11 ms·

What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do? Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and

• klyrs 5y ago
  Protecting the top %.01 appears to be just about the only thing that both parties can agree on.
• dzonga 5y ago
  stop working at those companies. but a good number of people around these parts have already decided going through fb/google hazing is worth it for the paycheck. screw ethics. you already know, once a company reaches monopoly position, a lot of corners have been cut and it has been unethical. that's a discussion HN at large is not ready to have atm.
  • bigiain 5y ago
    "You can’t buy ethics offsets for the terrible things you do at your day job." and: "But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit." -- https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b9e78c090aee https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b...
• cianmm 5y ago
  I think more whistleblowers and legal ramifications for C-level execs (prison time preferably since they can happily pay any fine thrown at them) is the only real way to do it at this point.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    The few experiences I had with whistleblowers is that it's way too sensitive and may never be handled officially by any system/government. They would have done it already :).
• freen 5y ago
  If you have spent money on google ads, contact your local attorney general. They may have defrauded you.
• cryptonym 5y ago
  Install Firefox and ublock on every single device of friends and family, including mobiles. Reject walled garden not allowing blocking ads.
  • tjpnz 5y ago
    That combination works but it doesn't solve the issue for apps and smart devices. At that point your only real options are PiHole or a VPN with builtin ad filtration.
  • 323 5y ago
    How ironic... If you browse HN from 10 years ago, you'll see exactly the same advice, except instead of "replace Chrome with Firefox" it was "replace IE with Chrome".
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • rvense 5y ago
      Of course. Google are every bit as bad for society as Microsoft are (and ever were).
• Zenax 5y ago
  Data intermediaries - our data is placed there, like our cash in a bank - and Fuckerberg and Co have to pay us for access. Like the banks pay us interest for giving them cash. Point being Google, FB, Twitter et al pay out more and get less and therefore are less exploitative douchebags whose activities and unintended consequences at scale are also less. Well explained here - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5ri-KktNs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5ri-KktNs
  • salawat 5y ago
    Poison pill. You're assuming and entrenching the practice of gathering such heaps of data and tracking behavior are okay to do in the first place. Remember, the money is a symptom of the root problem. A microcosm of humanity has built a surveillance infrastructure to monitor the rest with no consent. That's the problem.
• boudin 5y ago
  Can a campaign like Mozilla did to promote firefox when ie6 was a monopoly work? Promote a different browser when someone uses chrome with the possibility to get explanations about it. Contacting admins of sites that only works in chrome, this kind of thing. Could this information be used to try to push chromium based browser like brave and edge to switch to another engine, lowering the influence of google on the web? This will not adress the whole google service spectrum but chrome is the trojan horse for a lot of google strategies.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    > Can a campaign like Mozilla did to promote firefox when ie6 was a monopoly work? Yes; it worked. somehow, they blew the goodwill away. /me still a Firefox user. I'll fly away if something better comes along - FF is very much a compromise.
    • boudin 5y ago
      I'm with you on that, still a Firefox user as well but I'm not a fan of a lot of Mozilla's decisions. I still trust them more than Google though.
  • floatboth 5y ago
    It's extremely hard to out-campaign Chrome's campaign of being pushed via google.com and youtube.com, unfortunately. Though I'd like to see Mozilla try more promotion channels like video sponsorships, maybe go heavier in regions where Google is not as dominant as in the US…
• jqpabc123 5y ago
  ... the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market. The alternative business model is so simple and is already in place --- simply advertise based on expressed interest. This is what DuckDuckGo is doing very effectively. Show ads based on search words. No global, privacy invading network required. Amazon is doing the same quite effectively. Their ad business is growing by leaps and bounds simply by showing ads based on search terms.
  • beambot 5y ago
    I'm not sure if include Amazon in the list of privacy conscious providers: https://nypost.com/2021/10/19/i-found-an-amazon-folder-with-thousands-of-audio-recordings-from-my-home-gadgets/ https://nypost.com/2021/10/19/i-found-an-amazon-folder-with-...
    • S04dKHzrKT 5y ago
      Agreed. I have recruiters reaching out to me on one of my older spam email addresses (in addition to my personal address). They are clearly doing some sort tracking/correlation.
  • floatboth 5y ago
    That's how Google used to do things back in the day! I still don't get how in the hell could personalized ads be more profitable. All I've heard is the "we'll keep showing you ads for toasters after you bought one because you'd buy another if the first one breaks" meme but where's the hard evidence on personalized ads getting more clicks?! Contextual at least intuitively seems to make way more sense.
    • brianwawok 5y ago
      You know who the best person I could show an ad to? The person who went to my website but didn’t click buy. Had him 99% there. Payback is great on these users. If a few really did buy already? Who cares, beats showing the ad to a room of 20,000 random people
    • 5y ago
• yobbo 5y ago
  How would anyone compete with a scam business model? Ad buyers don't care if it's effective. Or rather they need convincing-looking gibberish to convince their bosses that they're worthwhile. Bosses don't want to seem stupid and are afraid of missing out, so they let it continue. I suppose a free-speech distributed search service could make a difference if it was actually better than google. Imagine with distributed hosting similar to mail/dns-servers, where ISP:s could redirect their traffic to local mirrors. Really slick alternatives to walled-garden apps as interfaces to standard protocol services like imap/matrix/etc, and make sure the servers are reliable and painless to set up.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    "Ad buyers don't care if it's effective." Yes, they definitely do.
    • grumbel 5y ago
      Then why are Internet ads so terrible? Ever more annoying ways to present ads might make people accidentally click on an ad, but seem like a bad way of getting people to buy the product. Even video ads are generally terrible, many of them fail to even tell me the name of the thing I am supposed to buy before that 'Skip'-timer has run out. The Internet would offer so many different and better ways to keep consumers informative about new products.
    • RNCTX 5y ago
      That in itself requires clarification. There have been years in which Facebook is caught lying about as metrics in all 12 months. Do ad agencies care if x number of units sell, or do they care that a report cause the commission check to clear? I say the latter, more typically.
    • bigiain 5y ago
      Some do. Others spend a million dollars a month on whatever stupid idea a team of Account Managers in $6000 suits/outfits with $500 haircuts pitch to them. And then congratulate themselves when the Analytics Department produces graphs of whatever meaningless metrics they can find or make up that go "up and to the right" for each month. And the Regional Ad Buyer and the Digital Agency will convince themselves that attributing every single sale to that advertising spend is valid and acceptable accounting practice, when most of the client's product practically sells itself. And they'll do this for a decade or more, until Global Head Office notice, then they'll pull the plug with 3 or 4 months outstanding unpaid, leading to ~100 people getting laid off with zero notice and tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid monthly salary and entitlements. At least, that's how it happened last time I got burnt by it...
• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I tell everyone about Firefox and uBlock Origin. Blocking YouTube ads is enough of an argument to convince anyone to at least try it out. I've never seen someone who didn't love the ad-free web experience. It's actually safe to just install this software on random computers: people's quality of life will be invisibly yet thoroughly improved, they will notice that things are just better even if they can't explain why. They'll be a lot safer from malware too. The objective is to reduce the return on investment of advertisers as much as possible. This will only happen in significant enough numbers once a significant portion of the population is blocking ads. It's our moral imperative to spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
  • fidesomnes 5y ago
    that is way obsolete by now. you need to be using Brave with ublock origin, this dns service https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.Blacklist https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.B... ClearURL's, HTTPS Everywhere, and Random User Agent. I also use whoogle for a local privacy enhancing filter of google data with all ad elements stripped out (and that is if I even use google I usually use ddg).
  • A__Account 5y ago
    Firefox barely runs though. I've had to start opening up Edge just to get Reddit to load because FF slows to such a crawl.
    • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
      There might be something wrong on your system. I switched a long time ago but sometimes run chrome to compare performance, and it's on a par. If you come across a site where the performance is noticeably worse than in Chrome, it may be worth notifying the owner. The alternative is to live in a Google-controlled dystopia.
      • Drdrdrq 5y ago
        > If you come across a site where the performance is noticeably worse than in Chrome, it may be worth notifying the owner. There is an exception to this - G sites routinely run slower on FF, but this is very likely how Google wants it to be.
• crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
  How about killing debt? Removing the gates we've built around resources for human needs? A computer virus to promote a culture of interdependence?
• Fervicus 5y ago
  I am very much interested in furthering this discussion. Every so often there is something big like this in the news, we talk about it for a few days and then forget about it. Nothing substantially changes. No big consequences for the guilty. How do we fix this?
  • dcow 5y ago
    Stop using their junk. Delete your facebook, switch to fastmail or protonmail. Join patreaon and support content creators directly. There are plenty of things you can do you just have to start doing them.
    • Fervicus 5y ago
      Me, and I am sure, several other people on here do several of these things. It makes a difference, but it's not enough. We need some action at a much bigger scale.
• monopoledance 5y ago
  Incentivize the economy to not overproduce bullshit ad nauseam. Vote with your wallet, and push for it culturally, or spiritually - offer alternative experiences and goals to consumerism. Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for, which are made for “economic growth” as a goal in it self. (If your factual constraints allow for it.) As long as there is this enormous pressure to sell you ever more things, nothing will change for the better… just change: More influencers, more product placements and sponsor guided “content“, more MLM type bullshit all around. Someone will figure out how to recruit your friends and family to explicitly advertise the next innovation in problem creation inside your last domain of unquestioned trust and honesty - mark my words! How about a gamified “hit” on your friends? Getting big-data intelligence briefings and some psychological guidance on someone you used to care about, and some shitty internet points as reward for their conversion: “Agent 1337biz, your next target is your colleague John Doe. The file is transmitted as we speak. Further our influence, your loyalty will be rewarded! Hail, Hydra”.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    Platitudes. > Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for What is this in reference to? Nobody asked for Google to create their ad marketplace? No, there is huge demand for and complicity with targeted ads among millions of small businesses.
    • monopoledance 5y ago
      Working for Google and Facebook has other ethical implications…. but that’s not what I was referring to. > huge demand That’s my point. Stop working for those small and big businesses in need of pushing solutions to problems they invented. Tho, you seem to imply an ideological/apologetical take on the economy, which isn’t exactly helpful, in any case. The tautology “it exists because it exists” can comfortably offer absolution for anything and anyone, because no one is in control, no one has responsibility. I get the appeal for coping, but it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy at best, religious glorification of apathy at worst. It is not, however, the inherent nature of things.
• swiftcoder 5y ago
  > a business model that could win with them in the free market. The entire point here is that the market is not, at least in this particular instance, "free". When a market is very explicitly being manipulated by a cartel who jointly hold a monopoly position over said market... they are in a position to prevent effective competition permanently.
  • catlifeonmars 5y ago
    This reminds me of the paradox of tolerance.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  >What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do? support politicians and lobbyists with your money / influence that are in favor of bringing robust anti-trust legislation to bear on the companies in question. The free market mythology is just one of the reasons we are in this situation to begin with.
• jareklupinski 5y ago
  individually we need to stop working for unethical companies we are the ones building these tools, reading these articles / comments sections, and talking with our colleagues and friends working on developing these products we just have to accept that our takehome might not be as large at the end of the pay-cycle. feels better spending it tho :)
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    and on a larger scale, a different social model with less consumerism, thus less ads and less big corps trying to ensure more profits by any means. The more we delegate the less we see. I don't like to transfer web to real world but a more peer to peer life could help. Sorry for the fuzzy comment but with the advent of advanced robotics and ubiquitous computing, we'll probably have no choice but to rethink daily lives.
  • pixl97 5y ago
    Individually it doesn't work. Unethical behavior is generally profitable, more so then the ethical behavior it is 'out competing'. The Unethical groups then use this profit to buy out and corner the market.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "individually we need to stop working for unethical companies" Has there been a single case in history where this worked? has this been an issue for drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation, ever? If not, maybe we should stop parroting it?
    • jareklupinski 5y ago
      > drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation it is easier to come up with manageable solutions when you don't try to conflate the mafia with a search engine, or Beretta with a social network don't search for a one-size-fits-all solution or it will seem impossible; focus on one at a time
• ilaksh 5y ago
  The solution to the technopolies is decentralized technologies. I used to write full explanations of how that would work, but my comments about it always get buried. So I don't bother really explaining anymore.
• alexashka 5y ago
  > What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do? Go into politics. Yes, that simple. Easy? No. Simple? Yes.
• MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Don't vote Republican. But they decrease my taxes! Too bad pay up.
  • bilvar 5y ago
    How would that work? Both of the accused companies' executives and majority of workforce are hard-line Democrats.
• jl6 5y ago
  You could refuse to hire anyone who has worked for ad-tech in recent history.
  • singron 5y ago
    Maybe the people leaving ad-tech are the people you should hire? FB and Google pay top compensation, so anyone who doesn't work there anymore probably decided to eschew money for some other purpose. E.g. I didn't know how gross ad-tech was until I saw how the sausage was made.
  • yosito 5y ago
    How does forcing people who recently made a bad judgement call to continue making a bad judgement call achieve anything positive?
    • foerbert 5y ago
      Because it can influence the behavior of people who might be going into adtech. If working for adtech becomes known for coming with a cost of harming future career prospects outside of adtech, it becomes far less attractive even without having to adjust compensation. This is also the kind of thing can get associated with moral failings, which can create significant social costs to joining adtech as well. None of this occurs if you just sit back and encourage people to get out of adtech and make it nice and easy. People will just decide to do it for "just a few years" so they can "make some money." On top of all that, this sort of change doesn't happen instantly. It'll start slowing and the momentum will grow. People current in adtech will have a chance to see the writing on the wall and jump ship before it's more than a minor annoyance.
• specto 5y ago
  I suppose it's true most people here (not me) is part of the 1% but man it seems strange no one questions this.
  • deathanatos 5y ago
    I don't think most of us are in the top 1%. Median net worth in my state is ~$800,000. I'm worth quite a fair bit less than that, so I'm apparently not even in the upper half. (I'm a SWE, I've worked, at times, for large tech companies, include one in FAANG, who paid in line with about what I'm earning now, adjusted for experience.) (Nationally, the median net worth is $121,000 (!) — so I'm upper half there, but still not 1%, since 20M Californias are worth far more.) Reminds me that one of these days I should work out the day I became net-worth positive… (since, like many Americans, I started with a fair bit of college debt…)
• 9387367 5y ago
  Individually, we must build alternatives and don’t give up and if it works out, don’t sell out. Look at lichess.org, it’s possible.
  • bardan 5y ago
    "Don't sell out" is nice and easy until someone slaps fifty million dollars on the table.
    • rpmisms 5y ago
      I'd like to say that if I was already experiencing good growth as a founder, and financially comfortable, I'd be disinclined to take the offer. If the company is already going down and someone wants the IP, whatever.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "business model that could win with them in the free market" Does "free market" mean there are no laws? Is so, start kidnapping their executives. No, we have laws? Well then perhaps police and courts should do their jobs, but I guess harassing everyday joe is easier than holding megacorps to account.
• la6471 5y ago
  Why should the burden be on common people ? It’s the government and policy makers job to enforce the law and make appropriate policies and legislation. Common people pay taxes (a lot of it) for them to do their job. Why do commoners have to wade into politics and then get exploited by the politicians to fight brother against brothers?
• slightwinder 5y ago
  > What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do? Nothing. This can't be fixed. Where there is power, there will be abuse. This is an unfixable trait of humanity. What can be done is reducing the impact of abuse and regularly investigate and educate about them. Transparency is important here, and regulating individual power. > I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, Those already exist. Just support them. Or do you mean specific cases like misusages in the ad-market? > Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this? History is a constant battle of powers about abuse. Those problems are neither new, nor special. Abuse will always exist, and it's the daily struggle of humanity to find the balance between the benefits and losses for all the different groups around the world.
• GoodJokes 5y ago
  Vote for better politicians that are not bought and paid for. Donate to them too. Also, don’t work for them.
• niutech 5y ago
  This movement is called open source. We should educate people about importance of privacy and show them open source, privacy respecting, self hosted alternatives to closed source, tracking, proprietary services. If all of us converted only one person, this would make a legion of conscious people.