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I agree with you on the technical merit (or lack thereof) of illustrating the magnitude with colorful metaphors. However, a counter point: I feel it is useful

by bhauer 9y ago

I agree with you on the technical merit (or lack thereof) of illustrating the magnitude with colorful metaphors. However, a counter point: I feel it is useful and helpful to our cause to have authors such as this creating those colorful metaphors. We have tried in vain to communicate to laypeople the importance of data safety, self-ownership of data, being mindful of one's privacy, and being suspicious of the data collected by third-parties. I believe laypeople remain disinterested because the way we raise these concerns is abstract. In order to convince laypeople that control of one's data is important, those of us who are matter-of-fact on the matter will convey the facts and try to construct fairly mild-tempered plausible threat scenarios that are, frankly, unconvincing to the majority of people we are trying to convince. For a good chunk of those we're trying to convince, vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat are what is necessary to tip the scale. The recent twitter thread that showed a map of Ireland with every point the user had been in the past several years was a poignant visual representation of our argument. It made the argument way better than repeatedly saying, "Google tracks your location, always!" When we've presented that abstract point previously, we've heard "I don't care, that's fine" as a response every time. And then someone shows them this map and suddenly: "Whoa, that is creepy!" Yes! I for one welcome a bit of colorful language, as long as we don't get totally carried away. I don't really dig the "Well, duh!" attitude if we convey that to the people we're trying to convince. We're trying to make laypeople value their own privacy and feel good doing so. Not judged for having been ignorant of or disinterested in our previous arguments. Be welcoming of this good favor in the fight for data privacy.

danarmak 9y ago
The problem isn't how they describe the size of the data. It's that the data whose size they describe is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make. I didn't say "well duh, Google has at least 5GB on you, that's a small number really". I said "well duh, of course Google has your gmails and Drive docs" - and they are as small or large as you make them, their size is completely irrelevant. I did snipe at the comparison to Word docs, not because it's a non-commensurable unit but because Word docs don't have a size - I can easily make a single Word doc 5GB large. But that was an aside quite irrelevant to my main point and maybe I should have omitted it.
Bartweiss 9y ago
> vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat In this case, though, I don't think it's an illustration of the threat at all. The location tracking map may be visceral enough to motivate people, and that's fine. Sometimes people need a strong visual to act on something they already knew. But the "5.5Gb, millions of Word documents!" bit? That's an archive including your Google Drive files, of course it's comparable in size to the free storage Google provides. And perhaps more importantly, if your Takeout archive is only 10Mb, that doesn't even begin to imply Google lacks records on you. Potent metaphors are great, and I certainly recognize the problem of techies saying "yeah, duh, obviously" without helping people really understand the consequences of a topic. But in the Takeout case it feels like responding to consumer indifference about real problems by sparking fear over a basically meaningless topic.

by bhauer 9y ago

danarmak 9y ago

The problem isn't how they describe the size of the data. It's that the data whose size they describe is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make. I didn't say "well duh, Google has at least 5GB on you, that's a small number really". I said "well duh, of course Google has your gmails and Drive docs" - and they are as small or large as you make them, their size is completely irrelevant. I did snipe at the comparison to Word docs, not because it's a non-commensurable unit but because Word docs don't have a size - I can easily make a single Word doc 5GB large. But that was an aside quite irrelevant to my main point and maybe I should have omitted it.

Bartweiss 9y ago

> vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat In this case, though, I don't think it's an illustration of the threat at all. The location tracking map may be visceral enough to motivate people, and that's fine. Sometimes people need a strong visual to act on something they already knew. But the "5.5Gb, millions of Word documents!" bit? That's an archive including your Google Drive files, of course it's comparable in size to the free storage Google provides. And perhaps more importantly, if your Takeout archive is only 10Mb, that doesn't even begin to imply Google lacks records on you. Potent metaphors are great, and I certainly recognize the problem of techies saying "yeah, duh, obviously" without helping people really understand the consequences of a topic. But in the Takeout case it feels like responding to consumer indifference about real problems by sparking fear over a basically meaningless topic.