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Google won’t be able to resist listening in on your conversations
- waqf 10y agoThis is really missing the point, because if I objected to Google mining my private conversations to advertise to me I wouldn't use Gmail. The problem with ads on Google Home this week is serious, but it isn't related to "Google spying on me" at all. It's to do with the fact that reading out ads in my home is super creepy, despite — in fact, because of — the fact that the ads aren't targeted to me.
- sandworm101 10y agoNon-targeted ads creap you out? When google shows me ads for diebtic test strips, hair dye and kitty litter i rest assured that Google isnt tracking me, that they know so little about my habits that they think those appropriate ads. (Then i get angry with my adblocking tech and set about making sure i never see any kitty litter ads ever again.)
- waqf 10y agoSufficiently targeted ads are indistinguishable from honest search results: that is, if Google gives me the perfect result then I don't care what money changes hands behind the scenes (although yes, I do still care what's being done with my personal data to achieve that).
- ferentchak 10y agoThere is a main difference. Instead of sorting those results on the best fit for what I am looking for they are sorting them based upon the highest bidder. You are right that sometimes these results are similar but these days when I ask Google a question about products I pretty much only get to know about the ones that were willing to pay Google to inform me of them. Great for Google but only ok for me and the product company.
- euyyn 10y agoWait, you always get organic results, no?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y agoYou have it all backwards. If the money that changes hands doesn't influence the search result, then the money won't change hands. An advertisement customer won't pay in order to not influence what the audience gets to see. Also, the theoretical possibility that money doesn't necessarily influence decisions is not exactly a good reason to accept the risk that it does after all. If that were a sensible argument, you could just throw out all anti-corruption legislation, because it is very much theoretically possible for a bribed person to still make a decision that's not influenced by the bribery.
- yosamino 10y ago> because if I objected to Google mining my private conversations to advertise to me I wouldn't use Gmail. This incorrect and short-sighted. The private conversations that you have are with someone else, who might have not opted into Google mining their conversation. In that sense your conversation partners' only option to "opt-out" of using gmail is to stop conversing with you, which I find to be a perverse choice.
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- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y agoI guess it should be noted, though, that the choice being perverse doesn't mean the outcome is obvious. I, for one, generally will just refrain from contacting you if the only contact info I have is a gmail address, if it's not exceptionally important for me.
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- joshuamorton 10y agoIts worth pointing out that this doesn't help you much. I have 3-4 email addresses, from @gmail to @myuniversity to @mywebsite. I send and receive all of my mail from a Inbox though.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y agoYeah, I am aware that I might be misplacing my trust and share things with people who end up sharing it with third parties, violating my trust ... your point being?
- joshuamorton 10y agoWell I didn't really have a point to be made, just a general informational statement. However, claiming that I'm violating your trust if you send me an email is a bit of a strong statement, don't you think.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago> It's to do with the fact that reading out ads in my home is super creepy, despite — in fact, because of — the fact that the ads aren't targeted to me. IMHO: Reading out non-targeted ads in my home: annoying Reading out targeted ads in my home: annoying AND creepy
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoRadio stations do precisely this, and they're decidedly non-creepy.
- CaptSpify 10y agoDoesn't Home cost money though? Radio stations are essentially free
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Doesn't Home cost money though? The hardware costs money, just as a radio does. The service is free, just as radio stations are.
- CaptSpify 10y agoBut anyone can make a radio out of whatever parts they want, so they are essentially free. AFAIK, there are no "home builds" for the Home?
- rdiddly 10y ago"Resist" might not be the operative term here. Advertising is the whole purpose for developing these devices and placing them in people's homes. Edit: And though it's obvious I'll say it: at Google advertising means data gathering.
- tyingq 10y agoI'm sure they will find a way to introduce the ads, as well as a premium subscription option that removes them.
- newsat13 10y agoLike youtube red? Note that this only stops ads from being displayed. They still mine your youtube data for re-use in other services.
- blakesterz 10y agoThat Verge article has 2 different statements, the first sounds like this was for sure an AD though they try like hell to make it sound like it's not an ad... “This isn't an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales.” But then the second sounds like no, it wasn't so much an ad as something an algorithm dug up. "What’s circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content." Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, those 2 statements seem to describe things that can be different. One "came from a partner" the other was just "timely content".
- Navarr 10y agoThey're really both the same - and there's a LOT of annoying FUD regarding this. It's triggered by the phrase "Good Morning" or other phrases that launch into the "what is going on today" prompt. * The weather is currently blahblahblah * Your commute will be x minutes * Beauty and the Beast came out in theaters today * [the rest of your news]
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- frik 10y agoMy Google Home gave me an ad for the beauty and the beast today https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5zq60f/my_google_home_gave_me_an_ad_for_the_beauty_and/?st=j0cq7kyq&sh=6d8f1529 https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5zq60f/my_google_ho... Video: https://twitter.com/brysonmeunier/status/842358950536318976 https://twitter.com/brysonmeunier/status/842358950536318976
- educar 10y agoI have trumpeted this many times but selfhosted solutions like cloudron, sandstorm, arkos are the way to go. We want iot devices to send data to our personal servers and not to big brother companies for analysis and mining. That said, in my experience, people willingly give their data to Google and Facebook. I assumed people were not cognisant but this is not the case. Most people are very conscious of their decision and argue that their data is safer with Google and it's a good trade off. This seems like a PR issue and hard to fix even if selfhosted solutions reach maturity. Do others share my thoughts? Would love to hear from privacy enthusiasts as to how we can promote better architectures for the web.
- yladiz 10y agoI think it's a fair assessment, since setting up a self hosted solution generally costs money and may not be as safe/secure as something Google has. I probably wouldn't host my own solution to most things if there is a version available that isn't too costly. Currently I avoid Google as much as possible because I don't want them to have my information in exchange for a service; I'd rather pay some money for a service that won't siphon my data and use it for various, advertisement based purposes (it's not surprising but it's kinda terrible that they put ads on a device you paid a bit of money for). The reason I stick with Facebook is that there isn't as much of a solution otherwise, but I do try to use alternative messaging apps (Line, Wechat, Kakao, iMessage) when possible.
- KanyeBest 10y agoLet me be the devil's advocate for a moment: Why is it a problem if Google knows more about you? Doesn't it just mean that you will be served content more relevant to you?
- amelius 10y agoI guess it depends how valuable that service is. Right now, I can't imagine that being served content "more relevant to me" is so valuable as to warrant a corporation systematically recording my doings. My current reaction is: I'm perfectly capable of finding relevant stuff on my own, thank you very much. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
- thisisauserid 10y agoThe Onion called this one years ago: http://bit.ly/1JXicmI http://bit.ly/1JXicmI
- cryoshon 10y agouhhh... who here has yet to adopt a radical fuck-all-ads-always-and-forever-i-dont-care-if-you-go-out-of-business attitude? if you're not already blocking all ads wherever you possibly can, you can expect zero privacy and a lot of invasive advertisements and surveillance. and it'll annoy you. seriously, fuck em. if they go broke, they'll ask you to pay for their service. that might be what needs to happen to restore privacy: throw money at them so that they don't need to sell you out.
- update 10y agoI use uBlock origin on all my browsers. are you doing anything extra (e.g. blocking at an /etc/hosts level?) or am I covered?
- username223 10y agoIIUC uBlock just deals with JavaScript. Google and others fall back to old-school pixel tracking when their JS fails, so I put some of the worst offenders in /etc/hosts.
- vkb 10y agoPerhaps it's just my selective biases, but I feel like I am reading about more notable people in the tech industry speaking out in favor of privacy over the past couple months than even when the Snowden revelations happened in 2013. Could this possibly be a tipping point for adtech as a revenue model? (Although I've been reading about it for almost a year now [1], [2], [3]) I'd like to hope so, and am also curious: how invasive can companies be before consumers start to push back? [1] http://digiday.com/marketing/copyranter-ad-tech-bubble-explode/ http://digiday.com/marketing/copyranter-ad-tech-bubble-explo... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/41zyoo/why_i_believe_there_is_a_social_media_adtech/ https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/41zyoo/why_i_bel... [3] https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online-advertising-bubble https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online-adverti...
- burkemw3 10y agoI decided I cared less about this considering that I (and many others) already have a Google listening device with me more often than I'm in my kitchen: an Android phone.
- coldpie 10y agoIs there any evidence of Google actually doing this on a widespread basis? The Home is specifically designed to be an always-on microphone. My phone isn't.
- chadgeidel 10y agoI'm not sure if it's on by default, but the "OK Google" feature presumably requires an always-listening microphone on your phone.
- jumpCastle 10y agoThe difference in the quality of the microphones make it quiet impractical in phone, but very easy in a google home device.
- rthomas6 10y agoI'm trying to move away from Google, but I'm struggling to find anything close to the quality of Inbox. It's pretty much perfect. And it gets a lot of its greatness by reading my email and organizing my information and events for me. Is there anything non-cloud-based that I could use that even comes close to this?
- y4mi 10y agoreally? i used inbox since the closed beta as well, but recently (january) switched to another mail provider and can't say i really miss it. its kinda nice, but it was pretty easy to replace it with some static mail routing rules (and the added benefit of a wildcard email address, making $whatever@domain.tld possible, consequently making these rules even easier).
- rthomas6 10y agoI planned a short vacation earlier this month which involved flights, 2 different hotels, and a rental car. Inbox automatically gave me an itinerary with a timeline of each thing in order with all relevant info (flight times, flight number, hotel addresses, rental car company and confirmation number, etc) on one screen I could look at on my phone. It added my trip (and hotel stays) to my calendar on the correct dates so I could plan better. And it did all this without me asking it to do anything. Literally all I did was make reservations for things. It figured out where I was going, and that the flights, hotels, and rental car were all part of the same trip.
- yuvadam 10y agoYou don't have to self-host, there are many good email services out there that will happily take your business and are infinitely better than Gmail. I've been using Fastmail for the past few years and haven't looked back since.
- pokemongoaway 10y agoI think if we got a post to the top of HN we could get 20+ devs who all want this and could either make an OSS project or a competitive startup... Maybe I'm delusional though :)
- 65827 10y ago"This isn’t an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales." It just boggles my mind that anyone could read nonsense like this and not immediately say "I want nothing to do with that". This is evil corporatist greed along the lines of Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, or Halliburton. Alphabet needs to start getting called out forcefully, especially by their own employees and other tech leaders, whenever they pull this crap.
- username223 10y agoAssuming they haven't developed a deep neural net to generate PR-speak, I really want to understand the human(s) who wrote that. How do these people operate? I would assume they know they're spouting pure bullshit, know that everyone knows that, and simply don't care, but I'm not in that business.
- WA 10y agoMaybe it's like a game for copywriters: Don't take yourself too seriously and see what you can get away with.
- eip 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M
- gumby 10y agoI assume they just breathe their own exhaust and so that statement was heartfelt. You can imagine that especially non-technical people can believe that "advertising is annoying and intrusive but we have deep learning and so much knowledge of the user that the users will be delighted when we add to their experience. We'll just keep out the annoying stuff." And really are we any different? Any YC entrepreneur should know how to cold call, and the only way to bring yourself to do it is to believe in your heart that the person you're calling really will be happier with the information you provide, delighted that you called, so you aren't interrupting them at all.
- RickS 10y ago
- macawfish 10y agoStraight out of M.T. Anderson's Feed. Have you read it? Read it! (Or listen to it, there's a really great audio book of it)
- ksk 10y agoDoes anyone remember Patrick Norton on The ScreenSavers on TechTV in the 00s complaining about websites keeping access logs? Heck we even complained about cookies back then. The sick thing about the privacy trap is that they slow-cook you to the point where _not_ snooping on users becomes something akin to a business risk.
- dgudkov 10y agoI believe it already is a business risk because competitors would still keep doing this to their advantage even if you stop it. It's like smuggling -- once your competitor finds a way of smuggling goods safely, not doing it becomes a business risk, especially if margins are low.
- dep_b 10y agoIt's like buying a cat at a Monsanto pet store and complain afterwards it glows in the dark.
- jypepin 10y agoWatching the Edward Snowden is pretty eye opening about this kind of stuff. I was going to buy an Alexa devise, but thankfully watched the movie first and now I know I won't...