4 ms·

I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization. They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to b

I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization. They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. An example of a corporation I would never work for would be Nestle, which has caused death and dependency with their products in Africa. Email providers (Google, Microsoft, your ISP, or even Yahoo) having access to your email is the very nature of unencrypted email unless you expect everyone to run their own mail servers. And non-gmail users can definitely send email to gmail users; I've definitely sent email from an organization I worked at that used Outlook+Exchange to my personal gmail acocunt. I have also had scripts that sent out email from a (now defunct) website in the past and really had not issue getting email accepted once I set up reverse DNS, but admittedly that was many years ago. "Easy to ignore" just meant easy to ignore internal corporate-speak bullshit, similar internal buzzwords that I've seen at every company I've worked at of any size. A dictator could already gain control of any communications platform in theory, such as your phone company. In fact, the NSA already does spy on communications in the US (and probably abroad). Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company?

danieldk 10y ago
They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. You cannot trivially opt out of Google tracking you or your environment. To give some examples: - Google reads all my e-mail sent to a Google Mail user to build advertising profiles. - Google Analytics is used by many websites and can be used by Google to track users' movements around the web. Obviously, ads can be used for the same purposes. - Google snoops access points and maps them to GPS positions. It's not opt-in, but you have to opt-out by adding _nomap to your SSID. To make this even more annoying, Microsoft has different requirements to opt out of their tracking. - Google snaps photos of my house, street, car without ever asking permission and puts them online. Applies machine learning to extract data. Unfortunately, we cannot know what data. A lot of things that Google does are incredibly offensive privacy violations (even if not by law), but it is hard or impossible to opt out of them. Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company? There are also communication companies with moral values and that try to avoid collecting and retaining as much possible data and metadata. (Fastmail, Protonmail, Signal, XS4All, to just name a few). I would also like to point out that there is a huge difference between (1) a dictator can monitor all your traffic from this point in time (ISP with short log retention) and (2) a dictator can scan virtually behaviour data of the last decade to see whether someone was gay, communicated with a leftist group, or whatever 'crime' one can commit. At any rate, 'others do it too' is a terrible argument. A lot of humans do a lot of terrible things. That does not mean that we do not have to strive for a more reasonable world.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > Applies machine learning to extract data. Not only machines are let loose on that data. Ever try to open some websites through a VPN or Tor? Often you'll be presented with Google's Recaptcha tool to verify that you are not a robot but a genuine human visitor (to prevent spam and DDOS attacks). To gain access to the website itself you are enlisted to train Google's algorithms to properly recognize objects on outdoor photographs — including but not limited to mountains, store fronts, house numbers, and cars. A recent 'innovation' has you freehand draw the outline of traffic signs. All unpaid labour, all for a huge proprietary dataset. The old Recaptcha system of proofreading OCR scanned words from books at least had some public merit.
ashark 10y ago
> I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization. It's not just making money from ads like an old-school newspaper did, it's 1) collecting so much data about people, 2) using it to crank the existing evil of ads (they're often highly asymmetric psychological warfare, after all) up to 11 with targeting, 3) sucking the air out of the room for privacy-respecting services with non-spying business models, 4) a bit more mundane than those other problems, but, extortion—I sure see a lot of ads for exactly the company/site I was obviously searching for at the top of my search results, and this is due to putting ads inline with search results, which forces companies to buy ads for searches that are clearly specifically for them. The inline, top-of-results ads are misleading to users and force "protection money" out of companies.
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  > I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization 5) To protect ad revenue, its changing the nature of the web. Who the fuck is Google to decide whether guest blogging is or is not a good thing? So, Google is not really smart enough to figure out how to rank websites when real people get together and collude to improve their chances in the game. I suppose they would rather just deal with non-human websites than the humans who are the source of those websites. 1. Which makes the following statement really ironic "I'm treated more like a human than I would be at many other companies" 2. It is probably a signal that perhaps the "product" is not "clearly very high quality", but rather is just somewhat better than the next best one, so instead of saying "We are too dumb to figure it out", their story was "people are manipulating things behind our backs and since there is such a big human component, we are being misled". Hmmm...so some humans are getting together behind closed doors to game the system, and this is upsetting the tech giants? So how should the rest of the population feel when they ask themselves the same question about what is happening within the walls of the tech giants' offices as they make a ton of sneaky decisions which is causing a lot of problems for people's privacy? I once made a suggestion on this forum to compile every publicly known piece of information about all the employees at Google and Facebook (and while you are at it, why not Amazon and Microsoft?), and release it as a Kaggle [1] dataset for data mining and see how they would feel about it. Are there colleagues involved in secret relationships? Boy, I would sure enjoy knowing it just as much as GooFace likes to triangulate information about me. Are there folks who are actively supporting Donald Trump every time they can while putting on a liberal face within the organizations? Hey, I think it would be great fun to out them to their colleagues and sit back and watch the show. Someone retorted that I am threatening "doxing". Oh yes, let us all be sure to be very respectful of the same people who don't think there is anything wrong with not giving us the same respect. The ire directed at these organizations is well deserved, and well earned. [1] Yeah, so Google acquired Kaggle. Just release it someplace else.

danieldk 10y ago

They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. You cannot trivially opt out of Google tracking you or your environment. To give some examples: - Google reads all my e-mail sent to a Google Mail user to build advertising profiles. - Google Analytics is used by many websites and can be used by Google to track users' movements around the web. Obviously, ads can be used for the same purposes. - Google snoops access points and maps them to GPS positions. It's not opt-in, but you have to opt-out by adding _nomap to your SSID. To make this even more annoying, Microsoft has different requirements to opt out of their tracking. - Google snaps photos of my house, street, car without ever asking permission and puts them online. Applies machine learning to extract data. Unfortunately, we cannot know what data. A lot of things that Google does are incredibly offensive privacy violations (even if not by law), but it is hard or impossible to opt out of them. Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company? There are also communication companies with moral values and that try to avoid collecting and retaining as much possible data and metadata. (Fastmail, Protonmail, Signal, XS4All, to just name a few). I would also like to point out that there is a huge difference between (1) a dictator can monitor all your traffic from this point in time (ISP with short log retention) and (2) a dictator can scan virtually behaviour data of the last decade to see whether someone was gay, communicated with a leftist group, or whatever 'crime' one can commit. At any rate, 'others do it too' is a terrible argument. A lot of humans do a lot of terrible things. That does not mean that we do not have to strive for a more reasonable world.

Freak_NL 10y ago
> Applies machine learning to extract data. Not only machines are let loose on that data. Ever try to open some websites through a VPN or Tor? Often you'll be presented with Google's Recaptcha tool to verify that you are not a robot but a genuine human visitor (to prevent spam and DDOS attacks). To gain access to the website itself you are enlisted to train Google's algorithms to properly recognize objects on outdoor photographs — including but not limited to mountains, store fronts, house numbers, and cars. A recent 'innovation' has you freehand draw the outline of traffic signs. All unpaid labour, all for a huge proprietary dataset. The old Recaptcha system of proofreading OCR scanned words from books at least had some public merit.

ashark 10y ago

> I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization. It's not just making money from ads like an old-school newspaper did, it's 1) collecting so much data about people, 2) using it to crank the existing evil of ads (they're often highly asymmetric psychological warfare, after all) up to 11 with targeting, 3) sucking the air out of the room for privacy-respecting services with non-spying business models, 4) a bit more mundane than those other problems, but, extortion—I sure see a lot of ads for exactly the company/site I was obviously searching for at the top of my search results, and this is due to putting ads inline with search results, which forces companies to buy ads for searches that are clearly specifically for them. The inline, top-of-results ads are misleading to users and force "protection money" out of companies.

thr0waway1239 10y ago
> I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization 5) To protect ad revenue, its changing the nature of the web. Who the fuck is Google to decide whether guest blogging is or is not a good thing? So, Google is not really smart enough to figure out how to rank websites when real people get together and collude to improve their chances in the game. I suppose they would rather just deal with non-human websites than the humans who are the source of those websites. 1. Which makes the following statement really ironic "I'm treated more like a human than I would be at many other companies" 2. It is probably a signal that perhaps the "product" is not "clearly very high quality", but rather is just somewhat better than the next best one, so instead of saying "We are too dumb to figure it out", their story was "people are manipulating things behind our backs and since there is such a big human component, we are being misled". Hmmm...so some humans are getting together behind closed doors to game the system, and this is upsetting the tech giants? So how should the rest of the population feel when they ask themselves the same question about what is happening within the walls of the tech giants' offices as they make a ton of sneaky decisions which is causing a lot of problems for people's privacy? I once made a suggestion on this forum to compile every publicly known piece of information about all the employees at Google and Facebook (and while you are at it, why not Amazon and Microsoft?), and release it as a Kaggle [1] dataset for data mining and see how they would feel about it. Are there colleagues involved in secret relationships? Boy, I would sure enjoy knowing it just as much as GooFace likes to triangulate information about me. Are there folks who are actively supporting Donald Trump every time they can while putting on a liberal face within the organizations? Hey, I think it would be great fun to out them to their colleagues and sit back and watch the show. Someone retorted that I am threatening "doxing". Oh yes, let us all be sure to be very respectful of the same people who don't think there is anything wrong with not giving us the same respect. The ire directed at these organizations is well deserved, and well earned. [1] Yeah, so Google acquired Kaggle. Just release it someplace else.