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Is this really surprising to anyone but the laymen? I mean, of course they store everything the user does, why wouldn't they?

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>I mean, of course they store everything the user does, why wouldn't they? Because their behavior fits the legal definition of stalking in many jurisdictions. Yes, the user "consented" to the stalking, but many of their friends which are being stalked as a result did not.
untog 9y ago
> Is this really surprising to anyone but the laymen? That's a pretty huge caveat. "This isn't news, except to the majority of people". It's an article in The Guardian, it's obvious intended for the "laymen", of which there are a pretty big number. > of course they store everything the user does, why wouldn't they? That's the crux of it, for me. I agree, they have no incentives not to hoard data. So those incentives, like GDPR, should be created.
- tomxor 9y ago
  > That's a pretty huge caveat. "This isn't news, except to the majority of people" TL;DR defaults matter to the layman - the 99%, google will say they gave you the options (so many that it's tiresome for most people to bother going through). Yup, when reading through all of the stuff I was just checking off my mental list of all the things that don't affect me. I don't use google on phones, and for gmail stuff i've already trawled through the massive list of options to stop tracking and logging various stuff. Additionally I only log into a google account in isolation so it can't join history together. Even after all of this I recognise that google mostly likely has other tricks up it's sleeves like browser fingerprinting to join sessions together and associate their activity with my account in secret, not to mention they are mining all of my email of course, but this is the best I can do while continuing to use a google account (and even without a google account they can still track individuals via other means). This is only practical for those the most aware of what these companies do and the most interested in preventing - understandably, the layman just wants to use it as intended without doing days of research and digging through piles of options in paranoia trying to turn everything off, these types of services rely on this fact. I am not a normal user and they really don't care that 1e-10% are evading them, they are relying on the fact that almost all of their users wont be going to great lengths to turn all the tracking and logging options off.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

>I mean, of course they store everything the user does, why wouldn't they? Because their behavior fits the legal definition of stalking in many jurisdictions. Yes, the user "consented" to the stalking, but many of their friends which are being stalked as a result did not.

untog 9y ago

> Is this really surprising to anyone but the laymen? That's a pretty huge caveat. "This isn't news, except to the majority of people". It's an article in The Guardian, it's obvious intended for the "laymen", of which there are a pretty big number. > of course they store everything the user does, why wouldn't they? That's the crux of it, for me. I agree, they have no incentives not to hoard data. So those incentives, like GDPR, should be created.

tomxor 9y ago
> That's a pretty huge caveat. "This isn't news, except to the majority of people" TL;DR defaults matter to the layman - the 99%, google will say they gave you the options (so many that it's tiresome for most people to bother going through). Yup, when reading through all of the stuff I was just checking off my mental list of all the things that don't affect me. I don't use google on phones, and for gmail stuff i've already trawled through the massive list of options to stop tracking and logging various stuff. Additionally I only log into a google account in isolation so it can't join history together. Even after all of this I recognise that google mostly likely has other tricks up it's sleeves like browser fingerprinting to join sessions together and associate their activity with my account in secret, not to mention they are mining all of my email of course, but this is the best I can do while continuing to use a google account (and even without a google account they can still track individuals via other means). This is only practical for those the most aware of what these companies do and the most interested in preventing - understandably, the layman just wants to use it as intended without doing days of research and digging through piles of options in paranoia trying to turn everything off, these types of services rely on this fact. I am not a normal user and they really don't care that 1e-10% are evading them, they are relying on the fact that almost all of their users wont be going to great lengths to turn all the tracking and logging options off.