8 ms·
There’s a huge privacy battle on the horizon in tech. The initial scuffles are just the beginning. Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being
by JCM9 5y ago
There’s a huge privacy battle on the horizon in tech. The initial scuffles are just the beginning. Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share. Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?).
Meanwhile the likes of Apple and others are taking a stance of making it increasingly hard for Google and Facebook to do what they want to via updates now advertised as “features” that protect consumers. As these documents highlight Google knows consumers want this privacy and it scares the $&!& out of them. Interesting days ahead.
- Vespasian 5y agoGoogle even managed to incur heavy losses from offering cloud infrastructure services. A business which usually is a guaranteed golden goose. They are really bad at making money with anything that isn't advertising.
- tomrod 5y agoI'm pretty sure they're doing that to draw folks from AWS and similar.
- ForHackernews 5y agoYeah, but you'd have to be a fool to go. Google has proven over and over again that they don't value customer support or long term maintenance. They will get bored and sunset services you depend on, or switch off your entire business because some employee sent suspicious email on his gmail.
- Spooky23 5y agoGCP is very different than the consumer services.
- ForHackernews 5y agoSo they claim. Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/gbh7p6/gcp_suspended_my_account_due_to_suspicious/ https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/gbh7p6/gcp_sus... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26252533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26252533
- urthor 5y agoNo... Google actually has started hiring AWS style support engineers for GCP. Google has realized that building up business to business support networks is a profitable approach. Customers get nothing, because customers don't pay money. Customers are the product.
- Spooky23 5y agoI’m working on a piece of a project that’s on GCP and ran into an edge case issue. For at least this product, the engineer reminded me of the old school Sun and IBM support people. It was a breath of fresh air for me. I’ve heard AWS is similar but never experienced it firsthand. Other big tech companies are very different. A few weeks ago, I submitted an incident with sample code and got a response back with code to implement a workaround, and the information related to the enhancement the engineer submitted so I could escalate if needed. They automatically transitioned support engineers in another geography at shift end without any drama or repetition from me. All within 12 hours.
- readams 5y agoGoogle cloud has huge year over year growth, and does really well especially in retail sectors. The losses are an investment. Also, not sure where you get that is a guaranteed golden goose. Most companies that are in this space don't do well.
- quotemstr 5y ago> Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. While it's true that on the internet there's a loud privacy activist movement that's grown over the past few years, I don't think this movement reflects the true preferences of the silent majority. I think it's a self-serving moral panic. Users benefit from the services that their information funds. It would be a mistake to incinerate trillions of dollars of institutional value on the say-so of a few strident and unrepresentative activist voices.
- nojito 5y ago>I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. There's actually a pretty cool graph from Google from the court docs that says the opposite. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1tSEWYAAVHGY?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1tSEWYAAVHGY?format=jpg&name=...
- joshuamorton 5y agoThat graph didn't have a scale. It could be that 97% of users disabled the feature, or less than 1%. You just don't know.
- nojito 5y agoIf the scale didn't matter, Google would not have called it a "Problem"
- joshuamorton 5y agoI think what it comes down to is that a small number of people coughs be "a problem", while still not being evidence that the median regular person or whatever cares.
- swader999 5y ago75 million in the USA that voted for the Red team saw close up the stifling censorship and deplatforming. Awareness is growing but I do agree behavior will be slow to change.
- mistrial9 5y agoas an American skilled in computer science, I am literally aghast at what the mobile phone has done in barely fifteen years, degrading decades and in fact centuries of individual rights mores. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, in East Asia, there was a completely different series of social evolutions, such that a large majority of people are not bothered and in fact expect services tied to identity tied to finance. This conveniently is expressed by a government issued ID tied to a smart phone number tied to banking. There are exceptions but not the majority. This simple formula is repugnant to my US Western sense of social boundaries. Investors are the ones that seem to have no problem with individuals giving up their privacy, while the people in question cross the gamut of social condition.
- dv_dt 5y agoIn a way it seems pragmatic. You say all the boundaries are being violated, you might as well get something out of it. Also I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference in loss of privacy and tapping or swiping a credit card.
- vageli 5y ago> Also I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference in loss of privacy and tapping or swiping a credit card. Well for one thing, at least in my experience, most credit card transaction data does not include granular information about the transaction (like the list of groceries you bought).
- amelius 5y agoI would like to know if this is still true.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoBut the supermarkets gather that data, for sure. Several times I've bought a brand name item, then reverted to generic, then got offers related to that brand (just because I was buying based on value). I assume if they can establish a buying pattern with a few offers then often that will convert someone to the brand goods. (It's way easier just to pick the packet that looks like the one you got before than it is to look for the best offer). One thing about returning to relative wealth is how much stress it removes from 'weekly' shopping.
- croes 5y agoThe best part is, that it's not proven that all this tailored ads really have the desired effect. Especially if many buy those ads. Most of them are useless because the targeted customer only choose one to buy from for a wanted product, if he is choice is based on ads at all.
- graphtrader 5y agoThis is the real rub to me. It would be one thing if you rip off all my data but I am constantly seeing ads for cool things I would never have found otherwise and can't wait to buy. Instead the ads are always shit that I never even consider. If things were not tailored I would probably randomly run across products that are just outside my current taste but at least spark some interest.
- ipaddr 5y agoThe one who pays the most is the one who gets the spot. Tailored to make the most profit and you are part of a group of people who buy 'x' product. The group might be males, 20-25 year olds, sailors from Malta. You would expect ads for sailing equipment or vacations or beer. This group get's an ads for Corn Flakes instead. Why because Kellogg want to attract more young males and they may target a spot like sailing where they will sponser races and buy as many digital ads in that category as they can. You seeing cereal ads makes it seem very untargeted but in reality your data has been highly targetted to give you the unwanted ad.
- trulyme 5y agoThis! Customer is served, except the customer is not the site visitor, it is the advertiser.
- cookiengineer 5y agoI think in the future in order to stay private online, there's no way unless web traffic is decentralized off their servers. That is the real power behind a peer-to-peer system in my opinion: Offloading, and therefore removing the capabilities to track anything as a single node in the system. The only issue is peer-to-peer transport encryption, which can be solved if done correctly. Something like "statistically correct" DNS, or assets, or contents should've been the norm a long time ago. That's exactly what I'm striving for with my Tholian Stealth Browser [1] (to clarify: I mean peer-to-peer as a networking concept, specifically as the opposite concept of a decentralized blockchain) [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoIf a peer to peer system of interest caught on, I'm sure google would be glad to run 90% of the nodes (incognito) to have some view of what's happening therein.
- Xelynega 5y agoAll they would have to do is "support" the p2p network in chrome/chromium and because of the ease of use the majority of p2p nodes will be running code written by Google.
- cookiengineer 5y agoWell, that depends on the scenarios that the threat model tries to identify. The question at this point (or rather in that specific moment) is what will lead to classifying malicious actors, and how these malicious actors can be identified permanently. If it's a blocked IP: not a good solution. If it's a TLS certificate for said peer: probably better. Fighting anti censorship mechanisms is really hard due to its statistically local-true nature. The buckets have to be carefully sorted and randomized with multiple geolocations, ISPs, and fully-encrypted network protocols - to the very least in order to make this work.
- petters 5y agoGoogle would be able to get a ton of revenue without tracking users at all. Selling ads based on search keywords would still work very well
- joe_fishfish 5y agoIndeed, that's DuckDuckGo's main monetisation strategy right now, and it's working very well for them.
- ColinHayhurst 5y agoTrue and for others perhaps. But they still rely on the ad networks of, and passing data on to Microsoft (DDG, Ecosia....) or Google (Startpage). Apologies for the self-promotion but there is another way: https://www.mojeek.com/support/ads/ https://www.mojeek.com/support/ads/
- clairity 5y agopersonal data should be 2-party consent for every data sale transaction by law, not this ‘opted-in by corporate mandate and backed by regulatory capture and monopolistic power’ we have now. people should be able to negotiate a rate at which they’re willing to allow the corporation to sell their data, including not allowing it at all ever.
- amelius 5y agoCan't we have a smart contract system where every company in possession of some user data can be asked to provide a machine-verifiable proof that it legally obtained that information?
- clairity 5y agosure, but it’s essentially a social/legal problem, not a technical one. the onus is on the company holding data to show the chain of consent, which doesn’t require anything fancy outside a purpose-built database.
- amelius 5y agoSo how does that work then? How does Google prove that I clicked that accept-EULA button? Or that I approve of them keeping track of my information? I never put my signature anywhere and still there are companies holding or even trading my information. > it’s essentially a social/legal problem, not a technical one And ironically, it's the tech companies who are getting away with it.
- clairity 5y agoright, that’s the social/legal problem, that consent is assumed, and i’d argue, coerced. bundling like this is actually an anti-trust concern, because it’s using power in one market (for instance, search) to exert control in another (data brokerage), but we’ve collectively lost sight of this being a problem. but yes, they should be required to get your unambiguous consent for data sharing separate from any other transaction, otherwise it shouldn’t be considered consent.
- 0800LUCAS 5y ago> Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?) IMO, you're wrong on this one. Things like Google fiber/car are not ways to diversify Google's revenue. They are just more tools in their arsenal to keep collecting more data on users and improving their ads. By offering things like Google fiber, they ensure more people get online and that's more data they can collect. Same with FB. Terragraph and Aquila are/were just ways to get people online so more data can be collected and fed into "the machine"
- Closi 5y agoI think there are three categories of projects at Google: 1) Working out how they can milk even more money out of their magic cash cow of online advertising by providing more opportunities to serve ads (YouTube, Gmail, Maps) 2) Protecting their magic cash cow (ads) from external threats, the main threat being a loss of tracking (Chrome, Android, Fibre, Google Analytics, Ok Google, Maps). (As an aside, if you use Chrome and want to avoid this kind of behaviour, please consider swapping to a truly open source non-tracking browser) 3) Trying to find another magic cash cow before the first one runs out of milk (Eg Google Cloud, YouTube Red) Some things will fall into multiple buckets, for example Google Maps and Gmail offers both an opportunity to further track users and serve them ads - double whammy! I suspect Google Cars are more about category 3, although have no doubt that they will be mined for data as much as possible to serve categories 1 & 2. Agree with your point on fibre - it looks like that is an attempt to own even more of the tech stack to provide even more methods to track.
- foobiekr 5y agoGoogle Fiber was about: threatening behavior of the carriers and net neutrality obtaining access rights to add fiber when new placement occurred … not trying to build a viable new business. Waymo (and basically all of X) is there to make google look sexy and to provide an exec playground than actual businesses. The Waymo team is the most competent team in the space and they know there is no business there this decade.
- nofunsir 5y agoThe Google fiber project was very much a aligned with their regular business model. Google fiber is dead because deep packet inspection is dead. The preemptive bad PR around snoopvertising and AT&T trying to compete made Google go, “oh yeah man ... we totally will not engage in deep packet inspection. Psh, stupid AT&T, what creeeps (ok guys shut it down!)”
- azalemeth 5y agoOne thing I've been meaning to do for a while is try to use a 'hardcore' AOSP 'de-googled' Android rom, like ParanoidAndroid. I've no idea how much of a pain in the arse this will be. Heck, being rooted causes enough unexpected "why do you not work" moments for me. If anything, I feel Google has got more hostile to the privacy-conscious user over time. The trouble with privacy as a product is that it's _very_ hard to verify it. Apple has basically said "Trust us, We're Okay" and smaller fry are even harder to verify.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agonow i wonder to what degree apple's public refusal to unlock a particular phone for the FBI was a publicity stunt...
- yosamino 5y agoI've never run, willing or knowlingly, an android phone that has not been de-googlified as my main phone (since my n900 died in 2012 ... I miss it ). For my purposes, that works out well, there are, within reason, replacements for all the basics. And now that I have done it for so long, I don't really know how having an android phone with google works. The niche is big enough that something like https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ exists that implements some of the core libraries for using google, without using google code. This enable installing some things from the playstore if neccessary ( I have not had the need - but I understand I am in a tiny minority ) - and it made it possible to install some corona contact tracing apps without having to rely on the google implementation. I am sure though, and I see it around me, that things won't continue exactly as before just without google, because of how deeply ingrained tracking everyone and everything all the time is. I don't know how hardcore you wanna get, but you might also want to take a look here https://e.foundation/ https://e.foundation/ , here https://lineageos.org https://lineageos.org and here https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org There's like - dozens of us ...and thank you for reminding me of ParanoidAndroid. I've not tried them in a while.
- user-the-name 5y agoThis kind of stuff is not, in general, possible to verify. You will always be trusting someone to be doing what they say they are doing. This isn't a bad thing. Society is built on trust. All it means is that there needs to be consequences for breaking that trust, to keep everyone honest.