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It's sort of an open secret that google's data is not nearly as anonymized as they would like you to believe. I'm only familiar with how advertising data works,

It's sort of an open secret that google's data is not nearly as anonymized as they would like you to believe. I'm only familiar with how advertising data works, and I can tell you that many of their large customers know exactly who they are targeting. It's not anonymous at all. They are combining google tools and data along with their own in ways that often violate the TOS, but everyone does it anyway. I think some companies have backtracked on this in the past few months, but it is still quite widespread.

manigandham 8y ago
Google knows how the person is because there is a high probability that person is logged in to the Google account (which is why GDPR and such legislation do nothing but entrench these companies further). Advertisers can't use this and don't have any way to extract identity. User ids have always been anonymous and are now completely removed from any data shared by Google's marketing software. The most an advertiser can do is target a list of users but there are limits on the minimum size and scope of these lists. It's incredibly hard to know a person's identity on the web unless they are logged into your service and it's only gotten harder.
crispyambulance 8y ago
OK, but what I am saying is that even if individual identities _remain_ anonymous, there's still a serious problem with the acquisition of aggregate information about a population. Users are pumping out their data en-masse and entities are buying it from the surveillance capitalism "apparatus" provided by Google and the like. That might be just fine if these entities are just companies that want to sell us soap and pop-tarts, but now we're seeing that there are other not-so-agreeable entities who want this data and are able to use in ways that the populace would find repulsive, including being incompatible with what they think is democracy. In other words, the scary part of surveillance capitalism is that we "lose as a whole", not as individuals.

manigandham 8y ago

Google knows how the person is because there is a high probability that person is logged in to the Google account (which is why GDPR and such legislation do nothing but entrench these companies further). Advertisers can't use this and don't have any way to extract identity. User ids have always been anonymous and are now completely removed from any data shared by Google's marketing software. The most an advertiser can do is target a list of users but there are limits on the minimum size and scope of these lists. It's incredibly hard to know a person's identity on the web unless they are logged into your service and it's only gotten harder.

crispyambulance 8y ago

OK, but what I am saying is that even if individual identities _remain_ anonymous, there's still a serious problem with the acquisition of aggregate information about a population. Users are pumping out their data en-masse and entities are buying it from the surveillance capitalism "apparatus" provided by Google and the like. That might be just fine if these entities are just companies that want to sell us soap and pop-tarts, but now we're seeing that there are other not-so-agreeable entities who want this data and are able to use in ways that the populace would find repulsive, including being incompatible with what they think is democracy. In other words, the scary part of surveillance capitalism is that we "lose as a whole", not as individuals.