8 ms·

They constantly berate you to deactivate no tracking preferences on google maps. When you're aware of this fact you start seeing it everywhere, not just on goog

• Tepix 8y ago
  The result of this A/B testing amounts to a dark patterns. A/B testing a user choice by manipulating him/her like that seems like a no-no.
  • reaperducer 8y ago
    And sometimes A/B Testing is humorous. Like when online publishers like Ars and TechCrunch A/B test headlines and pictures and I end up with a photo of singer Taylor Swift accompanying an article about Apple's iOS programming language Swift.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    A/B testing is the way Satan interacts with this world. Optimizing for business metrics eventually leads to dark patterns, and also provides a convenient excuse ("data says so!").
    • tripzilch 8y ago
      Not Satan but Moloch: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
• jimmytucson 8y ago
  > 3 or 4 rounds of A/B testing and you get the most efficient (read: manipulative) method of getting users "engaged" Now replace “engaged” with “to buy stuff” and that’s essentially online advertising. You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times. The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc. For example, implementing GDPR where I work has been a bizarre experience from a human standpoint. On the one hand, we all surely feel privately it’s a good thing for people, but we talk about it to each other as if it’s a burden and a setback for our business (which it is).
  • stlHusker 8y ago
    > You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times. Eh, this has existed for decades at a macro level in over-the-air television and radio. 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product' is a quote that has been floating around since at least the 1970s. Methods and techniques now have the ability to target you individually but the overall premise is nothing new. > The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc. Well, I'm in Aerospace and there are plenty of interesting problems to solve here that have nothing to do with "trickery"; it's just that 100 year old companies aren't "sexy" to young kids, often don't "move fast and break stuff" and frankly don't throw obscene amounts of money to bait them.
    • u76X3k7w2iUrAPn 8y ago
      I'm a relatively fresh grad working in development for a university. It's slow. It's stable. It's not very sexy. I could probably double my salary elsewhere. But, my conscience is pretty clean for this very reason. I build tools to make university operations more efficient, not to squeeze every last drop of data from our users or manipulate them into buying a product. There are definitely problems to be addressed in higher ed and how universities are run, but it's nowhere near Silicon Valley's lack of ethics.
• beezischillin 8y ago
  Same goes for trying to turn on Voice Match (and the voice activated OK, Google), a feature that's supposed to take a snapshot of your voice and activate the assistant, like "Hey, Siri!". They will force you to activate: 1. web/activity history, 2. saving all your voice requests to the Google and they push you to activate Location History. While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task, they will force you to keep a history of all your voice commands, searches and activity. Voice activation and match won't even work without that on. Even tho the assistant works just fine if you leave those off. Not to mention all the rest of these that happen, they even push for these during your first phone activation. I got my first Android phone this year after taking a very long break from Google phones in 2014, due to getting fed up with how much of a mess Android still was around version 5 and Google's unwillingness to fix the issues so I ended up switching to iOS for years. Now I decided to switch my second phone to an Android purely out of curiosity to see what's been happening to the platform and all these creepy-ass prompts in version 9 don't instil much confidence.
  • jayd16 8y ago
    >While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task But voice rec is not local. The reason it asks to store your voice is because they need to send it to their backend for recognition.
    • beezischillin 8y ago
      They don't need to explicitly save and store a history of every voice command to do voice recognition.
      • DennisAleynikov 8y ago
        there might be implementations that don't do this for instance Siri or Bixby but that doesn't mean Googles approach is wrong. It can be unacceptable for your privacy and security threat model but for most it makes 0 difference wether the training continuously happens in the cloud or locally on the NPU inside your phone. Saving all the clips as much as people love to fear monger it is literally the strategy that objectively leads to the highest quality implementation on the market. Googles Assistant by far understands language most naturally and we owe that to all the free vocal training data google diligently uses.
• thisisweirdok 8y ago
  Yes. 100% this. Someone's just pushing pixels around looking for some numbers to increase without actually dealing with the experience like a human.
• reaperducer 8y ago
  This end result is due to product managers/devs looking at conversion rates and optimizing for whatever their metric of success is Just wait until the product managers and devs are taken out of the loop and A/B testing becomes automated A/B...X/Y/Z testing through AI. Web interfaces will start to look like those crazy AI-generated YouTube videos. Anything to feed the shareholders.
  • Bartweiss 8y ago
    My big question is whether that sort of deranged AI-output look will work when it arrives. It does for Youtube videos, but they're both aimed at children and searching for maximum intensity (via both character recognition and zaniness) to hold attention. As is, I strongly suspect we're already over-testing on frontends. First, because frequent change has a cost in user retention, and so does instability. I get A/B tested enough that I notice it happening, or notice that instructions I give for a program don't reflect what other people on the same device are seeing. And since I use multiple Gmail accounts, I've also had the experience of different accounts falling into different branches of a significant UI test - it was a horrible and aggravating experience. Second, because isolated tests are a terrible way of judging aggregate effects. They're not necessarily run with an eye on "irrelevant" stats, and they're almost never run against a clean, single-design baseline. (Also, they're frequently run with grotesque statistical errors like stopping tests at significance...) The risk, then, is ending up with a hodge-podge of features that produced 3% improvement on some metric but did nothing for overall value. Newsletter signups designed to improve subscriptions, which destroyed retention. Buttons locked into arms races where they improve clickthrough by cannibalizing one another's traffic. Evolved-in-isolation pages that get good responses but decrease brand recognition, and so on. None of that means aimless AI testing won't happen; the combination of buzzword appeal and hands-off profit is probably too good to pass up. But I expect it won't be as valuable as people expect because it feeds into all the mistakes we're making already.
• pje 8y ago
  It's almost like we need regulations to counteract what are otherwise inevitable consequences of profit maximization!
  • scarface74 8y ago
    No, we just need to stop buying from companies whose business model is anything other than you give them money and they give you stuff.
    • tivert 8y ago
      > No, we just need to stop buying from companies whose business model is anything other than you give them money and they give you stuff. So, stop using the internet, then? Uncoordinated collective economic action like you call for doesn't really work, especially when it's against the shareholder-value maximizing interest of a corporation.
      • scarface74 8y ago
        I have an iPhone over an Android because Apple’s business model meets that criteria and nothing about the Android ecosystem does. I have Roku TVs but they are set to automatically go to the HDMI input with my AppleTV. So I don’t have to use a remote that has hard coded buttons that go to the highest bidder and where half the home screen is an advertiser. I buy business Windows PCs or laptops from the Microsoft store because they don’t look like a NASCAR car with all of the stickers and trialware. I pay for ad free streaming services. It’s not the “internet” that’s the problem. Websites have limited tracking ability if you use an adblocker. It’s your devices vendor that you have to worry about.
        • pishpash 8y ago
          Your ad free streaming services are still collecting your data.
    • vanviegen 8y ago
      Aren't companies that try to sell you stuff using the same (manipulative) optimizations?
• abapologist 8y ago
  These are the basic forces of commerce. Or any interaction. Amazon, target, even my loca coffee shops are not aligned with what’s best for me. They’re aligned with what’s best for them, with an eye towards maximizing overlap. But where they want the customer to do something the customer wouldn’t, that happens everywhere. It’s not limited to tech.
• contravariant 8y ago
  At this point I'm convinced they're deliberately making their captcha's impossible, to annoy me for taking anti-tracking measures.
  • castis 8y ago
    On the plus side I've become 400% better at identifying whether or not objects are traffic lights and/or fire hydrants.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      The most annoying captchas are the ones that change after selecting them. What da faq do I look like - free labor?!?!
      • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        yes.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    When I have the time (or have failed ten bloody CAPTCHA's in a row), I sometimes shoot out emails to whatever website or service I am trying to use, to advocate for the removal of reCAPTCHA. Unfortunately, as long as only a few people are complaining though, a lot of websites will continue to paste in Google code blocks willy-nilly.
    • cjhopman 8y ago
      Right. As long as the people sending in complaints is a (much, much) smaller problem than recaptcha solves, they'll continue using it.
  • throwawaymjabba 8y ago
    I came to the same conclusion 2 weeks ago. Nowadays, I have to solve the captcha 15-20 times before it lets me in. So I have started purposefully making wrong answers-road instead of car, sky instead of cross walks etc. If self driving cars end up crashing, I may have contributed to it. Similar thing happened with YouTube too. They would always show me the same ad over and over. Even if I skip, I would get that ad multiple times in the same video. It was a political ad and it starts with one guy saying how he can't get treatment because of some medicare changes. I got so annoyed I wanted to punch the guy talking in the ad whenever I hear him.
• colordrops 8y ago
  > There may be no intention of manipulation If random airmchair commentators can see the results as manipulative I guarantee that the program managers and devs can see it too.
  • cpuguy83 8y ago
    They don't see it as manipulative, which is the problem. They see it as "this is our product, we need a way to understand usage".
  • chocolatebunny 8y ago
    A lot of times you need to take a step back to see what you're doing. It's not always easy to do in a work environment.
    • pishpash 8y ago
      It's easy to see in a work environment. It's not easy to not dismiss it in favor of a promotion carrot.
• segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  80% of the time, for all online services, users get the choice to opt-out from the tracking, but trackers are on by default and users are encouraged to keep them on. This is what I call the fundamental principle of privacy settings: all privacy settings are based on the assumption that the vast majority of users will not understand, care, or make an effort to toggle all the knobs to opt-out from the tracking. This is how online services meeting the regulatory requirements and creating a positive image of being privacy-respecting, "we are giving people a choice over their data", meanwhile still allowing the unhampered collection of personal data in practice. Or the principle can be worded as, "If everyone opt-out from the tracking in their privacy settings, our business is finished". You can opt-out, but their business model remains the same, and you are simply an outlier. As I see it, the most interesting case study is Do-No-Track. When DNT has just became a standard, the response was mostly positive. Then something dramatic happened, Microsoft enabled DNT in IE 10 by default! Then amusingly, it triggered a total backlash from the industry. If you see the principle, it's easy to explain that. But Microsoft surely understand this point. Then why did it decide to do this? I highly suspect Microsoft's decision was a conspiracy to intentionally kill DNT, even if most people won't active it anyway, but they may believe that having a simple and universal privacy toggle is still being a potential threat to the business of the industry, so they decided to sabotage it by making it default-on, thus nobody will treat it seriously, and Microsoft can use the "we care about your privacy" as an excuse. One can't fix the privacy issues with a privacy setting. One needs to have an alternative business model in the age of Surveillance Capitalism.
  • ddebernardy 8y ago
    > 80% of the time, for all online services, users get the choice to opt-out from the tracking That's purely theoretical. My browser is sending to not track headers, I've uBlock turned on, I nearly always reject tracking, yet I periodically delete thousands of cookies. (In case there are bored Safari extension developers who read this and feel the same: an extension that allows to whitelist cookies and rejects everything else would be nice.)
    • rolleiflex 8y ago
• nameisu 8y ago
  google maps is the worst. probably caused some accidents already
• throwawaymjabba 8y ago
  Another one is body sensors. I disabled body sensor permission for play services. Whenever I am using Google Maps, it would complain about the permission every few minutes. Thankfully, found later an option to disable that nagging in maps setting. Maps still worked fine.
  • codedokode 8y ago
    It reminds me of Android 5 where every time you enable GPS, Google shows a popup asking you to share your location with them (very annoying). And besides, there is a checkbox "Don't ask me again", but if you tick it, the "Decline" button gets disabled to ensure that you don't make the wrong choice. [1] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/how-to-prevent-google-from-asking-for-location-permission-when-enabling-gps https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/how-to-pr...
    • throwmeback 8y ago
      It's still there in Android 7 and it's still a travesty.
• james_s_tayler 8y ago
  So what we have learned is that manipulation works.
• anonytrary 8y ago
  I've actively been avoiding Pinterest and Quora because I know they'll pester me about signing up an hide their content behind a soft wall. I don't share links to these sites with anyone anymore.