22 ms·

How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

198 points by anarbadalov 7y ago

brenden2 7y ago
This is what keeps me up at night these days. Between information gerrymandering, the quest for increased engagement, uncanny valleys, de-platforming and so forth I wonder how it will affect our ability to avoid misinformation, have original ideas, and not descend into some weird form of chaos a la Idiocracy (2006). If anyone is passionate about trying to find ways to treat people like individual humans again, please reach out to me. I want to solve this problem by creating a business that's sustainable and better than the Google/FB approach.
- java-man 7y ago
  I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service. One can see this in how quickly various products fall when a free alternative exists. How many people buy an email client, for example?
  - brenden2 7y ago
    I'm trying to prove this hypothesis wrong :) Obviously it's a big experiment. My belief is that with the right incentive system, and right messaging & social proof, you can fix the problem. We're not there yet, but we are seeing it work on a very small scale.
    - java-man 7y ago
      I would love to see you succeed!
      - brenden2 7y ago
        Thanks!
  - zepto 7y ago
    This has been true for a few decades, but it may not continue to be indefinitely. Also, it’s worth asking wondering what percentage of users you need in order to make a huge impact even if most people continue to use free stuff. My guess is that it could be as low as 1%.
    - brenden2 7y ago
      Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head. When it comes to new companies and business models, timing is super important. A great example of this was the dotcom boom where you saw a bunch of companies with (arguably) the right idea go bust, and then years later another company picked up where they left off and succeeded.
  - sverige 7y ago
    MS Windows is the great exception to this, where not only do they collect an inflated price for their software, they also spy on their users. So making money on the product is no guarantee that a software vendor won't also invade your privacy. Apparently the key to success is to get corporate lock-in.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      MS Windows builds on a very long history, which involves it positioning itself as the default OS on PCs (price bundled with the price of equipment), which led to a lot of software (games in particular) being written just for it. It also strongly benefited for being free for a sizable population of the world - by means of Microsoft not fighting rampant piracy of its systems.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.
  - mfer 7y ago
    I think context matters here... In the US, at least, debt is really high. There is a regular desire for "more". And to get "more" faster than previous generations did. All while the generations entering the workforce make less (when accounting for inflation) than previous generations did at the same age. This can drive people to try to get more from "free" things. Things aren't "free" but instead you pay with something else you may not realize the consequence of. It's almost a "privacy debt" instead of a financial one. Any new thing to fight the paying with privacy instead of money model needs to start in a landscape like this.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    >I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service. That is the current state yes, but I think that this was a manufactured type of psychology/expectation. I remember back in the day (90s 00s) when I used to install software for my family, one of my uncles was always flabbergasted that the software was free. "But why is it free?" "How do the make rent?!" I tried to explain the Hacker/OSS ethos and whatever else I could think of, but it never really sunk in for him. I think paid software is going to make a comeback once clients realize that nobody except google (and a handful of companies) are actually benefiting from the pointless web surveillance. Hopefully that will happen when the tech industry stops giving Google a free pass for their spying and squarely puts them in the enemy camp...
- vectorEQ 7y ago
  you can be a 'good human' yourself, whatever that means. and if you start a business you can make an effort to try and be a 'good business', whatever that means. you won't earn billions, but perhaps can 'feel good about yourself', whatever that means.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    You say as if it was all in GP's head, but being "a good human" and running a "good business" are concepts that are commonly understood, if a little fuzzy in the details. They're also the underpinning of society - the more good actors playing fair you have, the more stable and efficient a society is.
    - maximente 7y ago
      care to elaborate then? almost all decisions aren't as seemingly easy as you've stated. genuinely curious as most decisions straddle the whole "good" spectrum pretty seriously. one thing i just went through: should i pick up the contract from a slightly less "good" org, or let 2 1099ers go, whose families will go without income for some period of time? what's the good choice here in your opinion? or by good do you just mean non-cheating? is incorporating your company in a lower COL/higher talent area cheating in your eyes? etc. gets hairy quick.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I don't think the decisions are easy. Especially under competitive pressure. > one thing i just went through: should i pick up the contract from a slightly less "good" org, or let 2 1099ers go, whose families will go without income for some period of time? Depends on the "slightly". If slightly enough, can you reject the contract and help these 1099ers find another contract, by e.g. referring them? I don't know the details of your situation and I'm not going to judge you either way. I've been on the receiving end of a similar situation in that my boss once told me that there are troubles and he's looking for projects, and one potential contract that would be a good fit for my skills involved work on gambling machines. I refused on ethical grounds, and he later told me he was very happy that I did, because it didn't sit well with him either. Unfortunately, this ended up folding the company. Fortunately, he helped me move to another job and he got a job in a large shop himself, and from what I can tell, this ended up beneficial to everyone involved. Besides these borderline situations, there's plenty in business world that's happening on the "bad" side. Like, does the grocery store next to my parents' house have to wash spoiling meat with a dish cleaner and sell it as fresh? Does the boss of a certain large secondhand book store in Poland have to mentally abuse his workers, exploiting the fact that he employs people from small towns who may have trouble finding a new job? Does he have to bribe local government inspector so that this doesn't get out[0]? Do restaurants have to offer "grilled" meat which really is microwaved meat with grill marks added with a sandwitch grill? These are examples of clearly bad behavior. Whenever I befriend people working in any industry, I get to hear new stories like these. Companies doing that may get away with it on an open market, but these things do breed contempt. And come economic turmoil, people with pitchforks won't be checking if you were the (perceivably) rare entrepreneur that was good and honest. As for what's the good choice in general, I think this is always incremental and case-by-case, but a guiding principle I could offer would be the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Always strive to turn everything into win-win. Don't exploit people. - [0] - Allegation I have on good authority, but the party telling me this doesn't want to pursue it or have anything to do with their former boss. Fortunately, the guy got a kick in the butt from the building safety inspectors, who were unwilling to ignore the fact that the walls in the workplace were cracking. I heard the working conditions improved a little bit after that.
- ickwabe 7y ago
  You should reach out to the folks at https://teamhuman.fm/ https://teamhuman.fm/. Might be some connections you could make there along these lines.
  - brenden2 7y ago
    Thanks for the info! I'll try reaching out, but I'm probably too small of a fish for them to be interested :)
    - pureliquidhw 7y ago
      Great way to make someone think you're too small of a fish is to outright say it!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rkagerer 7y ago
  One way developers and product managers can help craft the world you envision is to exercise good moral judgement when confronted with choices that may lead to degraded sovereignty of personal data. The same way a civil engineer ought not sign off on a bridge design that's compromised. I realize not everyone is in a position to take a stand, and some will argue others will inevitably step in to do the shady deed. Keep in mind bold actions of integrity will often inspire others.
  - brenden2 7y ago
    It's really, really hard to do this when it goes against the bottom line, no matter how good of a person you are. The company will eventually act in ways that serve to increase revenue. Thus, if your incentives are misaligned, the actions you take to increase revenue will be harmful to users.
    - maximente 7y ago
      there are corporate structures that allow for decisions that aren't profit-seeking above all else. private corps and social purpose corps, are just two types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation
    - behringer 7y ago
      Sometimes doing what's right lands you in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
    - uoaei 7y ago
      It's important to reiterate that this isn't an issue with companies, nor with people per se. The issue is that the bottom line is the only incentive in capitalist economies. One can dream up other forms of economies where the incentive would not be there. Some have already been discussed in great detail over the past couple centuries.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
cromwellian 7y ago
A lot of inaccuracies and mixing up of categorically different things, one sentence it’s talking about, from an implied early realization that search data could used for machine learning and then implying it has something to do with the Page Rank Algorithm. I think Rank Brain was one of the first uses of ML as a signal for Google Search and that didn’t happen until 2015, 18 years later. It sort of reads as something trying to invent a top down narrative for what was in reality a haphazard and unplanned for slow evolution of many pivots over nearly two decades.
dswalter 7y ago
I just finished the book; it's uneven, but incredible. Some of her conclusions and how she frames the problem are arguable, but her presentation of the facts and her underlying hypotheses about how the situation has arisen are fascinating. This passage, and really her whole summary of the history of Google, (which goes beyond just this excerpt) are particularly compelling.
ryandrake 7y ago
> The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. We used to have fairly decent home automation products back then (wow, 20 years ago!) Even the cheap consumer X10 stuff at least worked and could even be used without a LAN, let alone Internet. Since then, the products have actually gotten worse in many ways. Sure, sensors are a little smaller now, and some of the designs look less dorky. On the other hand, it seems everything phones home (or elsewhere) now, stops working without Internet, exposes you to a massively increased computer security risk, and/or is stuffed with ads. Look for a decent home security camera that doesn't 1. Store video in the cloud, 2. Send opaque binary data back to some server in China, 3. Require an internet connection to set up, administer, or use, 4. Come with a giant EULA, Terms of Use & Privacy Policy. They exist but you need to dig a bit to find them. I used to only think about keeping people out of my home LAN, limiting/blocking incoming connections, preventing infiltration, having an “Internet only” guest VLAN. Now it’s just as important to block outgoing connections and prevent data exfiltration. You need a “no Internet” VLAN to isolate your “smart” devices. I used to be terrified to see all the failed login attempts on my internet-addressable SSH server. Now I’m terrified to see all the outgoing connection attempts from all my various devices and proprietary software. A lightbulb shouldn’t need a Privacy Policy. We stopped improving the Aware Home and instead added the Connected Home. Bad exchange.
- mfer 7y ago
  The goal used to be academic and early innovators trying to improve the home. The goal posts have changed. It's not about making huge companies lots of money and helping them gain power and influence. This isn't a technological shift as much as it's a goal shift.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's a good reason to reject those companies and encourage everyone else we know to reject them too.
- 7y ago
throwsurveill 7y ago
I think the surprising thing is that people are surprised. It took basically until now for the bloom to come off the rose. Think about that. For 20 years Google has been supposedly hiring the smartest guys in the room and all it took was free food, some ball pits and slides, contributing some tech to open source, and working on a handful of "moonshots" that haven't gone anywhere to keep the sheen of innovation going. And it worked. For 20 years. People have been saying Google is the new Microsoft for a few years but it basically took until now for that to become consensus. Microsoft, who's been on the back foot until recently, has recast themselves as the new Open Source Champion, basically using the Google playbook from 20 years ago. And it's working! If you think about it Apple is the only company that hasn't changed. There's never been a bait and switch. It's always been proprietary. It's always been confident, others would say arrogant about its products. They've never tried to cloak themselves with the mantle of open source. The only reason the tech industry uses their products is because of its inherent qualities. No one had to be tricked into liking them. And they've always been honest about this. All the "privacy cranks" were right about Google. But from 2000 to about 2015 they were casually dismissed as fringe. People really bought the "Don't be evil" slogan externally (and I'm sure internally as well). Before Facebook, they mastered the art of doing something bad then walking it back with an apology and some opt-out privacy setting that they knew no one would enable. Privacy was always an afterthought (read Steven Levy's book about Google). I'm glad everyone is seeing the light finally.
- throwaway7771 7y ago
  I quit Google because I could no longer be a part of the dystopian nightmare they envision as their version of the Nerd Paradise. You have no idea how strong the reality distortion field is inside of that bubble. Googlers are breathtakingly naive about how the line has been pushed by the senior leadership in order to go from being mere billionaires to mega billionaires. And it's not that hard to see the mental model and economic conditions that gave rise to this situation. Assumption 1: Technology is a universal good. Assumption 2: Centralization is the most efficient mode of operation. (this follows directly from the mission to "Organize the world's information") Assumption 3: A dumb mantra like "Don't be evil", like intentions matter, and actions don't. Assumption 4: A centralized data-driven computer system makes the best decisions. Assumption 5: If the market rewards it, it's moral. Assumption 6: The more you know about people, the better you can manipulate them (c.f. showing them "more relevant" ads) Conclusion: Google knows best for everyone, its AI should run the whole world, and since it has a crapton of money, it must be right. Just pump that 25% year-over-year growth long enough, and you have a sprawling multi-national entity that literally knows everything about everyone. What they search for, what they buy, every website they ever visit, how long they stay there, and how they interact with it, what they watch, what music they like, who they talk to and what about, who they spend their time with, and where, exactly, to the meter, they are every single second of every day, what they look like, what they like to take pictures of, what their voice sounds like, their credit history, criminal backgrounds, and soon, their DNA. The world doesn't need Google to know this shit. I don't need Google to know this shit about me in order for it to tell me what Katy Perry's second album is named. For fuck sake, we need to stop this.
dandare 7y ago
Surveillance capitalism is a misnomer, a knee jerk reaction. At a glance, online advertising generates somewhere between $83.0 billion in 2017 and $220.38 billion in 2019, the exact number does not matter because it pales in comparison with other industries. Even if we removed all targeting online advertising would not disappear, so not all the worth is due to surveillance. Online surveillance is bad, but it does not define the type of Capitalism we live in.
- pacala 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, Alibaba Group, Tencent, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase. 6 surveillance corporations in top 10, 4 american and 2 chinese. If 6 out of largest corporations in the world were oil companies, we'd call it oil capitalism. If they were banks, we'd call it financial capitalism. It so happens that our age is the age of surveillance capitalism.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    Amazon makes most of their money from retail and cloud. Microsoft arguably makes most of their money from sales of Windows, Office, and Azure. If any form of advertising, even internal tracking and advertising, at all denotes you as surveillance company, then Apple's iAd, and Store optimization algorithms to try and maximize app sales would count. Likewise, JPMorgan Chase, which probably knows a good deal more about your personal finances than any of the tech companies, is also a surveillance company. We live in an era where defense contractors have caused the deaths of millions of people, and Purdue farmer just made $30 billion hooking people on opioids and reducing American life expectancy for the first time since 1918, where gun manufacturers are feeding small arms violence all over the world, especially in developing countries, and even hooking kids on smoking nicotine -- Juul -- is back. And we're discussing how on HN horrible target advertising is, over and over again. There's actually people's lives and healthy being literally destroyed by regular old capitalism all around the world.
tehjoker 7y ago
I like how Google has been slowly making street names harder to see in maps, which I presume is a behavioral nudge to make you rely more and more on their turn by turn directions, which allows them increasingly direct control over the motion of the physical world.
- cowpig 7y ago
  I dunno, I think Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade (with a particularly precipitous drop after whatever refactor they released in 2014 or so. Google maps is * Much, much slower * Harder to read/understand, especially street names * Much worse text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and have them understand * Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection, which felt dangerous), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP * Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans Even if a little can be explained by a desire to control the world, I think most is just the traditional corporate rot that happens to any successful company. Like Steve Jobs describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M
sedachv 7y ago
If you want to help do something about Internet surveillance, donate to the Electronic Privacy Information Center https://epic.org/ https://epic.org/ If you cannot donate, subscribing to their newsletter is free, and I highly recommend it.

198 points by anarbadalov 7y ago

This is what keeps me up at night these days. Between information gerrymandering, the quest for increased engagement, uncanny valleys, de-platforming and so forth I wonder how it will affect our ability to avoid misinformation, have original ideas, and not descend into some weird form of chaos a la Idiocracy (2006). If anyone is passionate about trying to find ways to treat people like individual humans again, please reach out to me. I want to solve this problem by creating a business that's sustainable and better than the Google/FB approach.

java-man 7y ago
I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service. One can see this in how quickly various products fall when a free alternative exists. How many people buy an email client, for example?
- brenden2 7y ago
  I'm trying to prove this hypothesis wrong :) Obviously it's a big experiment. My belief is that with the right incentive system, and right messaging & social proof, you can fix the problem. We're not there yet, but we are seeing it work on a very small scale.
  - java-man 7y ago
    I would love to see you succeed!
    - brenden2 7y ago
      Thanks!
- zepto 7y ago
  This has been true for a few decades, but it may not continue to be indefinitely. Also, it’s worth asking wondering what percentage of users you need in order to make a huge impact even if most people continue to use free stuff. My guess is that it could be as low as 1%.
  - brenden2 7y ago
    Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head. When it comes to new companies and business models, timing is super important. A great example of this was the dotcom boom where you saw a bunch of companies with (arguably) the right idea go bust, and then years later another company picked up where they left off and succeeded.
- sverige 7y ago
  MS Windows is the great exception to this, where not only do they collect an inflated price for their software, they also spy on their users. So making money on the product is no guarantee that a software vendor won't also invade your privacy. Apparently the key to success is to get corporate lock-in.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    MS Windows builds on a very long history, which involves it positioning itself as the default OS on PCs (price bundled with the price of equipment), which led to a lot of software (games in particular) being written just for it. It also strongly benefited for being free for a sizable population of the world - by means of Microsoft not fighting rampant piracy of its systems.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.
- mfer 7y ago
  I think context matters here... In the US, at least, debt is really high. There is a regular desire for "more". And to get "more" faster than previous generations did. All while the generations entering the workforce make less (when accounting for inflation) than previous generations did at the same age. This can drive people to try to get more from "free" things. Things aren't "free" but instead you pay with something else you may not realize the consequence of. It's almost a "privacy debt" instead of a financial one. Any new thing to fight the paying with privacy instead of money model needs to start in a landscape like this.
- la_barba 7y ago
  >I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service. That is the current state yes, but I think that this was a manufactured type of psychology/expectation. I remember back in the day (90s 00s) when I used to install software for my family, one of my uncles was always flabbergasted that the software was free. "But why is it free?" "How do the make rent?!" I tried to explain the Hacker/OSS ethos and whatever else I could think of, but it never really sunk in for him. I think paid software is going to make a comeback once clients realize that nobody except google (and a handful of companies) are actually benefiting from the pointless web surveillance. Hopefully that will happen when the tech industry stops giving Google a free pass for their spying and squarely puts them in the enemy camp...
vectorEQ 7y ago
you can be a 'good human' yourself, whatever that means. and if you start a business you can make an effort to try and be a 'good business', whatever that means. you won't earn billions, but perhaps can 'feel good about yourself', whatever that means.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You say as if it was all in GP's head, but being "a good human" and running a "good business" are concepts that are commonly understood, if a little fuzzy in the details. They're also the underpinning of society - the more good actors playing fair you have, the more stable and efficient a society is.
  - maximente 7y ago
    care to elaborate then? almost all decisions aren't as seemingly easy as you've stated. genuinely curious as most decisions straddle the whole "good" spectrum pretty seriously. one thing i just went through: should i pick up the contract from a slightly less "good" org, or let 2 1099ers go, whose families will go without income for some period of time? what's the good choice here in your opinion? or by good do you just mean non-cheating? is incorporating your company in a lower COL/higher talent area cheating in your eyes? etc. gets hairy quick.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I don't think the decisions are easy. Especially under competitive pressure. > one thing i just went through: should i pick up the contract from a slightly less "good" org, or let 2 1099ers go, whose families will go without income for some period of time? Depends on the "slightly". If slightly enough, can you reject the contract and help these 1099ers find another contract, by e.g. referring them? I don't know the details of your situation and I'm not going to judge you either way. I've been on the receiving end of a similar situation in that my boss once told me that there are troubles and he's looking for projects, and one potential contract that would be a good fit for my skills involved work on gambling machines. I refused on ethical grounds, and he later told me he was very happy that I did, because it didn't sit well with him either. Unfortunately, this ended up folding the company. Fortunately, he helped me move to another job and he got a job in a large shop himself, and from what I can tell, this ended up beneficial to everyone involved. Besides these borderline situations, there's plenty in business world that's happening on the "bad" side. Like, does the grocery store next to my parents' house have to wash spoiling meat with a dish cleaner and sell it as fresh? Does the boss of a certain large secondhand book store in Poland have to mentally abuse his workers, exploiting the fact that he employs people from small towns who may have trouble finding a new job? Does he have to bribe local government inspector so that this doesn't get out[0]? Do restaurants have to offer "grilled" meat which really is microwaved meat with grill marks added with a sandwitch grill? These are examples of clearly bad behavior. Whenever I befriend people working in any industry, I get to hear new stories like these. Companies doing that may get away with it on an open market, but these things do breed contempt. And come economic turmoil, people with pitchforks won't be checking if you were the (perceivably) rare entrepreneur that was good and honest. As for what's the good choice in general, I think this is always incremental and case-by-case, but a guiding principle I could offer would be the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Always strive to turn everything into win-win. Don't exploit people. - [0] - Allegation I have on good authority, but the party telling me this doesn't want to pursue it or have anything to do with their former boss. Fortunately, the guy got a kick in the butt from the building safety inspectors, who were unwilling to ignore the fact that the walls in the workplace were cracking. I heard the working conditions improved a little bit after that.
ickwabe 7y ago
You should reach out to the folks at https://teamhuman.fm/ https://teamhuman.fm/. Might be some connections you could make there along these lines.
- brenden2 7y ago
  Thanks for the info! I'll try reaching out, but I'm probably too small of a fish for them to be interested :)
  - pureliquidhw 7y ago
    Great way to make someone think you're too small of a fish is to outright say it!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rkagerer 7y ago
One way developers and product managers can help craft the world you envision is to exercise good moral judgement when confronted with choices that may lead to degraded sovereignty of personal data. The same way a civil engineer ought not sign off on a bridge design that's compromised. I realize not everyone is in a position to take a stand, and some will argue others will inevitably step in to do the shady deed. Keep in mind bold actions of integrity will often inspire others.
- brenden2 7y ago
  It's really, really hard to do this when it goes against the bottom line, no matter how good of a person you are. The company will eventually act in ways that serve to increase revenue. Thus, if your incentives are misaligned, the actions you take to increase revenue will be harmful to users.
  - maximente 7y ago
    there are corporate structures that allow for decisions that aren't profit-seeking above all else. private corps and social purpose corps, are just two types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation
  - behringer 7y ago
    Sometimes doing what's right lands you in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
  - uoaei 7y ago
    It's important to reiterate that this isn't an issue with companies, nor with people per se. The issue is that the bottom line is the only incentive in capitalist economies. One can dream up other forms of economies where the incentive would not be there. Some have already been discussed in great detail over the past couple centuries.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago

cromwellian 7y ago

A lot of inaccuracies and mixing up of categorically different things, one sentence it’s talking about, from an implied early realization that search data could used for machine learning and then implying it has something to do with the Page Rank Algorithm. I think Rank Brain was one of the first uses of ML as a signal for Google Search and that didn’t happen until 2015, 18 years later. It sort of reads as something trying to invent a top down narrative for what was in reality a haphazard and unplanned for slow evolution of many pivots over nearly two decades.

dswalter 7y ago

I just finished the book; it's uneven, but incredible. Some of her conclusions and how she frames the problem are arguable, but her presentation of the facts and her underlying hypotheses about how the situation has arisen are fascinating. This passage, and really her whole summary of the history of Google, (which goes beyond just this excerpt) are particularly compelling.

ryandrake 7y ago

> The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. We used to have fairly decent home automation products back then (wow, 20 years ago!) Even the cheap consumer X10 stuff at least worked and could even be used without a LAN, let alone Internet. Since then, the products have actually gotten worse in many ways. Sure, sensors are a little smaller now, and some of the designs look less dorky. On the other hand, it seems everything phones home (or elsewhere) now, stops working without Internet, exposes you to a massively increased computer security risk, and/or is stuffed with ads. Look for a decent home security camera that doesn't 1. Store video in the cloud, 2. Send opaque binary data back to some server in China, 3. Require an internet connection to set up, administer, or use, 4. Come with a giant EULA, Terms of Use & Privacy Policy. They exist but you need to dig a bit to find them. I used to only think about keeping people out of my home LAN, limiting/blocking incoming connections, preventing infiltration, having an “Internet only” guest VLAN. Now it’s just as important to block outgoing connections and prevent data exfiltration. You need a “no Internet” VLAN to isolate your “smart” devices. I used to be terrified to see all the failed login attempts on my internet-addressable SSH server. Now I’m terrified to see all the outgoing connection attempts from all my various devices and proprietary software. A lightbulb shouldn’t need a Privacy Policy. We stopped improving the Aware Home and instead added the Connected Home. Bad exchange.

mfer 7y ago
The goal used to be academic and early innovators trying to improve the home. The goal posts have changed. It's not about making huge companies lots of money and helping them gain power and influence. This isn't a technological shift as much as it's a goal shift.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's a good reason to reject those companies and encourage everyone else we know to reject them too.
7y ago

throwsurveill 7y ago

I think the surprising thing is that people are surprised. It took basically until now for the bloom to come off the rose. Think about that. For 20 years Google has been supposedly hiring the smartest guys in the room and all it took was free food, some ball pits and slides, contributing some tech to open source, and working on a handful of "moonshots" that haven't gone anywhere to keep the sheen of innovation going. And it worked. For 20 years. People have been saying Google is the new Microsoft for a few years but it basically took until now for that to become consensus. Microsoft, who's been on the back foot until recently, has recast themselves as the new Open Source Champion, basically using the Google playbook from 20 years ago. And it's working! If you think about it Apple is the only company that hasn't changed. There's never been a bait and switch. It's always been proprietary. It's always been confident, others would say arrogant about its products. They've never tried to cloak themselves with the mantle of open source. The only reason the tech industry uses their products is because of its inherent qualities. No one had to be tricked into liking them. And they've always been honest about this. All the "privacy cranks" were right about Google. But from 2000 to about 2015 they were casually dismissed as fringe. People really bought the "Don't be evil" slogan externally (and I'm sure internally as well). Before Facebook, they mastered the art of doing something bad then walking it back with an apology and some opt-out privacy setting that they knew no one would enable. Privacy was always an afterthought (read Steven Levy's book about Google). I'm glad everyone is seeing the light finally.

throwaway7771 7y ago
I quit Google because I could no longer be a part of the dystopian nightmare they envision as their version of the Nerd Paradise. You have no idea how strong the reality distortion field is inside of that bubble. Googlers are breathtakingly naive about how the line has been pushed by the senior leadership in order to go from being mere billionaires to mega billionaires. And it's not that hard to see the mental model and economic conditions that gave rise to this situation. Assumption 1: Technology is a universal good. Assumption 2: Centralization is the most efficient mode of operation. (this follows directly from the mission to "Organize the world's information") Assumption 3: A dumb mantra like "Don't be evil", like intentions matter, and actions don't. Assumption 4: A centralized data-driven computer system makes the best decisions. Assumption 5: If the market rewards it, it's moral. Assumption 6: The more you know about people, the better you can manipulate them (c.f. showing them "more relevant" ads) Conclusion: Google knows best for everyone, its AI should run the whole world, and since it has a crapton of money, it must be right. Just pump that 25% year-over-year growth long enough, and you have a sprawling multi-national entity that literally knows everything about everyone. What they search for, what they buy, every website they ever visit, how long they stay there, and how they interact with it, what they watch, what music they like, who they talk to and what about, who they spend their time with, and where, exactly, to the meter, they are every single second of every day, what they look like, what they like to take pictures of, what their voice sounds like, their credit history, criminal backgrounds, and soon, their DNA. The world doesn't need Google to know this shit. I don't need Google to know this shit about me in order for it to tell me what Katy Perry's second album is named. For fuck sake, we need to stop this.

dandare 7y ago

Surveillance capitalism is a misnomer, a knee jerk reaction. At a glance, online advertising generates somewhere between $83.0 billion in 2017 and $220.38 billion in 2019, the exact number does not matter because it pales in comparison with other industries. Even if we removed all targeting online advertising would not disappear, so not all the worth is due to surveillance. Online surveillance is bad, but it does not define the type of Capitalism we live in.

pacala 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, Alibaba Group, Tencent, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase. 6 surveillance corporations in top 10, 4 american and 2 chinese. If 6 out of largest corporations in the world were oil companies, we'd call it oil capitalism. If they were banks, we'd call it financial capitalism. It so happens that our age is the age of surveillance capitalism.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  Amazon makes most of their money from retail and cloud. Microsoft arguably makes most of their money from sales of Windows, Office, and Azure. If any form of advertising, even internal tracking and advertising, at all denotes you as surveillance company, then Apple's iAd, and Store optimization algorithms to try and maximize app sales would count. Likewise, JPMorgan Chase, which probably knows a good deal more about your personal finances than any of the tech companies, is also a surveillance company. We live in an era where defense contractors have caused the deaths of millions of people, and Purdue farmer just made $30 billion hooking people on opioids and reducing American life expectancy for the first time since 1918, where gun manufacturers are feeding small arms violence all over the world, especially in developing countries, and even hooking kids on smoking nicotine -- Juul -- is back. And we're discussing how on HN horrible target advertising is, over and over again. There's actually people's lives and healthy being literally destroyed by regular old capitalism all around the world.

tehjoker 7y ago

I like how Google has been slowly making street names harder to see in maps, which I presume is a behavioral nudge to make you rely more and more on their turn by turn directions, which allows them increasingly direct control over the motion of the physical world.

cowpig 7y ago
I dunno, I think Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade (with a particularly precipitous drop after whatever refactor they released in 2014 or so. Google maps is * Much, much slower * Harder to read/understand, especially street names * Much worse text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and have them understand * Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection, which felt dangerous), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP * Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans Even if a little can be explained by a desire to control the world, I think most is just the traditional corporate rot that happens to any successful company. Like Steve Jobs describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M

sedachv 7y ago

If you want to help do something about Internet surveillance, donate to the Electronic Privacy Information Center https://epic.org/ https://epic.org/ If you cannot donate, subscribing to their newsletter is free, and I highly recommend it.