I’m tempted to use this as a demonstration to a friend who still doesn’t believe me about targeted ads and the maliciousness of social media companies. I’d pay them to target her with an obviously irrelevant idea (have kids for example, considering she’s against kids and does not want any) and hand her an encrypted flash drive with a message saying I did that beforehand. A few weeks later I’d ask her about it and give her the key to decrypt the drive and read my message.
A few years ago Facebook had less stringent limitations on its ad targeting, and I believe Chris Soghoian was able to target ads to individual people (from the Google public policy team, if I remember correctly) by specifying enough intersecting demographic criteria related to each individual target. This probably doesn't work anymore because big tech companies have gotten stricter about how small the pool of targets for a demographically-targeted ad campaign can be.
At one point, you might have been able to create a non-retargeting-based ad campaign that would only have targeted your friend!
While I agree with you 100% for the general public I think if someone is manually decrypting a file (assumedly with gpg) they understand enough to get hashing. Now if you want to get into the realm of really "understood" by the public you should just send a Word doc or zip file with a password on it.
Yes, the latter is the kind of thing, no need for gpg complexity. The original comment talked about an encrypted flash drives, and that's usually done in a fairly accessible way.
You might find that she was unswayed and you learned the ineffectiveness of targeted advertising for that specific person. After reading the message, "Sure I saw the ads, cared about them as much as any other - ignored them".
