at.

Taboola's not hiding this – in fact it's one of their selling points. They call this feature "Marketplace Audiences" and it allows you to target by a whole range of demographic and intent-based audience factors, using both Taboola first-party and third party data.

You can see this in Taboola's Marketplace Audiences dashboard:

If you think it's basing membership of an audience of "Israelis in the US" or "Education: Graduate school" just on the context of the page, I have a bridge to sell to you.

So why has Eric got this wrong? I suspect because he has a little bit of an agenda. Take a look at the last sentence in his post:

Want brash, garish advertising plastered all over the web? Reject ads personalization. Want relevant, informed advertising? Embrace ads personalization.

I have absolutely no idea why a venture capitalist who "invests in the future of mobile" would want to promote the idea that only personlised ads, which require extensive profiling, tracking and targeting, are the only way to get "quality" advertising. Maybe someone out there can help me out with this?

(Via Daring Fireball)