3 ms·

> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we

> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here. [I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this. A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that. > you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad. But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.

meowface 6y ago
>Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.) If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even? >A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that. I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  > provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users. There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking). > My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago. Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum). It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.

meowface 6y ago

>Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.) If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even? >A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that. I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.

joshuamorton 5y ago
> provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users. There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking). > My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago. Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum). It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.