5 ms·

Yeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance trade

Yeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance tradeoffs are acceptable

eyelidlessness 6y ago
And then the criticism would be “Google enables violating the privacy of rural and poor customers with less access to high speed Internet”. I’m not saying any one of these criticisms is wrong. Just that they’re predictable and there’s basically no move Google could make besides shutting down that would satisfy the complaints (and even then it would be the ultimate “Google kills products” meme).
- coliveira 6y ago
  But this is exactly the nature of the problem: a company that has basically the power of big government dictating what people will do without their previous approval. The very existence of such a company is anti-democratic. Now we are stuck with a single company dominating a public service (internet) that affects the lives of billions of people around the world and we don't have a say on how they manage this network.
  - geofft 6y ago
    No, the nature of the problem is that Google (and big government, in its own ways) is trying to solve hard problems with no good solution. There are clear downsides (described in this thread) to all the possible options, and even the option of letting people choose between bad options doesn't actually make people's lives better at the end of the day. Keep in mind that Chrome basically pioneered the concept of doing OS-level sandboxing between websites. We can complain all we want about how Google should give people the option to choose whether they want hard site isolation or not, but if it weren't for Google's investment in Chrome, we wouldn't even think of the option. Would it be better to live in a world where hard problems don't get possible solutions at all, where no one feels like they have choices taken away from them because the choices were never given them in the first place? (I do firmly agree that the very existence of Google is anti-democratic, though... but I get there via an entirely different argument. I'm glad to see more people concluding this, nonetheless.)
    - coliveira 6y ago
      The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live. As for technology existing only because of Google or some other large company, that's not the case. Google was more innovative when it was smaller. Netscape created the whole browser industry as a small startup. Just let a lot of small to medium size companies compete in the market and split the ones that become so big as to become a threat to the whole ecosystem.
      - d1zzy 6y ago
        There are many problems that cannot be solved by the resources available to a medium sized company. Which is why you need multiple governments to get together to help out something like AirBus or space programs. Similarly Google at its scale can tackle large problems more efficiently than having 10000 medium sized companies pool their resources together to do the same. In other words, everything has pros and cons that depend on each particular situation. Large companies aren't "all bad" and small companies aren't "all good", you just chose to give lower priority (or ignore) ti the bad aspects of small companies while showing concern with the bad aspects of large companies.
        coliveira 6y ago
        That's a theory without data to back it up. Especially in technology, where big innovation usually comes from small to medium sized companies. What smaller companies cannot do is coerce the market to extract profits at the level done by Google and their pears. That's why we need anti-trust legislation.
      - ben509 6y ago
        > The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. No, a plurality of people agreed on the solution, and everyone else disagreed with it but was stuck with it. > Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live. Now you're at the whim of a popularity contest.
- tekromancr 6y ago
  So? You are just describing how discourse works. Entity A does thing that impacts entity B. Entity B makes those effects known to a broader group than entity B. Maybe entity A does thing about it, maybe not.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    I’m describing a situation where a certain set of opinions is insatiable because sating any subset thirsts another.
    - tekromancr 6y ago
      ok, that makes sense, but I think that describes such a general idea. I am incapable of imagining a single thing everyone on the entire planet is capable of agreeing on; so inherently, any action anyone could possibly ever take would be subject to mutually exclusive opinions.
ashtonkem 6y ago
To a first order approximation, nobody actually changes any of these advanced settings. The default is what most people use, and most settings might as well never exist.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Sure, but the people that do change get these settings are people too, and they’re often the type of people that will be vocal about your product and recommend it to people.
  - geofft 6y ago
    Then why haven't any of those vocal people managed to get Firefox, KDE, or Devuan to nontrivial market share?
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    1) “There is a setting” is a good way to deflect from the more difficult job of making decisions about what the product should do. 2) Every setting comes with an opportunity cost. More than one product has died under a morasse of way too many configuration flags, or focused on features to please a minority of users at the cost of the product itself. 3) The group that says they want the setting is always bigger than the group that will actually use the setting.
tinus_hn 6y ago
It doesn’t matter because the vast majority won’t change the default so sites won’t optimize for your use case anyway.
gumby 6y ago
Most people don't understand how various options should be set if they even know those options exist.

Yeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance tradeoffs are acceptable

eyelidlessness 6y ago

And then the criticism would be “Google enables violating the privacy of rural and poor customers with less access to high speed Internet”. I’m not saying any one of these criticisms is wrong. Just that they’re predictable and there’s basically no move Google could make besides shutting down that would satisfy the complaints (and even then it would be the ultimate “Google kills products” meme).

coliveira 6y ago
But this is exactly the nature of the problem: a company that has basically the power of big government dictating what people will do without their previous approval. The very existence of such a company is anti-democratic. Now we are stuck with a single company dominating a public service (internet) that affects the lives of billions of people around the world and we don't have a say on how they manage this network.
- geofft 6y ago
  No, the nature of the problem is that Google (and big government, in its own ways) is trying to solve hard problems with no good solution. There are clear downsides (described in this thread) to all the possible options, and even the option of letting people choose between bad options doesn't actually make people's lives better at the end of the day. Keep in mind that Chrome basically pioneered the concept of doing OS-level sandboxing between websites. We can complain all we want about how Google should give people the option to choose whether they want hard site isolation or not, but if it weren't for Google's investment in Chrome, we wouldn't even think of the option. Would it be better to live in a world where hard problems don't get possible solutions at all, where no one feels like they have choices taken away from them because the choices were never given them in the first place? (I do firmly agree that the very existence of Google is anti-democratic, though... but I get there via an entirely different argument. I'm glad to see more people concluding this, nonetheless.)
  - coliveira 6y ago
    The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live. As for technology existing only because of Google or some other large company, that's not the case. Google was more innovative when it was smaller. Netscape created the whole browser industry as a small startup. Just let a lot of small to medium size companies compete in the market and split the ones that become so big as to become a threat to the whole ecosystem.
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      There are many problems that cannot be solved by the resources available to a medium sized company. Which is why you need multiple governments to get together to help out something like AirBus or space programs. Similarly Google at its scale can tackle large problems more efficiently than having 10000 medium sized companies pool their resources together to do the same. In other words, everything has pros and cons that depend on each particular situation. Large companies aren't "all bad" and small companies aren't "all good", you just chose to give lower priority (or ignore) ti the bad aspects of small companies while showing concern with the bad aspects of large companies.
      - coliveira 6y ago
        That's a theory without data to back it up. Especially in technology, where big innovation usually comes from small to medium sized companies. What smaller companies cannot do is coerce the market to extract profits at the level done by Google and their pears. That's why we need anti-trust legislation.
    - ben509 6y ago
      > The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. No, a plurality of people agreed on the solution, and everyone else disagreed with it but was stuck with it. > Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live. Now you're at the whim of a popularity contest.
tekromancr 6y ago
So? You are just describing how discourse works. Entity A does thing that impacts entity B. Entity B makes those effects known to a broader group than entity B. Maybe entity A does thing about it, maybe not.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I’m describing a situation where a certain set of opinions is insatiable because sating any subset thirsts another.
  - tekromancr 6y ago
    ok, that makes sense, but I think that describes such a general idea. I am incapable of imagining a single thing everyone on the entire planet is capable of agreeing on; so inherently, any action anyone could possibly ever take would be subject to mutually exclusive opinions.

ashtonkem 6y ago

To a first order approximation, nobody actually changes any of these advanced settings. The default is what most people use, and most settings might as well never exist.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Sure, but the people that do change get these settings are people too, and they’re often the type of people that will be vocal about your product and recommend it to people.
- geofft 6y ago
  Then why haven't any of those vocal people managed to get Firefox, KDE, or Devuan to nontrivial market share?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  1) “There is a setting” is a good way to deflect from the more difficult job of making decisions about what the product should do. 2) Every setting comes with an opportunity cost. More than one product has died under a morasse of way too many configuration flags, or focused on features to please a minority of users at the cost of the product itself. 3) The group that says they want the setting is always bigger than the group that will actually use the setting.

tinus_hn 6y ago

It doesn’t matter because the vast majority won’t change the default so sites won’t optimize for your use case anyway.

gumby 6y ago

Most people don't understand how various options should be set if they even know those options exist.