10 ms·
Google and Facebook are watching our every move online
- Zhyl 9y agoI read the opening paragraph and thought 'wow, this guy has clearly just taken the release statement from Duckduckgo's privacy app announcement (or possibly their much-upvoted AMA) and just copied and pasted some statistics.' Then I saw the author.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoWell spotted, very funny. Speaking of which, I recently moved to DDG and couldn't be happier. Frankly the only thing I don't like about DDG is the name.
- dnate 9y agoyes, DDG has been nothing bu bliss lately. I did 99% of my master thesis research on there. And the other 1% I went to google for usually didn't turn up anything useful either.
- DavideNL 9y ago> And the other 1% I went to google Next time, don't go to Google, but go to Startpage. They have the same results as Google but they strip all the Google crap for more privacy. You can search Startpage.com from within duckduckgo by "searching" in Duckduckgo for: !sp hackernews :-)
- atc 9y agoMoved a few months ago, have zero issues. 99% of my queries are there now. I'm leaving Google as much as possible - I'm seriously concerned at the fact their workforce is made up of fascists on the left & the right of the spectrum and they're "pro diveristy" when it comes to colour but not of opionion. We shouldn't be rewarding that mentality.
- ucaetano 9y agoYes! Disable 3rd party cookies, delete your Google & Facebook accounts, and done. Easy peasy.
- kuschku 9y ago"Google says it has access to roughly 70% of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with companies that track that data." "Google DeepMind's first deal with the NHS [...] gave the Google-owned artificial intelligence (AI) lab access to 1.6 million NHS patient records across three North London hospitals without patient's prior knowledge." "Google starts tracking offline shopping" Sure. Deleting the accounts surely is enough.
- gaius 9y agoIndeed. It will take legislative action including no-knock raids on DCs and offices to rein them in. Someone in the NHS needs to be held responsible too.
- fixermark 9y agoIt's interesting that you trust a government to execute a no-knock raid on a private company's datacenter (and extract only the information that is relevant without drag-netting unrelated private information) more than you trust that private company to secure your data (an exercise they have a vested economic interest in accomplishing). At the end of the day, all of these questions always come down to trust and just trust.
- gaius 9y agoI don’t mean extracting it - I mean destroying it.
- ucaetano 9y agoOh, none of those are exclusive or even new. Your credit rating company has far more info on you that you didn't sign up for. And AFAIK, and from what I heard from friends working at google, everything is linked to a google gaia account, if you don't have one, you don't exist for them. Have you deleted your Google and Fb account yet?
- mar77i 9y agoDuck, duck, duck, duck, duck...
- mar77i 9y ago...go?
- ielfkd 9y agoi think many orgs instead of suing google n such orgs if they simply use that money to invest in good organizations which are open and respect an individuals privacy that ll lead to a better world. it is not the law that is going to protect the people it is money in the good people's hand that is going to take us in a positive future. doing one good to cover up 18 other bad things is not considered good.
- rand0mthought 9y agoFunny, but Privacy Badger blocked 10 trackers in this article
- igravious 9y agoFTA: “What you may not realize, though, is 76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. The next highest is Twitter with 12 percent.” Article postscript: “Commentary by Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo, which makes online privacy tools, including an alternative search engine to Google. Follow him on Twitter @yegg . For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.” Kind of set off my irony detector!
- zevv 9y agoMy ghostery blocked 24
- PuffinBlue 9y agoublock didn't block anything. Then I realised that this site allows auto-playing videos so at some point in the past I seem to have disabled JavaScript on this site. I wish it was easier to control JavaScript usage as the visitor. It's either very complex or just 'turn it all off and go somewhere else if nothing works'. Perhaps the second option is the 'correct' response though.
- morganvachon 9y agoIf you're using Firefox and you want to keep JavaScript enabled but stop auto-playing videos, you can go into about:config and set media.autoplay.enabled to false. I'm not sure if other browsers have a similar switch, but this works in any current version of Firefox. It only affects HTML5 video containers; Flash and Silverlight video containers may still auto-play.
- Slansitartop 9y ago
- ielfkd 9y agoI hope duck duck go is not some google's back channel project just to have a leg in contradicting initiatives.
- lerie82 9y agoI hate reading news articles about tech stuff from "leading news sources", they never really know what's going on. It's like they use technology to scare people into either voting for someone or buying something from someone.
- astro_robot 9y agoHonest question. I'm unsure what the danger is in letting these companies acquire data on us. We get a lot of benefit from using their products for free. Why should I care about giving my data to them as a cost of admission?
- rahoulb 9y agoWatch Minority Report, then replace "psychics" with "data-mining"
- metalliqaz 9y agoThe aggregation of data is extensive and the ubiquity of the net means the data covers nearly every aspect of your life. Such information can be misused in many ways. Unfortunately, those misuses don't really become clear until the data set is already built, so there is no way to undo it. Even if Facebook or Google don't exploit the data themselves, the data could be stolen by criminals or seized by the government. Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay up? Is that worth the price free access to your high-school friends' duckface selfies?
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago>Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay up? Once tabloid journalists start trying to infer embarrassing things about politicians based on metadata we'll probably have some progress.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- programmarchy 9y agoPerhaps you don't have any controversial opinions or beliefs. However, that could change. Not because you change your views, but because in the future a power could arise that wants to kill people who believe the things you do, and has no problem using force to acquire the data from Google to make their lists. Suddenly, you have a problem.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Google and Facebook's hidden trackers across the Internet,..." Are these "hidden trackers" mentioned in the article just the normal beacons or are they referring to something new? Are these relevant if a person is not logged into neither FB or Google or if someone has uBlock Origin/Privacy Badger installed?
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoFacebook, at least, is quite happy to build your shadow profile regardless of whether you're logged in.
- bogomipz 9y agoRight, they're buying those from 3rd party data brokers I believe. This is the place where legislation is needed so people can own their own data. I would love to see some clearing house that sends out requests to people saying "Facebook or whomever is interested in acquiring your day" and you are given the option of approving or denying.
- lucb1e 9y ago> they're buying those from 3rd party data brokers I believe Huh, why would they need to? The first time you load an element from Facebook (be it a like button, comments or something else) you just get a unique cookie and there's your Facebook profile. Now it's a waiting game until you log in and they can connect it to a person, or you do something else that allows them to identify you (maybe visiting friend's pages, and they already have WhatsApp data so they know who talks with that specific set of people? Idk, there's just so much data and so many options). Or they can never connect it to a person but they can still show you good ads based on that browsing history.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bogomipz 9y ago
- trqx 9y agoA common behavior I witness, is people using ad/tracker blockers such as ublock origin and/or umatrix and yet continue to consult websites that makes use of those trackers. Worse, they link those sites to other people that might not make use of those blockers. They don't think much of it, but ain't that evil? Most of the times they don't even notice anymore that trackers were blocked on the page they consult. Just look at links posted here on HN, most are of hostile websites. I'd love to see a browser extension more radical: if it detects such third party scripts or cookies it simply stop loading the page and display a message explaining why instead. Someone sends you a link to an article on cnn.com? Answer with this message telling why you won't consult it. Going further: the extension attempts to extract the content, strip it of anything useless (some js libs works OK for such tasks), and share this version with others using this extension.
- Daycrawler 9y agoWhy stopping going to the sites? The point of blockers is specifically to make them harmless.
- trqx 9y agoSo they stop doing arm to others. Once most websites understand it is not viable to attempt to mess with their own visitors, browsers could block the remaining ones by default?
- metalliqaz 9y agoI don't know what I would read all day if I had that extension installed. There'd be nothing left. Classic quote, semi-relevant: "I'm pretty sure that if you took all the porn off the internet there would only be one site left and it would be called 'bring back the porn'" -Dr Cox
- IncRnd 9y agoThat may be, but I'm happy that my blocker stopped 25 scripts/ads/sites from loading at this articles page!
- Fej 9y agoThe metaphorical Pandora's box has been opened, and the contents aren't going back in. Best we can hope for is practical legislation. The EU is ahead on this one. Its GDPR is going to throw a massive wrench in these practices.
- kasey_junk 9y agoI don't think that GDPR is going to disrupt the google/facebook dominance in advertising nor curtail their collecting data about you. In fact, I believe GDPR rewards their walled garden/integration strategy. The most onerous and problematic parts of GDPR for adtech companies is the acquisition of consent to share the data they gather with their partners. This means that every barrier from publisher, to ad network, to advertiser needs to be consented. Google/Facebook are themselves massive players at each of those levels and therefore can skip that step. We don't know what will happen in the future, but I suspect that Google/Facebook will leverage their systems at both the publisher and advertiser areas to put more of the ecosystem into their systems. This may be ok, consolidating your information into a couple of big players that have an even more holistic view of you might be preferable to having little views of you all over the internet. But its worse for advertisers and publishers and I find it disconcerting. * Disclaimer: I work on GDPR related topics, this is my opinion and not that of my employer
- marten-de-vries 9y agoThe article seems to argue for a GDPR[1]-like equivalent in the US. It'll be interesting to see how it is enforced in the EU. If applied as intended, it could offer a more realistic alternative to the only other privacy-preserving option at the moment: not using Google/Facebook/etc. 'noyb'[2] is planning to help that along. I just hope we don't get another cookie-law like debacle. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... [2]: https://noyb.eu/ https://noyb.eu/
- linsomniac 9y agoI feel like I'm in the minority, but I'm mostly ok with Google. I feel like they are good stewards of my data (encrypting even internal traffic, severe restrictions on who can get access to my data, doing useful things with that data). I believe Facebook has similar policies in place. I think their biggest sins are just being big. It makes them a larger target (which probably necessitates them taking extreme protections, otherwise they WOULD be taken down). Others that are much more concerning don't get attacked simply because they are smaller. For example Lyft and Uber who have both been found to have all sorts of personally identifiable information available to random employees. Or various ISPs tracking of data flowing through it. To me, the cost of being google's product, is outweighed by what they provide me with. Search, news, music, assistant functions, "remember this day", "here is your family growing up", e-mail, automation of e-mails into actionable widgets... These things all are powered by Google knowing kind of a lot about me. I don't know of any alternative to Google for these services, that respects privacy.
- gknoy 9y agoFacebook's "X years ago today, you posted this ..." has been amazing. I don't usually re-share it but it really brightens my morning or day to see photos of my kids when they were 4-5 years younger, and marvel at how much they've grown. I mean, I'd still think about that even without FB showing me things, but I would not have managed to build a "here's a flashback!" photo-reminder system. In an age when we take SO MANY PHOTOS (and don't even bother curating them because we don't have time for it), it's nice to have that too.
- mdekkers 9y agoFacebook's "X years ago today, you posted this ..." has been amazing I can see your point but it isn't relevant to the article, and also, it is a matter of perspective. I managed to permanently disable it, after it kept popping up photos of my then-recently deceased spouse. Not something I was ready to deal with, and after switching it off, FB helpfully turned it back on for me. I eventually managed to disable it permanently, but if there is one thing I hate it is for some software to treat my instructions as suggestions.
- 9y ago
- danjc 9y agoSurely the bullet at the top should read "Google and Facebook's impact on our privacy cannot be overstated", not understated!
- resu_nimda 9y agoGoogle and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble — an alternate digital universe that controls what you see in their products, based on what their algorithms think you are most likely to click on. These echo chambers distort people's reality, creating a myriad of unintended consequences such as increasing societal polarization. How is this any different from the pre- or sans-Google and Facebook world? People have always lived in bubbles, always been funneled down a particular path by their experiential influences. Without Google or Facebook, if you were a white supremacist, it’s probably because you were influenced by white supremacists and you would continue to surround yourself with them. If you were someone who really strived to expose yourself to different ideas and things outside your bubble, you can arguably do that easier than ever now. This isn’t really to “exonerate” FB and Big G, but I think it’s worth asking what impact they’ve really had on this basic facet of life.
- SirFatty 9y agoSo are you suggesting that it isn't much, much worse now?
- resu_nimda 9y agoMuch worse relative to what? An actual point in the past where people’s lives were less “bubble-y?” Or a hypothetical scenario where Facebook and Google took it upon themselves to upend the natural tendency of people to prefer identifying and associating with familiar, like-minded people and ideas?
- rhizome 9y agoI think it’s worth asking what impact they’ve really had on this basic facet of life Absolutely zero, and have arguably made it worse.
- resu_nimda 9y agoYes, I am asking what those arguments are. Keeping in mind that “worse” is a relative term, i.e. it needs to be demonstrated how it was better at some other time, which the article seems to assume a priori.
- DaniFong 9y agoThese guys are selling data to "advertisers" that are actually trolls trying to subvert our democracy. They specifically target pain points and make things unbearable online for people. They use their data to alter the subliminal landscape. It made everyone at each other's throats.
- tomc1985 9y agoNot only do we need to make them stop, we need to make them purge.
- evolve2k 9y agoAddressing root causes one key approach would be for someone to develop a better alternative to google analytics. I'd hazard that the usefulness and ease of use for webmasters to install analytics tracking via google analytics is the number one reasons that 76% of sites include google tracking. Develop a mass replacement for GA and you'll directly hut that number.
- no_identd 9y agoHow much would it cost to pay off every single Hollywood paparazzi to drive over to Silicon Valley and focus their attention on the Google, Facebook & Microsoft executives for a month?
- CodeSheikh 9y agoThey provide free services. What do you expect? The data they have collected is so lucrative for them that they would never offer Facebook, Gmail, Google Search on a premium basis to daily consumer. I mean I would take premium package if they guarantee that they will not parse my images, parse my emails, parse my searches, connect dots among my social peers in order to help train their AI bots. Which/whenever they will use in the future to come up with better products or improve their existing products. Sure there are problems associated with it. One of them is when malicious players like foreign govts get hold of such data and use it to their advantage.
- basicplus2 9y agoI use One phone for phone calls and personal use providing a wifi hotspot to another phone for Facebook and Google account.. I just wish I could get two separate phones in one case
- mnm1 9y agoWriting better articles than this is the way to stop Google/FB/advertising. Educating people on how dangerous ads are and what the solutions are (uBlock origin, turning off JS, VPNs, and hosts files etc.) is the main thing we can do other than making such things the defaults in products like Firefox (which doesn't even have such features built in yet, afaik). Once a large enough percentage of the population is using such solutions, tracking will no longer be a problem. If the argument is that most people won't want to deal with such education or the solutions it proposes, then those people simply do not deserve privacy or security. People that are too lazy/stupid to use computers probably shouldn't without the supervision of someone competent anyway. Yes, that includes the proverbial grandma--I don't let my mother use a computer I haven't prepared for her, for example.
- bb88 9y agoThis isn't news. This has been well known for a while now.
- rapnie 9y agoimho the current web is broken.. it has become entirely dominated by monopolists, which will only grow larger.. more dominating we need: - The Decentralized Web (as it was originally envisioned) - Users in full control of their own data - Privacy-first approaches only - Stricter regulation (though tough to implement well)
- IncRnd 9y ago> we need: - The Decentralized Web (as it was originally envisioned) - Users in full control of their own data - Privacy-first approaches only - Stricter regulation (though tough to implement well) You have that now! Just stop giving your data to companies you don't want to have it. The people who never give their data away wonder at the people who give their data away, then call for regulation.
- rapnie 9y agosure, we have it.. but we need to use it pervasively, en masse :) and not giving your data away is _really_ hard for average user, when google is so deeply engrained in the web
- featherverse 9y agoHow many years of these warnings is it going to take before people actually take action? A couple of browser plugins and a change of search engines and social platforms will solve this problem entirely.