9 ms·

> How we will get out of this, I have no idea... I don't know. It was a faustian bargain we all made. It was fun for a while, but now it is getting increasingl

> How we will get out of this, I have no idea... I don't know. It was a faustian bargain we all made. It was fun for a while, but now it is getting increasingly ugly. How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?

clouddrover 8y ago
> It was a faustian bargain we all made. I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with. I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so. It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it. If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > ... it doesn't matter if you made it or not. Yep, like in the film "Rosemary's Baby". It was Rosemary's husband that made the deal with the devil but it was she who ended up carrying the child of Satan.
- _jal 8y ago
  Spot on. Opting out of the weaponized, automated surveillance machine is not really possible. I do block FB, Google and a bunch of others at the IP level. There are fallbacks, but I do end up leaking when they stand up new IP blocks, and the smaller surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with. I also pee in their datasets sometimes, but that's a more experimental/entertainment activity. And I'm playing with some other ideas not ready for prime time. > how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data? Regulation. That's what you do with antisocial behavior, negative externalities and worse. The transnational nature of the net adds complications and freeholds, but the big boys absolutely could be brought to heel, if people wanted to. Politically, the winds seem to be blowing in the other direction in the US, and the GDPR has been argued to death here. But that's how the situation improves. (It will never be "fixed", absent an event that destroys the ability to run networks.)
  - FredFS456 8y ago
    Any more info (eg. tools + source) on how to pee in their datasets?
    - drcharris 8y ago
      I think a very effective way is to get much better control over your cookies, when you allow them to be set, under which conditions, on which sites. I use a combination of CookieBro and Umatrix on Firefox for this. Cookies are only allowed for sites I actively want to log into. For sites that require cookies to function, periodic auto-deletion via CookieBro handles those.
    - _jal 8y ago
      I shouldn't overstate what I'm doing - this is largely an exercise in reversing what they're doing. And when I figure it out I might have a little fun by way of verifying I figured something out. Tools - I use Charles Proxy and perl with WWW::Mechanize (substitute your recreational language of choice). Sometimes JMeter is helpful, but that's kind of a rathole if you haven't had reason to subject yourself to it before.
aldoushuxley001 8y ago
You have to Faustian Haggle.
smt88 8y ago
A Faustian bargain implies that we knew the price. Facebook actively misled (and continues to mislead) us about what we were giving up to use its service. I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  A Faustian Bargain is the pinnacle of deception. We had no idea of the "real" price in the early naughts. You are right about them misleading us.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  I don’t think people really can feign ignorance. What did we think was going on? FB built this huge free product out of the goodness of their hearts? Did nobody stop to think about how Zuck became a billionaire and pays all these employees?
  - yifanl 8y ago
    When facebook came out, the vast majority of sites _did_ (or were assumed to) operate that way.
  - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
    Here's the problem: many people in tech circles, including HN, passionately argued that their main monetization technique was selling ads, that they were incentivized to protect user data. But it has become clear that while they were profiting off of ads, they were also essentially giving away the data they were supposedly protecting. EFF and others sounded the alarm as it was happening but many people here and in other tech forums couldn't believe it was happening in 2009. But now that it's all in the open we're seeing a bit of history rewriting.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    > Did nobody stop to think ...? Sure, we certainly "thought". There were the mildly provocative arguments about facebook users being "the product". Like cattle. Many just assumed they were not susceptible to ads or strong enough not to be manipulated. Folks were thinking about this on an individual basis, assuming that yes, some dumbasses would get sucked in by Farmville but that they themselves were impervious. Turns out it doesn't matter what any one individual thinks. Facebook is all about scale and knowledge. They're selling enormous social power to whoever forks over the money. It doesn't matter to facebook if the real customer is selling soap or authoritarian government. I think only now are we getting wise to the full implications of Facebook and the like.
mikeash 8y ago
I believe the standard process is to win a fiddle contest.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  Touché !
- rhaps0dy 8y ago
  All the violin virtuosi are probably on Facebook, so they can get us out of the bargain.
  - erric 8y ago
    Paging Joshua Bell[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Be ye angels? Nay we are but men!
- stuntkite 8y ago
  If you win, you get a solid gold fiddle and out of the contract. If you loose you get a smaller silver fiddle and they kill one of your friends.
mtgx 8y ago
> it is getting increasingly ugly This is what's scary. The ugly part is just starting, because we haven't even gotten to the point where their AI systems have super-human intelligence and can use all of your "whole-life/everything you've ever done" data against you. How bad is this going to be in 20 years? And does anyone really think Google and Facebook will "self-regulate" sufficiently on this, without extreme outside pressure?
CaptainZapp 8y ago
A good start is to get rid of your Facebook account and try to find alternatives to Google. Sure, DDG is not quite there, but for most of my queries it's just fine. Having "deleted" my Facebook account some four years ago was a real liberator, though.
- ed312 8y ago
  DDG is definitely "good enough" for 90+% of my searches. I occasionally have to reword something or change a keyword. Maps and Gmail on the other hand...
- bla2 8y ago
  I don't get why people recommend DDG. It's mostly a different skin on bing search results. Why is relying on bing better than relying on google? If DDG had its own engine, I could see the "they're the small underdog focused solely on this" angle, but as-is, you have the choice of Microsoft or Google.
  - CaptainZapp 8y ago
    There's that little thing that they don't track and bubble you.
  - sveme 8y ago
    They do have their own engine.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      Not for regular search results. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
      - cpeterso 8y ago
        What is a "regular search result"? Your link says: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex." I use DDG because I like its !bang searches and I genuinely prefer its Instant Answers and page layout over Google's.
hutzlibu 8y ago
"How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?" Well, Goethes Faust got away pretty well, beeing gods favourite .. and a grammar exploit in the bargain. (the bargain was, Mephistopheles serves him, until he says some specific words (Verweile doch, du bist so schön) ... and in the end Faust says, now I feel like I could say "Verweile doch..." Mephistopheles thinks thats it, summons his demons, to prepare for it. Faust dies, beeing old ... but since god was the all powerful judge and Faust his favourite, ... well that was enough to save his soul. And the demons had to go away accomplishing nothing) So any lessons for the real world? I don't see any... edit: maybe to give more context: Faust made the deal, because he was not content, mainly about the limitations about understanding the world, but also in general. And the words of the bargain mean something like, now I am content. So Mephistos part was to make him content, or even too full of this world. But it is somewhat complicated, beeing Goethe.. but worth a read, at least in german. Don't know, if the translations are good enough, because much of the greatness of the book, is the powerful language and verses, which at least I could never translate adequately.
- neaden 8y ago
  Let's hope Zukerburg isn't a fan of Marlowe then.
pm90 8y ago
Legislation. Vote for politicians who care about these things (increasingly many do, especially the younger ones). Or stand up and run on a platform of providing a safer internet for all of us, free from the kind of tracking that we take for granted. I agree it may not be easy. But we desperately need more tech-savvy politicians in these technological times.
replies_to_all 8y ago
What did I (people who are not attached to gmail and Google search) give in this bargain. I have all the Google things (like most) but I also have backups on Box and Mega. gmail is great, but I have several other addresses that I use that filter and forward mail to gmail, so it is always "my choice" which of my email Google gets to see.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

clouddrover 8y ago

> It was a faustian bargain we all made. I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with. I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so. It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it. If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?

crispyambulance 8y ago
> ... it doesn't matter if you made it or not. Yep, like in the film "Rosemary's Baby". It was Rosemary's husband that made the deal with the devil but it was she who ended up carrying the child of Satan.
_jal 8y ago
Spot on. Opting out of the weaponized, automated surveillance machine is not really possible. I do block FB, Google and a bunch of others at the IP level. There are fallbacks, but I do end up leaking when they stand up new IP blocks, and the smaller surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with. I also pee in their datasets sometimes, but that's a more experimental/entertainment activity. And I'm playing with some other ideas not ready for prime time. > how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data? Regulation. That's what you do with antisocial behavior, negative externalities and worse. The transnational nature of the net adds complications and freeholds, but the big boys absolutely could be brought to heel, if people wanted to. Politically, the winds seem to be blowing in the other direction in the US, and the GDPR has been argued to death here. But that's how the situation improves. (It will never be "fixed", absent an event that destroys the ability to run networks.)
- FredFS456 8y ago
  Any more info (eg. tools + source) on how to pee in their datasets?
  - drcharris 8y ago
    I think a very effective way is to get much better control over your cookies, when you allow them to be set, under which conditions, on which sites. I use a combination of CookieBro and Umatrix on Firefox for this. Cookies are only allowed for sites I actively want to log into. For sites that require cookies to function, periodic auto-deletion via CookieBro handles those.
  - _jal 8y ago
    I shouldn't overstate what I'm doing - this is largely an exercise in reversing what they're doing. And when I figure it out I might have a little fun by way of verifying I figured something out. Tools - I use Charles Proxy and perl with WWW::Mechanize (substitute your recreational language of choice). Sometimes JMeter is helpful, but that's kind of a rathole if you haven't had reason to subject yourself to it before.

aldoushuxley001 8y ago

You have to Faustian Haggle.

smt88 8y ago

A Faustian bargain implies that we knew the price. Facebook actively misled (and continues to mislead) us about what we were giving up to use its service. I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.

crispyambulance 8y ago
A Faustian Bargain is the pinnacle of deception. We had no idea of the "real" price in the early naughts. You are right about them misleading us.
ryandrake 8y ago
I don’t think people really can feign ignorance. What did we think was going on? FB built this huge free product out of the goodness of their hearts? Did nobody stop to think about how Zuck became a billionaire and pays all these employees?
- yifanl 8y ago
  When facebook came out, the vast majority of sites _did_ (or were assumed to) operate that way.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  Here's the problem: many people in tech circles, including HN, passionately argued that their main monetization technique was selling ads, that they were incentivized to protect user data. But it has become clear that while they were profiting off of ads, they were also essentially giving away the data they were supposedly protecting. EFF and others sounded the alarm as it was happening but many people here and in other tech forums couldn't believe it was happening in 2009. But now that it's all in the open we're seeing a bit of history rewriting.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > Did nobody stop to think ...? Sure, we certainly "thought". There were the mildly provocative arguments about facebook users being "the product". Like cattle. Many just assumed they were not susceptible to ads or strong enough not to be manipulated. Folks were thinking about this on an individual basis, assuming that yes, some dumbasses would get sucked in by Farmville but that they themselves were impervious. Turns out it doesn't matter what any one individual thinks. Facebook is all about scale and knowledge. They're selling enormous social power to whoever forks over the money. It doesn't matter to facebook if the real customer is selling soap or authoritarian government. I think only now are we getting wise to the full implications of Facebook and the like.

mikeash 8y ago

I believe the standard process is to win a fiddle contest.

crispyambulance 8y ago
Touché !
rhaps0dy 8y ago
All the violin virtuosi are probably on Facebook, so they can get us out of the bargain.
- erric 8y ago
  Paging Joshua Bell[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Be ye angels? Nay we are but men!
stuntkite 8y ago
If you win, you get a solid gold fiddle and out of the contract. If you loose you get a smaller silver fiddle and they kill one of your friends.

mtgx 8y ago

> it is getting increasingly ugly This is what's scary. The ugly part is just starting, because we haven't even gotten to the point where their AI systems have super-human intelligence and can use all of your "whole-life/everything you've ever done" data against you. How bad is this going to be in 20 years? And does anyone really think Google and Facebook will "self-regulate" sufficiently on this, without extreme outside pressure?

CaptainZapp 8y ago

A good start is to get rid of your Facebook account and try to find alternatives to Google. Sure, DDG is not quite there, but for most of my queries it's just fine. Having "deleted" my Facebook account some four years ago was a real liberator, though.

ed312 8y ago
DDG is definitely "good enough" for 90+% of my searches. I occasionally have to reword something or change a keyword. Maps and Gmail on the other hand...
bla2 8y ago
I don't get why people recommend DDG. It's mostly a different skin on bing search results. Why is relying on bing better than relying on google? If DDG had its own engine, I could see the "they're the small underdog focused solely on this" angle, but as-is, you have the choice of Microsoft or Google.
- CaptainZapp 8y ago
  There's that little thing that they don't track and bubble you.
- sveme 8y ago
  They do have their own engine.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Not for regular search results. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      What is a "regular search result"? Your link says: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex." I use DDG because I like its !bang searches and I genuinely prefer its Instant Answers and page layout over Google's.

hutzlibu 8y ago

"How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?" Well, Goethes Faust got away pretty well, beeing gods favourite .. and a grammar exploit in the bargain. (the bargain was, Mephistopheles serves him, until he says some specific words (Verweile doch, du bist so schön) ... and in the end Faust says, now I feel like I could say "Verweile doch..." Mephistopheles thinks thats it, summons his demons, to prepare for it. Faust dies, beeing old ... but since god was the all powerful judge and Faust his favourite, ... well that was enough to save his soul. And the demons had to go away accomplishing nothing) So any lessons for the real world? I don't see any... edit: maybe to give more context: Faust made the deal, because he was not content, mainly about the limitations about understanding the world, but also in general. And the words of the bargain mean something like, now I am content. So Mephistos part was to make him content, or even too full of this world. But it is somewhat complicated, beeing Goethe.. but worth a read, at least in german. Don't know, if the translations are good enough, because much of the greatness of the book, is the powerful language and verses, which at least I could never translate adequately.

neaden 8y ago
Let's hope Zukerburg isn't a fan of Marlowe then.

pm90 8y ago

Legislation. Vote for politicians who care about these things (increasingly many do, especially the younger ones). Or stand up and run on a platform of providing a safer internet for all of us, free from the kind of tracking that we take for granted. I agree it may not be easy. But we desperately need more tech-savvy politicians in these technological times.

replies_to_all 8y ago

What did I (people who are not attached to gmail and Google search) give in this bargain. I have all the Google things (like most) but I also have backups on Box and Mega. gmail is great, but I have several other addresses that I use that filter and forward mail to gmail, so it is always "my choice" which of my email Google gets to see.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]