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And what exactly is Google doing with our data? And how does that apply in this context? Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet? Also, comparing

And what exactly is Google doing with our data? And how does that apply in this context? Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet? Also, comparing Google to Big Brother is disingenuous at best. Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. They are merely trying to allow advertisers to target audiences precisely. I hate advertising, for sure. But the anti-Google fear-mongering and hate based on nothing substantial and leveraging an inaccurate view of what Google does is harmful for everyone involved.

math_and_stuff 8y ago
> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. I think proactive censorship for authoritarian governments (e.g., China) falls into this category.
- wafflesraccoon 8y ago
  Is that really Google's fault or China's for creating the policy? Google is forced to follow the local laws in the countries that it operates in.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    It's true, but they're not actually forced to operate in China for any reason other than a desire to compete with unrestrained Chinese companies, and a desire to drive growth. So the relevant product groups and leadership are, at least to some degree, implicated in deciding to go along with rules they knew would be morally objectionable from the start. That said, Chinese folks are imo quite right to cry "hypocrisy" on the degree of moral outrage US citizens level at Western nations given how many ways western nations police dissidents and stifle anti-government speech.
  - Drakim 8y ago
    While this isn't something I disagree with in principle, I can't help but to feel uneasy about it. Should companies have helped Nazi Germany to identify Jews since that was the local law? If not, the clearly the principle isn't so solid after all. But I don't know what to replace it with.
    - bduerst 8y ago
      Even if Google didn't change search results, people who clicked on the censored website links still wouldn't be able to load the sites. You have to ask which is better - serving information in the framework provided or serving no information at all.
      - Drakim 8y ago
        Yeah you are probably right about that.
    - jdmichal 8y ago
      This reminded me of a conversation chain I had a couple years ago. The main point is that civil disobedience is the purposeful breaking of law, but it is just that. You can break the law, but you need to do so with preparation to face whatever the penalty is. I'm not sure what civil disobedience looks like at the corporate level... I can't think of an examples. At the end, I think it must be an individual decision with enough corporate authority to make it stick... In which case, it falls under the same ideals. (I've removed contextual text that I think is irrelevant for this discussion.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953 ... Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey laws, not the refusal to uphold them. People participating in civil disobedience do it with the understanding that they can (and should) be prosecuted for such. They do so to act as martyrs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428 ... The bottom line is, you need to be really, really careful when you start arguing for "ethics" and "morality" as a basis for execution of law. For instance, to make a concrete example: It could be argued that based on the ethics and morality of the Nazis, that the mass murders committed under the Holocaust were in fact them morally disobeying those supra-national human rights laws. Who are you to say that the Nazi morality is wrong? You can't point to the agreed-upon supra-national human rights laws, because you are in fact arguing that law should be violated based on morality! In fact, one of the ways to view law is as an encoding of the morality of the society it covers. Sometimes laws, being fixed entities, and society, being ever changing, drift apart over time. Same as software drifts from the requirements of business if not kept up to date. It usually takes an example like this German one to point out the absurdity, and if the law really is no longer part of the society's morality, becomes fairly easy for lawmakers to fix. (As a reminder, this law being invoked is very old -- from when Germany was a monarchy and insulting dictator kings was morally a very serious crime!)
- jpdus 8y ago
  With this argument, you should be more upset about Apple. Google is missing out on the soon-to-be biggest ad market of the world - at least partially due to ethical standards. Apple does earn a significant part of its revenues in China and has no problems with working with the govt there. (I am not affiliated in any way with either company - just don't understand all the hate against Google)
  - math_and_stuff 8y ago
    I am upset about Apple's appstore actions. I was responding to a claim about Google.
- bduerst 8y ago
  Or "Right to be Forgotten" by the EU.
8note 8y ago
it's not the worst comparison. Google search is removing our need, and thus ability to remember things
- bun_at_work 8y ago
  By your logic, books can similarly be compared to Big Brother. Perhaps the Google fear-mongering is just a natural human reaction to new technology...
gaius 8y ago
Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. They are merely trying to allow advertisers to target audiences Do you see the juxtaposition here?
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Even if we follow your logic faithfully, all it suggests is that Google enables people to "control and limit what people think." Honestly, I don't think society as a whole has really come to grips with what advertising is or how to treat it ethically. Informing consumers has never really been what it's used for, even though that's a critical function of any proposed society that relies on open markets.
ErikAugust 8y ago
"Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet?" That is a valid conflation. Google became Alphabet in 2015. It began in 1998. The vast majority of its existence and brand persona is as Google.
- gowld 8y ago
  Brand Persona doesn't matter. How the data is used matters.
bzbarsky 8y ago
> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. Google's efforts against "fake news" are exactly trying to do that. And just because one agrees with them in this one instance doesn't change the precedent.
- andybak 8y ago
  Rather a case of "damned if they do, damned if they don't" on that one.
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    I'm not saying I don't understand why they are doing it. But I also understand why news media in a totalitarian regime toe the party line, say. And they are also damned if they do, damned if they don't. Again, I am not claiming that Google should be doing something different. They may well not have any other options. I'm claiming that we should be aware of what they (and various other companies and governments!) are doing and act accordingly. If someone claimed that the US government "isn't trying to control or limit what people think", say, that would probably be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Even more so for the Chinese government. My argument is that such claims about Google should also be treated sceptically. Not as sceptically as the Chinese government; hard to compare tothe US government.
- gxigzigxigxi 8y ago
  Hrm. It is different. Google going against fake news is google avoiding the promulgation of falsehoods. That is, in a sense, an effort to change people’s beliefs. But in that sense, anything and everything that google does or doesn’t do would be considered an effort to change beliefs, which makes it a useless statement.
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    Google has no problems with promulgating falsehoods that are not classified as "fake news". Unfortunately, that definition involves a lot of motivated reasoning, on all sides. > anything and everything that google does or doesn’t do would be considered an effort to change beliefs Absolutely. Google (like so many other organizations) is making efforts to change beliefs all the time. That's not a problem per se, except they have so much leverage to _succeed_ at it that it might be worth thinking about the implications a bit. And statements that they don't do it don't help with that step.
danShumway 8y ago
> Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet? Alphabet isn't the result of a merger, or Google getting bought out by a different company. It's largely the same people and culture that Google was and is, just split out into a larger parent organization so they can oversee more products. If I change my name to Eric, that doesn't make me a different person.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
pacala 8y ago
> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. Advertisement is precisely trying to control what people think. Specifically, influence their economic and political decisions.
- bun_at_work 8y ago
  Google serves ads, they aren't (generally) the one's creating or doing the advertising. The only time they are advertising is when they are trying to sell a product, which is way less often than they are serving someone else's ads.
WalterGR 8y ago
Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. The Web Spam team at Google is corrupt, such that a single person can affect rankings in ways that destroy or legitimize websites. And they do fully take advantage of this power. It’s literally impossible to say that Google doesn’t control or limit what people think, given that there’s zero transparency and zero accountability.
- WalterGR 8y ago
  That should read, “It’s literally impossible to say that Google doesn’t try to control or limit...” (It’s too late for me to edit my comment.)

math_and_stuff 8y ago

> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. I think proactive censorship for authoritarian governments (e.g., China) falls into this category.

wafflesraccoon 8y ago
Is that really Google's fault or China's for creating the policy? Google is forced to follow the local laws in the countries that it operates in.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  It's true, but they're not actually forced to operate in China for any reason other than a desire to compete with unrestrained Chinese companies, and a desire to drive growth. So the relevant product groups and leadership are, at least to some degree, implicated in deciding to go along with rules they knew would be morally objectionable from the start. That said, Chinese folks are imo quite right to cry "hypocrisy" on the degree of moral outrage US citizens level at Western nations given how many ways western nations police dissidents and stifle anti-government speech.
- Drakim 8y ago
  While this isn't something I disagree with in principle, I can't help but to feel uneasy about it. Should companies have helped Nazi Germany to identify Jews since that was the local law? If not, the clearly the principle isn't so solid after all. But I don't know what to replace it with.
  - bduerst 8y ago
    Even if Google didn't change search results, people who clicked on the censored website links still wouldn't be able to load the sites. You have to ask which is better - serving information in the framework provided or serving no information at all.
    - Drakim 8y ago
      Yeah you are probably right about that.
  - jdmichal 8y ago
    This reminded me of a conversation chain I had a couple years ago. The main point is that civil disobedience is the purposeful breaking of law, but it is just that. You can break the law, but you need to do so with preparation to face whatever the penalty is. I'm not sure what civil disobedience looks like at the corporate level... I can't think of an examples. At the end, I think it must be an individual decision with enough corporate authority to make it stick... In which case, it falls under the same ideals. (I've removed contextual text that I think is irrelevant for this discussion.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953 ... Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey laws, not the refusal to uphold them. People participating in civil disobedience do it with the understanding that they can (and should) be prosecuted for such. They do so to act as martyrs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428 ... The bottom line is, you need to be really, really careful when you start arguing for "ethics" and "morality" as a basis for execution of law. For instance, to make a concrete example: It could be argued that based on the ethics and morality of the Nazis, that the mass murders committed under the Holocaust were in fact them morally disobeying those supra-national human rights laws. Who are you to say that the Nazi morality is wrong? You can't point to the agreed-upon supra-national human rights laws, because you are in fact arguing that law should be violated based on morality! In fact, one of the ways to view law is as an encoding of the morality of the society it covers. Sometimes laws, being fixed entities, and society, being ever changing, drift apart over time. Same as software drifts from the requirements of business if not kept up to date. It usually takes an example like this German one to point out the absurdity, and if the law really is no longer part of the society's morality, becomes fairly easy for lawmakers to fix. (As a reminder, this law being invoked is very old -- from when Germany was a monarchy and insulting dictator kings was morally a very serious crime!)
jpdus 8y ago
With this argument, you should be more upset about Apple. Google is missing out on the soon-to-be biggest ad market of the world - at least partially due to ethical standards. Apple does earn a significant part of its revenues in China and has no problems with working with the govt there. (I am not affiliated in any way with either company - just don't understand all the hate against Google)
- math_and_stuff 8y ago
  I am upset about Apple's appstore actions. I was responding to a claim about Google.
bduerst 8y ago
Or "Right to be Forgotten" by the EU.

8note 8y ago

it's not the worst comparison. Google search is removing our need, and thus ability to remember things

bun_at_work 8y ago
By your logic, books can similarly be compared to Big Brother. Perhaps the Google fear-mongering is just a natural human reaction to new technology...

gaius 8y ago

Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. They are merely trying to allow advertisers to target audiences Do you see the juxtaposition here?

KirinDave 8y ago
Even if we follow your logic faithfully, all it suggests is that Google enables people to "control and limit what people think." Honestly, I don't think society as a whole has really come to grips with what advertising is or how to treat it ethically. Informing consumers has never really been what it's used for, even though that's a critical function of any proposed society that relies on open markets.

ErikAugust 8y ago

"Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet?" That is a valid conflation. Google became Alphabet in 2015. It began in 1998. The vast majority of its existence and brand persona is as Google.

gowld 8y ago
Brand Persona doesn't matter. How the data is used matters.

bzbarsky 8y ago

> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. Google's efforts against "fake news" are exactly trying to do that. And just because one agrees with them in this one instance doesn't change the precedent.

andybak 8y ago
Rather a case of "damned if they do, damned if they don't" on that one.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  I'm not saying I don't understand why they are doing it. But I also understand why news media in a totalitarian regime toe the party line, say. And they are also damned if they do, damned if they don't. Again, I am not claiming that Google should be doing something different. They may well not have any other options. I'm claiming that we should be aware of what they (and various other companies and governments!) are doing and act accordingly. If someone claimed that the US government "isn't trying to control or limit what people think", say, that would probably be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Even more so for the Chinese government. My argument is that such claims about Google should also be treated sceptically. Not as sceptically as the Chinese government; hard to compare tothe US government.
gxigzigxigxi 8y ago
Hrm. It is different. Google going against fake news is google avoiding the promulgation of falsehoods. That is, in a sense, an effort to change people’s beliefs. But in that sense, anything and everything that google does or doesn’t do would be considered an effort to change beliefs, which makes it a useless statement.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  Google has no problems with promulgating falsehoods that are not classified as "fake news". Unfortunately, that definition involves a lot of motivated reasoning, on all sides. > anything and everything that google does or doesn’t do would be considered an effort to change beliefs Absolutely. Google (like so many other organizations) is making efforts to change beliefs all the time. That's not a problem per se, except they have so much leverage to _succeed_ at it that it might be worth thinking about the implications a bit. And statements that they don't do it don't help with that step.

danShumway 8y ago

> Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet? Alphabet isn't the result of a merger, or Google getting bought out by a different company. It's largely the same people and culture that Google was and is, just split out into a larger parent organization so they can oversee more products. If I change my name to Eric, that doesn't make me a different person.

thanatropism 8y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

pacala 8y ago

> Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. Advertisement is precisely trying to control what people think. Specifically, influence their economic and political decisions.

bun_at_work 8y ago
Google serves ads, they aren't (generally) the one's creating or doing the advertising. The only time they are advertising is when they are trying to sell a product, which is way less often than they are serving someone else's ads.

WalterGR 8y ago

Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. The Web Spam team at Google is corrupt, such that a single person can affect rankings in ways that destroy or legitimize websites. And they do fully take advantage of this power. It’s literally impossible to say that Google doesn’t control or limit what people think, given that there’s zero transparency and zero accountability.

WalterGR 8y ago
That should read, “It’s literally impossible to say that Google doesn’t try to control or limit...” (It’s too late for me to edit my comment.)