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From what I've read they can still gather your public data, but to a lesser degree than they can from the direct use of their services. The second-hand scraping

From what I've read they can still gather your public data, but to a lesser degree than they can from the direct use of their services. The second-hand scraping is a lot less specific - "he visits X website, at X time, X times a day" as opposed to "he works at X, is featured in X type of photo, shares X type of content, has close relations with X people, is likely to click X type of advert". They can extrapolate a lot more accurate assumptions about someone from the latter set of data. I'm sure they're much better at data scraping then they were when I read that last though. Thankfully people much more intelligent than myself are making it easier to obfuscate this activity. I've had a lot of luck using the advice below: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107150700/https://iotdarwinaward.com/post/improve-your-privacy-in-age-of-mass-surveillance/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181107150700/https://iotdarwin...

rhn_mk1 8y ago
> "he works at X, is featured in X type of photo, shares X type of content, has close relations with X people [...] There's nothing preventing anyone to scrape that kind of info from public sources either. Some of this may be available here on HN (shares that kind of content, works at X), others on competitor's social networks (Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, GitHub, forums). In fact, this is part of Google's core business model, and you can most likely see this in their database already: "google" yourself. Admittedly, no one will be able to scrape click rates, but that's relatively insignificant compared to the amount of info we already publicly share.
- hilbert42 8y ago
  > There's nothing preventing anyone to scrape that kind of info from public sources either. Absolutely correct, if you read my posts then you'll see that I expose both myself and my ideas to quite some considerable degree. I'm under no illusion that all my attempts at blocking Google's spying will not work here. I've never had the need to hide myself on the web, rather it's that I've been forced to, or at least to try to hide parts of my private data—none of which I'm ashamed about. It's the underhanded and egregious way Google, Facebook, et all have gone about it that hurts and which I find so objectionable.

rhn_mk1 8y ago

> "he works at X, is featured in X type of photo, shares X type of content, has close relations with X people [...] There's nothing preventing anyone to scrape that kind of info from public sources either. Some of this may be available here on HN (shares that kind of content, works at X), others on competitor's social networks (Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, GitHub, forums). In fact, this is part of Google's core business model, and you can most likely see this in their database already: "google" yourself. Admittedly, no one will be able to scrape click rates, but that's relatively insignificant compared to the amount of info we already publicly share.

hilbert42 8y ago
> There's nothing preventing anyone to scrape that kind of info from public sources either. Absolutely correct, if you read my posts then you'll see that I expose both myself and my ideas to quite some considerable degree. I'm under no illusion that all my attempts at blocking Google's spying will not work here. I've never had the need to hide myself on the web, rather it's that I've been forced to, or at least to try to hide parts of my private data—none of which I'm ashamed about. It's the underhanded and egregious way Google, Facebook, et all have gone about it that hurts and which I find so objectionable.