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Okay, I'll bite - what kinds of things do I not "understand is actually happening" in terms of what companies like Google and Facebook do with my data? I'm a re

Okay, I'll bite - what kinds of things do I not "understand is actually happening" in terms of what companies like Google and Facebook do with my data? I'm a reasonably technical person and I honestly believe the "tradeoffs" I'm making with companies like that are firmly in my favor. It's not the first time I've asked people who seemed convinced that I was in some sort of abusive Stockholm-syndrome relationship with Google/FB/etc to explain what exactly is so bad about the metadata packages they're selling. The only convincing arguments I've ever heard have centered around insurance companies denying me coverage based on risk factors I'm revealing, but I'm pretty sure nobody is actually doing that. Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me.

inetknght 9y ago
> I'm a reasonably technical person and I honestly believe the "tradeoffs" I'm making with companies like that are firmly in my favor. Have you even bothered to read EULAs and privacy agreements? > The only convincing arguments I've ever heard have centered around insurance companies denying me coverage based on risk factors I'm revealing, but I'm pretty sure nobody is actually doing that. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/24/stop-using-unroll-me-right-now-it-sold-your-data-to-uber/ https://theintercept.com/2017/04/24/stop-using-unroll-me-rig... http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/01/17/169634045/some-types-of-insurance-can-discriminate-based-on-genes http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/01/17/16963404... Think of it this way: suppose you're working on a project. A competitor (or, really, anyone who doesn't like you) rolls in and wants to discredit your stuff. All they have to do is mine your "private" data for anything that can be put into a bad light. Then, because your clients are "private", they then take that info to your clients and ask whether they want to continue doing business dealings with such disreputable people. Or worse. They make it public. Yeah that's not going to happen. I'm pretty sure nobody is actually doing that. It's not like that's exactly what's being played out in high U.S. politics right now... Podesta/Pizzagate, Trump/Russia, Clinton/pay-to-play, yeah there's definitely nothing gained from invasions of privacy. Don't worry. You're just the little guy. You won't be affected. Not until it's your boss that decides he needs a scapegoat.
- apetresc 9y ago
  You're kind of proving my point. - Your first link is about the unroll.me debacle. Perfect example to me of a completely overblown story. They used receipt data to produce an anonymized sum (probably broken down by things like region, etc) of total ride-sharing spend, which they sold to Uber. I guess that kinda sucks for Lyft if they weren't expecting Uber to have such an easy time getting at that number, but it's hardly destructive. In most other industries, there are dozens of well-respected, very rich firms who's whole job it is to use similar tricks to estimate market share, Nielsen being the best example. Is Uber getting Lyft's numbers this way really that different from Wal-Mart getting Target's numbers by getting Nielsen to pay shoppers to scan their Target purchases and give that data to them? (That's called the Nielsen HomeScan Program, by the way). I understand that HomeScan users are volunteering for this in a more explicit way than unroll.me users are, but again, this is a philosophical distinction. Absolutely 0 harm was done to me as an unroll.me user by them giving Uber this number. - Your second link is the one good argument that I already acknowledged. The insurance industry is 100% built around developing a good statistical model of risk so they can price premiums appropriately for that risk. Nobody bats an eye that insurance rates are different for women vs men, which is after all a genetic difference like the ones in the article. The only difference is that it's an obvious one. It's a complicated question and I can see why this is a good question for courts to consider, but it's not a foregone conclusion to me that insurance companies shouldn't be able to factor these things into their models. Either way, 99.99% of the things people on HN (or in this thread) complain about with regards to privacy has nothing to do with your genome. - Your other mess of points are all movie-plot conspiracies that are already illegal in other ways. This doesn't convince me at all. I'm not seriously weighing the risk of some international political scandal being played out with me as the scapegoat as a result of Facebook knowing what movies I like. Neither will the vast majority of people. This does not make them irrational.
  - exergy 9y ago
    You're raising excellent points, but I doubt you'll get a satisfactory explanation here. My brother does digital advertising for a living, whereas I have an opaque sticker on my front webcam. We come from opposite ends of the privacy spectrum, and talk about this issue every so often. And yet, I've never succeeded in convincing him that lack of privacy online will impact him personally. The reason for that is that it probably won't. He's savvy enough, like most people, to keep his accounts private to random Google searches of him. But he uses FB, snapchat, instagram, and all of them heavily. Ultimately, I'm forced to admit that being in touch with friends on FB adds value to his life. The fact that I personally don't care for that doesn't mean he doesn't or shouldn't, and for him, the trade-offs are completely acceptable.
aqsalose 9y ago
>Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. I am not really sure if targeted ads, targeted news, targeted posts, targeted everything in social media is a good thing for a society in the long run. The physical reality is still the same for us; it would be great if we all lived in the same mental reality, too. On a personal level, while some of the advertising is good (it's useful knowledge to know which online bookstores ship to my country and what are their prices), I've always found the idea of advertising bit scary. A certain kind of optimized stimuli will make me some percentage point more like likely to want to buy a some kind thing I did not want before? Brr. I want more control of what I want. And some tradeoffs are not about the data. I've also noticed that an infinitely long feed that you can scroll and scroll ... is slightly addictive. I've read that it is so on purpose: all social media platforms popular today make money by advertising, or in other words, by having their users spend their time procrastinating on Twitter/FB/etc (so that they see the ads). I don't think this is a net benefit to individual users or the society as a whole, either.
- apetresc 9y ago
  For sure I'm on the same page as you that the current "media climate" is not necessarily a healthy one for society as a whole. But almost nobody uses that kind of "if everybody simultaneously stopped doing X the world would be a better place, so I'll stop doing X" mentality when deciding on their own behavior. Hence climate change, nuclear de-armament, etc. The arguments on HN and other places for "online privacy" aren't usually hinging on this tragedy-of-the-commons point. They're usually heavily implying that some very real and personal harm is being perpetrated on the unsuspecting sheeple right now and if only they understood what was really happening they'd be up in arms. I don't think a vague uneasiness with consumerism in general is what they're alluding to.
  - lm_nop 9y ago
    A specific example of potential 'personal harm' due to highly detailed targeting is when Facebook identifies an individual who likely suffers from depression based on posts and preferences, and then targets advertisements that perpetuate an environment of depression. Anecdotal ref: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/when-facebook-and-instagram-thinks-youre-depressed https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/when-facebook-and-instagr...
khedoros1 9y ago
> Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. Seems like a win for them and a mixed blessing for me. Is there a chance that I'll learn of some new product or service that will improve my life enough to be worth the cost of privacy+cash? Yes. Does it make me more likely to buy something that won't be worth the cost? Yes. I'd rather reduce my costs by giving them less information and have a higher proportion of clearly-irrelevant ads that take less effort to evaluate and decide to ignore.
_jal 9y ago
My commentary isn't talking about HN denizens who sit around debating this stuff in their spare time. I'm talking about folks who buy surveillance-TVs 'cause they're new and cool, hook it up to their Wifi because that's what the directions said, and never thought about the idea that they just installed a remote listening device in their bedroom. And sure, probably only robots listen to it. Probably. As for personal harms, I readily admit that most of my concern is about risk. It is more speculative - as far as I know, there's not been a huge number of targeted attacks on random people yet, and for those that do happen, people focus on the specific details, rather than the data that enabled it. You can write off the attacks on political figures, because you're not that important. But that ignores all the Gmail cracks that compromise other services because enough data about them is floating around to make an attack possible. But 10 years ago, perople weren't worried about automated attacks on US tax returns, internet-originated bank heists and ATM harvester stories were novelties instead of near-daily occurrences, and so on. What data did I leak somewhere that will come back to bite me next decade?
sfilargi 9y ago
It is not only Facebook and Google. Case in point the recent revelations about Unroll.me, which was used by even a lot of HN regulars without even knowing the way their email and data are used.
alasdair_ 9y ago
Imagine ten years from now you decide to run for some kind of important political office. Imagine your opponent had access to every single search query, email and message you had ever sent. Imagine they had access to all of the GPS data from your smartphone so that they could tell exactly where you went each day, how long you spent there and (importantly) which other people were nearby. Correlate all that with all of the things you've ever bought because your credit card company sold that info years ago. Add in all the data from your spouse, your children and your closes family and friends. Now hand it to the people that are trying to smear your reputation in the worst possible way. You can see how easy it would be to sway elections this way. Even if right now it wasn't something you cared much about - this data is collected forever and I doubt you know exactly how your life is likely to be ten, twenty, thirty or more years from now.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  Playing devil's advocate: They might expose that a candidate just likes to grab women by the pussy who did not indicate that they'd like that to happen. The candidate might still successfully be elected.
  - spearmint 9y ago
    How is that playing devil's advocate? Are you implying that if such a campaign were to hurt a candidate you don't personally approve of, it would be perfectly fine?
    - ajmurmann 9y ago
      No, I'm saying that having even massive dirty like this on a candidate apparently doesn't prevent them from winning anyways. A common response to pussy gate was that you hear stuff like that in any mens room. So digging up dirty from twenty years ago from someone Facebook page will likely be met with the same response.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  I like this explanation but would suggest that the more likely scenario is that all that data is accidently dumped onto the Internet for anybody to dig through.
type0 9y ago
> basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. How do you know you'll get better ads? Maybe the algorithm decides you have the money to pay and you will be presented with overpriced products. I for sure fell victim to the advertising before and bought products that I payed to much for and made impulse purchases that I regretted ordering but still couldn't bother to send those back.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Since you seem to have decided that your privacy is unimportant, I'd like to let you know that I have not. I believe my privacy is very important to me, and want the ability to protect it. The fact remains, even if you don't care, you should still fight for the ability of others (like me) to do so. That is what liberty is. If you don't, we may all lose that ability. I don't want that to happen, and there are many others who don't either.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
Information is power, when is asymmetrical, detailed, indexable and searchable. History shows how most dictatorships worked very hard at accessing citizen informations while keeping secrecy about their actions. Democracies are based on the opposite principle where public bodies are transparent and citizens are attentive observers. The same power struggle exist between people and corporations.
tripzilch 9y ago
> Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. targeted ads are not better ads. they can be more effective ads. for the advertiser. not for the consumer of the content they are mixed with because they are harder to ignore or even distinguish. it's not in the interest of the consumer to be told what they want, and being told more effectively definitely isn't. also, on a personal level targeted ads creep me the hell out, piss me off way more than bullshit ad noise. I get a very different level of exposure in the EU, though, so the level of creepiness isn't quite as normalised. also with ads being as ubiquitous as they are, it's weird and alienating to make our ambient experiences not shared ones. it's like that vague unease using someone else's logged in youtube, the alienness of the suggestions, or reading along with someone else's Facebook feed and worrying about the bullshit they're peddled, which for once sticks out because it's not targeted at you. but they didn't ask for that, they were just told what to want. surely you don't think that the ads targeted at you are different? (even if you do, that kinda undermines the point they are generally win/win)

inetknght 9y ago

> I'm a reasonably technical person and I honestly believe the "tradeoffs" I'm making with companies like that are firmly in my favor. Have you even bothered to read EULAs and privacy agreements? > The only convincing arguments I've ever heard have centered around insurance companies denying me coverage based on risk factors I'm revealing, but I'm pretty sure nobody is actually doing that. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/24/stop-using-unroll-me-right-now-it-sold-your-data-to-uber/ https://theintercept.com/2017/04/24/stop-using-unroll-me-rig... http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/01/17/169634045/some-types-of-insurance-can-discriminate-based-on-genes http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/01/17/16963404... Think of it this way: suppose you're working on a project. A competitor (or, really, anyone who doesn't like you) rolls in and wants to discredit your stuff. All they have to do is mine your "private" data for anything that can be put into a bad light. Then, because your clients are "private", they then take that info to your clients and ask whether they want to continue doing business dealings with such disreputable people. Or worse. They make it public. Yeah that's not going to happen. I'm pretty sure nobody is actually doing that. It's not like that's exactly what's being played out in high U.S. politics right now... Podesta/Pizzagate, Trump/Russia, Clinton/pay-to-play, yeah there's definitely nothing gained from invasions of privacy. Don't worry. You're just the little guy. You won't be affected. Not until it's your boss that decides he needs a scapegoat.

apetresc 9y ago
You're kind of proving my point. - Your first link is about the unroll.me debacle. Perfect example to me of a completely overblown story. They used receipt data to produce an anonymized sum (probably broken down by things like region, etc) of total ride-sharing spend, which they sold to Uber. I guess that kinda sucks for Lyft if they weren't expecting Uber to have such an easy time getting at that number, but it's hardly destructive. In most other industries, there are dozens of well-respected, very rich firms who's whole job it is to use similar tricks to estimate market share, Nielsen being the best example. Is Uber getting Lyft's numbers this way really that different from Wal-Mart getting Target's numbers by getting Nielsen to pay shoppers to scan their Target purchases and give that data to them? (That's called the Nielsen HomeScan Program, by the way). I understand that HomeScan users are volunteering for this in a more explicit way than unroll.me users are, but again, this is a philosophical distinction. Absolutely 0 harm was done to me as an unroll.me user by them giving Uber this number. - Your second link is the one good argument that I already acknowledged. The insurance industry is 100% built around developing a good statistical model of risk so they can price premiums appropriately for that risk. Nobody bats an eye that insurance rates are different for women vs men, which is after all a genetic difference like the ones in the article. The only difference is that it's an obvious one. It's a complicated question and I can see why this is a good question for courts to consider, but it's not a foregone conclusion to me that insurance companies shouldn't be able to factor these things into their models. Either way, 99.99% of the things people on HN (or in this thread) complain about with regards to privacy has nothing to do with your genome. - Your other mess of points are all movie-plot conspiracies that are already illegal in other ways. This doesn't convince me at all. I'm not seriously weighing the risk of some international political scandal being played out with me as the scapegoat as a result of Facebook knowing what movies I like. Neither will the vast majority of people. This does not make them irrational.
- exergy 9y ago
  You're raising excellent points, but I doubt you'll get a satisfactory explanation here. My brother does digital advertising for a living, whereas I have an opaque sticker on my front webcam. We come from opposite ends of the privacy spectrum, and talk about this issue every so often. And yet, I've never succeeded in convincing him that lack of privacy online will impact him personally. The reason for that is that it probably won't. He's savvy enough, like most people, to keep his accounts private to random Google searches of him. But he uses FB, snapchat, instagram, and all of them heavily. Ultimately, I'm forced to admit that being in touch with friends on FB adds value to his life. The fact that I personally don't care for that doesn't mean he doesn't or shouldn't, and for him, the trade-offs are completely acceptable.

aqsalose 9y ago

>Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. I am not really sure if targeted ads, targeted news, targeted posts, targeted everything in social media is a good thing for a society in the long run. The physical reality is still the same for us; it would be great if we all lived in the same mental reality, too. On a personal level, while some of the advertising is good (it's useful knowledge to know which online bookstores ship to my country and what are their prices), I've always found the idea of advertising bit scary. A certain kind of optimized stimuli will make me some percentage point more like likely to want to buy a some kind thing I did not want before? Brr. I want more control of what I want. And some tradeoffs are not about the data. I've also noticed that an infinitely long feed that you can scroll and scroll ... is slightly addictive. I've read that it is so on purpose: all social media platforms popular today make money by advertising, or in other words, by having their users spend their time procrastinating on Twitter/FB/etc (so that they see the ads). I don't think this is a net benefit to individual users or the society as a whole, either.

apetresc 9y ago
For sure I'm on the same page as you that the current "media climate" is not necessarily a healthy one for society as a whole. But almost nobody uses that kind of "if everybody simultaneously stopped doing X the world would be a better place, so I'll stop doing X" mentality when deciding on their own behavior. Hence climate change, nuclear de-armament, etc. The arguments on HN and other places for "online privacy" aren't usually hinging on this tragedy-of-the-commons point. They're usually heavily implying that some very real and personal harm is being perpetrated on the unsuspecting sheeple right now and if only they understood what was really happening they'd be up in arms. I don't think a vague uneasiness with consumerism in general is what they're alluding to.
- lm_nop 9y ago
  A specific example of potential 'personal harm' due to highly detailed targeting is when Facebook identifies an individual who likely suffers from depression based on posts and preferences, and then targets advertisements that perpetuate an environment of depression. Anecdotal ref: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/when-facebook-and-instagram-thinks-youre-depressed https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/when-facebook-and-instagr...

khedoros1 9y ago

> Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. Seems like a win for them and a mixed blessing for me. Is there a chance that I'll learn of some new product or service that will improve my life enough to be worth the cost of privacy+cash? Yes. Does it make me more likely to buy something that won't be worth the cost? Yes. I'd rather reduce my costs by giving them less information and have a higher proportion of clearly-irrelevant ads that take less effort to evaluate and decide to ignore.

_jal 9y ago

My commentary isn't talking about HN denizens who sit around debating this stuff in their spare time. I'm talking about folks who buy surveillance-TVs 'cause they're new and cool, hook it up to their Wifi because that's what the directions said, and never thought about the idea that they just installed a remote listening device in their bedroom. And sure, probably only robots listen to it. Probably. As for personal harms, I readily admit that most of my concern is about risk. It is more speculative - as far as I know, there's not been a huge number of targeted attacks on random people yet, and for those that do happen, people focus on the specific details, rather than the data that enabled it. You can write off the attacks on political figures, because you're not that important. But that ignores all the Gmail cracks that compromise other services because enough data about them is floating around to make an attack possible. But 10 years ago, perople weren't worried about automated attacks on US tax returns, internet-originated bank heists and ATM harvester stories were novelties instead of near-daily occurrences, and so on. What data did I leak somewhere that will come back to bite me next decade?

sfilargi 9y ago

It is not only Facebook and Google. Case in point the recent revelations about Unroll.me, which was used by even a lot of HN regulars without even knowing the way their email and data are used.

alasdair_ 9y ago

Imagine ten years from now you decide to run for some kind of important political office. Imagine your opponent had access to every single search query, email and message you had ever sent. Imagine they had access to all of the GPS data from your smartphone so that they could tell exactly where you went each day, how long you spent there and (importantly) which other people were nearby. Correlate all that with all of the things you've ever bought because your credit card company sold that info years ago. Add in all the data from your spouse, your children and your closes family and friends. Now hand it to the people that are trying to smear your reputation in the worst possible way. You can see how easy it would be to sway elections this way. Even if right now it wasn't something you cared much about - this data is collected forever and I doubt you know exactly how your life is likely to be ten, twenty, thirty or more years from now.

ajmurmann 9y ago
Playing devil's advocate: They might expose that a candidate just likes to grab women by the pussy who did not indicate that they'd like that to happen. The candidate might still successfully be elected.
- spearmint 9y ago
  How is that playing devil's advocate? Are you implying that if such a campaign were to hurt a candidate you don't personally approve of, it would be perfectly fine?
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    No, I'm saying that having even massive dirty like this on a candidate apparently doesn't prevent them from winning anyways. A common response to pussy gate was that you hear stuff like that in any mens room. So digging up dirty from twenty years ago from someone Facebook page will likely be met with the same response.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
I like this explanation but would suggest that the more likely scenario is that all that data is accidently dumped onto the Internet for anybody to dig through.

type0 9y ago

> basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. How do you know you'll get better ads? Maybe the algorithm decides you have the money to pay and you will be presented with overpriced products. I for sure fell victim to the advertising before and bought products that I payed to much for and made impulse purchases that I regretted ordering but still couldn't bother to send those back.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Since you seem to have decided that your privacy is unimportant, I'd like to let you know that I have not. I believe my privacy is very important to me, and want the ability to protect it. The fact remains, even if you don't care, you should still fight for the ability of others (like me) to do so. That is what liberty is. If you don't, we may all lose that ability. I don't want that to happen, and there are many others who don't either.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago

Information is power, when is asymmetrical, detailed, indexable and searchable. History shows how most dictatorships worked very hard at accessing citizen informations while keeping secrecy about their actions. Democracies are based on the opposite principle where public bodies are transparent and citizens are attentive observers. The same power struggle exist between people and corporations.

tripzilch 9y ago

> Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me. targeted ads are not better ads. they can be more effective ads. for the advertiser. not for the consumer of the content they are mixed with because they are harder to ignore or even distinguish. it's not in the interest of the consumer to be told what they want, and being told more effectively definitely isn't. also, on a personal level targeted ads creep me the hell out, piss me off way more than bullshit ad noise. I get a very different level of exposure in the EU, though, so the level of creepiness isn't quite as normalised. also with ads being as ubiquitous as they are, it's weird and alienating to make our ambient experiences not shared ones. it's like that vague unease using someone else's logged in youtube, the alienness of the suggestions, or reading along with someone else's Facebook feed and worrying about the bullshit they're peddled, which for once sticks out because it's not targeted at you. but they didn't ask for that, they were just told what to want. surely you don't think that the ads targeted at you are different? (even if you do, that kinda undermines the point they are generally win/win)