7 ms·

From what I understand, Google isn’t actually giving away people’s data to “hundreds of companies” for advertising purposes. When an advertiser wants to target

From what I understand, Google isn’t actually giving away people’s data to “hundreds of companies” for advertising purposes. When an advertiser wants to target a specific group of people, Google doesn’t say “here’s everyone’s private data, good luck”. GOOGLE does the filtering and targeting internally. I’m sorry but that isn’t evil or bad. Unless we want to start paying for google searches and Facebook, this is how it’s going to be. And personally, I actually like getting ads relevant to my life. For example, I even got my current job based off a highly relevant Facebook ad. My personal suspicion is that people are just jealous of how much success Google and Facebook have had.

Jaepa 8y ago
or this is just a PR stunt on a company who's trying to trumpet their "we block trackers like Google" functionality.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I'd bet it's a PR stunt. They're getting all kinds of publicity from this. ...that said, I installed Brave this weekend and am posting this comment from it, and I gotta say that it's really nice viewing a web without ads. I'd forgotten how pleasant browsing the web can be when you're not downloading the 100 or so ads & trackers on a typical news article and playing cat-and-mouse with their anti-AdBlock code. So from my selfish user's POV, this is a win.
  - andirk 8y ago
    Saves more than half your phone's battery life too. And content creators get paid.
  - BurningCycles 8y ago
    Or you can just install uBlock Origin. I don't see what Brave brings to the table.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      I had AdBlock rather than uBlock Origin for Chrome, but my experience with it was that it had odd stability issues (eg. certain PDFs would crash the tab, so would a certain window.open call on a niche site I frequent, or accessing a TurboTax download took me to TurboTax's internal login page for their Box account) and many news sites have counter-AdBlock pages where they put up an annoying popup if they detect you're using AdBlock. Not sure if you get those with uBlock Origin, but they don't show up on Brave.
    - profalseidol 8y ago
      I suggest reading this comment from one of the dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972072
      - warkdarrior 8y ago
        > We're not simply replacing ads. We're rescuing an industry. That's nice, but as a user I have no interest in rescuing the ad industry. The sooner it dies, the better.
    - Kurtz79 8y ago
      Brave is mostly used as a mobile browser. It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile. I installed it soon after switching to Android from iOS and I have no complaints, it is fast and it just works.
      - snaky 8y ago
        > It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile You don't need to "opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads" for that. https://www.bromite.org/fdroid https://www.bromite.org/fdroid
        etse 8y ago
- boxspam 8y ago
  The real world is hardly binary. Both the complaint may be valid, and part of a PR strategy.
boxspam 8y ago
I do think that Google has data sharing with "hundreds of companies". These are not advertisers, these are ad companies. They recently updated to comply with GDPR. https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9012903 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9012903 https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/adx-vendors https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/adx-vendors Edit: And about it being "evil" or "bad", let's just say that it is "unnecessary" (from a user viewpoint). You can still make money from ads without hovering up user data. But then you don't make money from users not clicking on the ad, and it is slower to build up an effective profile. Relevant ads are better than irrelevant ads, but nothing beats no ads at all. The best future ads will not look like ads at all (but will be hidden inside reviews and editorials).
- mertd 8y ago
  You'd prefer paid reviews over ads? Ads are honest. You know who paid for them and the intent is clear.
  - boxspam 8y ago
    I meant "the best" for the advertisers, not necessarily for the users. It is possible to do this transparently and there are times when users may actively search such "ads" out (and being paid a small fee, instead of that fee going to ad click companies), but the trend is going to obfuscation. You can block ads, but you won't block content. In a sense this complaint and PR is such a form of obfuscated advertising. The money and technological skills is in the hands of the advertisers, not the users, so this will be an unfair fight (advertisers will be better at hiding ads, than users are able to detect them).
  - andirk 8y ago
    Ads honest? And their intent is clear? What is honest or clear about an ad that says "doctors dont want you to know this"?
    - rwesty 8y ago
      That's not the point. The point is the ad is clearly marked and separate from the content you want to see. The other type of ad is known as "selling out." Where a legit content creator abuses their viewers trust in them to put out false information for financial gain. I would much rather have the first option. Although I think a paid tier with no ads is respectable as well.
mirimir 8y ago
Even if that's true, adversaries can see what ads you're being served, and that in itself could be sensitive data. And then there's data from cookies and other tracking tools.
yuhong 8y ago
Yea, I mentioned in the essay that "In many cases, advertisers managed “remarketing” lists of “anonymous” visitors that was being tracked by cookies from a central console without thinking of the privacy problems, treating visitors almost as numbers. "
jonahx 8y ago
> My personal suspicion is that people are just jealous of how much success Google and Facebook have had. Ah, yes, a classic: "All criticism of success and power stems from envy." Impervious to pushback (since that would only prove you'd pushed the hot button of painful truth) and always plausible-sounding, this is truly a brilliant weapon for snuffing out legitimate complaints and healthy conversation. > Unless we want to start paying for google searches I, and many others, would jump at the chance to pay for an internet without advertising and dark advertising tactics. I happily pay $10/month for youtube red, just to avoid the ad videos, and that's cheap at the price.
- h43k3r 8y ago
  There are more than billion people in India who will be internet users and who don't have the ability to shell out this kind of money. 10 dollars is probably 2 day salary for many workers.
  - finnh 8y ago
    By the same logic, Google cannot charge much for targeting ads at those same people. So I am not sure what your point is.
    - zethraeus 8y ago
      Price discrimination is harder to scale than ad targeting.
      - notafraudster 8y ago
        ... they engage in price discrimination when they do ad targeting. You know it doesn't cost an advertiser the same amount to target people in India as it does over here, right?
        Zarel 8y ago
        To be fair, advertisers are significantly less likely to complain about price discrimination than end users.
marichards 8y ago
If you run an ad campaign at a targeted audience, why can't the campaign have a specific page marker (campaign=only-christians (coded as AB1)) that reveals personal data? We never had a choice of an alternative model. The monopolies involved demand privacy for their services. You can serve ads without targeting or target content instead of audience: broadcasters have had to do this for a long time and it can be very profitable. It is evil and bad to profile people and worse to force it on them by abuse of market position. Audience targeted ads are a form of discrimination. Some of the data Google harvests has the potential to get people killed. For instance, when Google are gathering data about who uses membership areas of political sites, frequent sites for certain sexualities, using regulator pages to blow the whistle, etc. Google doesn't have a right to collect this data. It's evil.
ckastner 8y ago
> When an advertiser wants to target a specific group of people, Google doesn’t say “here’s everyone’s private data, good luck”. GOOGLE does the filtering and targeting internally. > I’m sorry but that isn’t evil or bad. It isn't evil, but it can be bad, and very much so. Google doing the filtering and targeting follows after Google has profiled and labeled you, an action you generally would have no recourse against. This is similar to the No Fly List: you might have no idea how you got on there, but once you're on it, that sticks. With Google's reach being what it is, the consequences after having been automatically labeled can be a frightening thought. You don't even have to have a Google account to feel the effects, shadow profiling can lead to the same result. One of the positive things of the GDPR is that it recognized this problem in Article 22, and provisioned that a data subject has a right to contest decisions based on automatic profiling.
dec0dedab0de 8y ago
Unless we want to start paying for google searches and Facebook, this is how it’s going to be. And personally, I actually like getting ads relevant to my life. I do not like targeted advertising one bit. It makes the ads boring, repetitive, and potentially embarrassing. I want to see ads relative to whatever content I am consuming. If that content is so general that it can't be targeted, then so be it. All other advertising works this way, and it has been doing just fine. Not to mention 3rd party scripts running, which only happens because the advertisers and content producers do not trust each other, so they sacrifice the security of their users.
t0astbread 8y ago
Consider that all data a company owns about you could be used against you. Now I'm not a criminal but I don't know what data Google (and other companies) collect about me and how that data could be interpreted to put me in a bad position. So I'd rather just avoid tracking as much as possible.
luddaite 8y ago
I would be all over any search engine subscription that guaranteed that none of my information would ever be stored in any way. Just give me the option to pay!
kruczek 8y ago
> Unless we want to start paying for google searches and Facebook, this is how it’s going to be. Not necessarily. There is always the model of selling ads without such obnoxious tracking. If Google would base their targeting only on the phrase typed into the search bar, then I'd be okay with that. But them stalking me everywhere I go around the web is not cool.

Jaepa 8y ago

or this is just a PR stunt on a company who's trying to trumpet their "we block trackers like Google" functionality.

nostrademons 8y ago
I'd bet it's a PR stunt. They're getting all kinds of publicity from this. ...that said, I installed Brave this weekend and am posting this comment from it, and I gotta say that it's really nice viewing a web without ads. I'd forgotten how pleasant browsing the web can be when you're not downloading the 100 or so ads & trackers on a typical news article and playing cat-and-mouse with their anti-AdBlock code. So from my selfish user's POV, this is a win.
- andirk 8y ago
  Saves more than half your phone's battery life too. And content creators get paid.
- BurningCycles 8y ago
  Or you can just install uBlock Origin. I don't see what Brave brings to the table.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    I had AdBlock rather than uBlock Origin for Chrome, but my experience with it was that it had odd stability issues (eg. certain PDFs would crash the tab, so would a certain window.open call on a niche site I frequent, or accessing a TurboTax download took me to TurboTax's internal login page for their Box account) and many news sites have counter-AdBlock pages where they put up an annoying popup if they detect you're using AdBlock. Not sure if you get those with uBlock Origin, but they don't show up on Brave.
  - profalseidol 8y ago
    I suggest reading this comment from one of the dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972072
    - warkdarrior 8y ago
      > We're not simply replacing ads. We're rescuing an industry. That's nice, but as a user I have no interest in rescuing the ad industry. The sooner it dies, the better.
  - Kurtz79 8y ago
    Brave is mostly used as a mobile browser. It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile. I installed it soon after switching to Android from iOS and I have no complaints, it is fast and it just works.
    - snaky 8y ago
      > It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile You don't need to "opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads" for that. https://www.bromite.org/fdroid https://www.bromite.org/fdroid
      - etse 8y ago
boxspam 8y ago
The real world is hardly binary. Both the complaint may be valid, and part of a PR strategy.

boxspam 8y ago

I do think that Google has data sharing with "hundreds of companies". These are not advertisers, these are ad companies. They recently updated to comply with GDPR. https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9012903 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9012903 https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/adx-vendors https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/adx-vendors Edit: And about it being "evil" or "bad", let's just say that it is "unnecessary" (from a user viewpoint). You can still make money from ads without hovering up user data. But then you don't make money from users not clicking on the ad, and it is slower to build up an effective profile. Relevant ads are better than irrelevant ads, but nothing beats no ads at all. The best future ads will not look like ads at all (but will be hidden inside reviews and editorials).

mertd 8y ago
You'd prefer paid reviews over ads? Ads are honest. You know who paid for them and the intent is clear.
- boxspam 8y ago
  I meant "the best" for the advertisers, not necessarily for the users. It is possible to do this transparently and there are times when users may actively search such "ads" out (and being paid a small fee, instead of that fee going to ad click companies), but the trend is going to obfuscation. You can block ads, but you won't block content. In a sense this complaint and PR is such a form of obfuscated advertising. The money and technological skills is in the hands of the advertisers, not the users, so this will be an unfair fight (advertisers will be better at hiding ads, than users are able to detect them).
- andirk 8y ago
  Ads honest? And their intent is clear? What is honest or clear about an ad that says "doctors dont want you to know this"?
  - rwesty 8y ago
    That's not the point. The point is the ad is clearly marked and separate from the content you want to see. The other type of ad is known as "selling out." Where a legit content creator abuses their viewers trust in them to put out false information for financial gain. I would much rather have the first option. Although I think a paid tier with no ads is respectable as well.

mirimir 8y ago

Even if that's true, adversaries can see what ads you're being served, and that in itself could be sensitive data. And then there's data from cookies and other tracking tools.

yuhong 8y ago

Yea, I mentioned in the essay that "In many cases, advertisers managed “remarketing” lists of “anonymous” visitors that was being tracked by cookies from a central console without thinking of the privacy problems, treating visitors almost as numbers. "

jonahx 8y ago

> My personal suspicion is that people are just jealous of how much success Google and Facebook have had. Ah, yes, a classic: "All criticism of success and power stems from envy." Impervious to pushback (since that would only prove you'd pushed the hot button of painful truth) and always plausible-sounding, this is truly a brilliant weapon for snuffing out legitimate complaints and healthy conversation. > Unless we want to start paying for google searches I, and many others, would jump at the chance to pay for an internet without advertising and dark advertising tactics. I happily pay $10/month for youtube red, just to avoid the ad videos, and that's cheap at the price.

h43k3r 8y ago
There are more than billion people in India who will be internet users and who don't have the ability to shell out this kind of money. 10 dollars is probably 2 day salary for many workers.
- finnh 8y ago
  By the same logic, Google cannot charge much for targeting ads at those same people. So I am not sure what your point is.
  - zethraeus 8y ago
    Price discrimination is harder to scale than ad targeting.
    - notafraudster 8y ago
      ... they engage in price discrimination when they do ad targeting. You know it doesn't cost an advertiser the same amount to target people in India as it does over here, right?
      - Zarel 8y ago
        To be fair, advertisers are significantly less likely to complain about price discrimination than end users.

marichards 8y ago

If you run an ad campaign at a targeted audience, why can't the campaign have a specific page marker (campaign=only-christians (coded as AB1)) that reveals personal data? We never had a choice of an alternative model. The monopolies involved demand privacy for their services. You can serve ads without targeting or target content instead of audience: broadcasters have had to do this for a long time and it can be very profitable. It is evil and bad to profile people and worse to force it on them by abuse of market position. Audience targeted ads are a form of discrimination. Some of the data Google harvests has the potential to get people killed. For instance, when Google are gathering data about who uses membership areas of political sites, frequent sites for certain sexualities, using regulator pages to blow the whistle, etc. Google doesn't have a right to collect this data. It's evil.

ckastner 8y ago

> When an advertiser wants to target a specific group of people, Google doesn’t say “here’s everyone’s private data, good luck”. GOOGLE does the filtering and targeting internally. > I’m sorry but that isn’t evil or bad. It isn't evil, but it can be bad, and very much so. Google doing the filtering and targeting follows after Google has profiled and labeled you, an action you generally would have no recourse against. This is similar to the No Fly List: you might have no idea how you got on there, but once you're on it, that sticks. With Google's reach being what it is, the consequences after having been automatically labeled can be a frightening thought. You don't even have to have a Google account to feel the effects, shadow profiling can lead to the same result. One of the positive things of the GDPR is that it recognized this problem in Article 22, and provisioned that a data subject has a right to contest decisions based on automatic profiling.

dec0dedab0de 8y ago

Unless we want to start paying for google searches and Facebook, this is how it’s going to be. And personally, I actually like getting ads relevant to my life. I do not like targeted advertising one bit. It makes the ads boring, repetitive, and potentially embarrassing. I want to see ads relative to whatever content I am consuming. If that content is so general that it can't be targeted, then so be it. All other advertising works this way, and it has been doing just fine. Not to mention 3rd party scripts running, which only happens because the advertisers and content producers do not trust each other, so they sacrifice the security of their users.

t0astbread 8y ago

Consider that all data a company owns about you could be used against you. Now I'm not a criminal but I don't know what data Google (and other companies) collect about me and how that data could be interpreted to put me in a bad position. So I'd rather just avoid tracking as much as possible.

luddaite 8y ago

I would be all over any search engine subscription that guaranteed that none of my information would ever be stored in any way. Just give me the option to pay!

kruczek 8y ago

> Unless we want to start paying for google searches and Facebook, this is how it’s going to be. Not necessarily. There is always the model of selling ads without such obnoxious tracking. If Google would base their targeting only on the phrase typed into the search bar, then I'd be okay with that. But them stalking me everywhere I go around the web is not cool.