6 ms·

the amount of data Google and Facebook have isn't talked about enough in this context, they most likely have internal tools that allow them to project which sta

the amount of data Google and Facebook have isn't talked about enough in this context, they most likely have internal tools that allow them to project which startups are becoming successful and either copy them early or just acquire them before the startup itself realizes how much potential they have Instagram acquisition for 1 billion as an example was a steal in hindsight, I bet facebook had more accurate forecasts for their growth than Instagram itself. I know Facebook did get some bad PR for collecting user data via a VPN app, but they didn't face any legal consequences- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo This doesn't even address how at a societal level these companies can basically create self-fulfilling prophecies by manipulating what stories and information is shown to people also makes me wonder about AWS/Amazon and what their policy is around copying some of their customers. They obviously fork or outright deploy managed open source projects to compete with them. I know Walmart doesn't let any of their suppliers use AWS either.

jethkl 4y ago
In prior life, I worked at place where we had access to data that contained user searches. We could plainly see that google searches, due to autocomplete, "quantize" results in a way that bing and others don't. The result is that google searches are almost inorganic crafted things, and they contain unusual artifacts. The impact on society is definitely real.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > The impact on society is definitely real. What impact do you mean and how do you know?
  - jethkl 4y ago
    For "what" -- I don't specify. Regarding "how I know", I start with several premises: 1) search engines are the dominant way to find information now. 2) conservatively, ≥80% of searches in US are through google. 3) google is not a passive observer of user search queries, but instead actively suggests queries to users. It follows that there must be some impact. The "engagement" effect is this: I start a search for Depeche Mode, but get distracted by suggestions for J Depp. In contrast, DDG suggests Depakote, Depression, Dept of Revenue and a few other things. Other search engines seem to be less aggressive.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      > For "what" -- I don't specify. Yeah, that's why I'm asking...
      - jethkl 4y ago
        There is hint of "what" at end of my previous comment, but no larger assertion is made.
        guerrilla 4y ago
        I wasn't asking for a hint, I was asking what you meant.
        darkerside 4y ago
        I think the problem here is that your statements have all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory
        jethkl 4y ago
        interesting take, but I don't see any problems here. Conspiratorial hallmarks? I'll try to defend. My comments about ≥80% market etc. are common knowledge and the conclusion is consistent. And my post prior to that is about my observations from a few years ago. Whatever you think of that claim, it is consistent with what is widely known (or easily inferred) about Google: they have top-tier engineering talent that has incentive to get tidy searches sent to them by dynamically generating "is similar to" canonical and trending matches, and aggressively pushing those matches to users before hitting submit. My claim is simply that I noticed Google succeeded in building a better version of this than their competition. I don't see anything suspect there. The interesting artifact of this is that the dominant set of queries becomes a very small proper subset of natural/organic queries.
ABeeSea 4y ago
Facebook bought a VPN company specifically to monitor traffic to competitors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo Amazon bought Alexa (the site ranking site, not the voice assistant) for the same reason.
- rhizome 4y ago
  And for which FB is currently fighting a class action lawsuit: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532210053469687808.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532210053469687808.html
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tristor 4y ago
I've actually been wondering about this for years. Nearly every startup I've worked at used Google Apps and put all their strategy documents and trade secrets into platforms owned and operated by Google. I'm sure there's something that assuages this concern in the contracts, just as I'm equally sure there's some clause that completely invalidates that and lets Google do whatever they want. I wonder if they actually do mine their data to identify startups for acquisition / competition, they certainly are incentivized to do so.
skohan 4y ago
This is something I wonder about Amazon/Google/Microsoft specifically: since they’re hosting basically every startup, how much are they able to leverage that data to their own benefit? AWS alone must have quite a detailed insight into which products and services are gaining traction just based on traffic data, or even how much they’re billing customers. To what extent are they able to leverage that?
- throwaway_1928 4y ago
  Given that Amazon is known for knocking off physical brands belonging to its 'retail partners' in its online store and then undercutting and outranking the originals [1], why would they not do the same with software hosted on AWS? A lot of AWS itself is just copied open source projects [2]. Google does the same thing with Yelp [3]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-google-european-union-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-google-eu...
- jedberg 4y ago
  My friend worked in ops at Google, and they had super strict rules about accessing customer data (basically you never could) and strict monitoring around access. Even if someone gave you permission you still couldn't do it. You couldn't even access your own data with the internal tools. I had a similar experience with AWS when I worked at Netflix. We were trying to diagnose a really strange problem and I asked the engineer to look at our data from their tools to help me find it. They told me they couldn't access that data, that the tools blocked them. Then I tried to give them an SSH key for one of our instances and they told me they would get fired for doing that and could not under any circumstance log into our box. I assume MS has similar controls.
  - skohan 4y ago
    But what I mean is you wouldn't even need to look at customer data. Just knowing how much traffic is going to which services would tell you a lot about a business. I don't know if they somehow obfuscate that as well.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jethkl 4y ago

In prior life, I worked at place where we had access to data that contained user searches. We could plainly see that google searches, due to autocomplete, "quantize" results in a way that bing and others don't. The result is that google searches are almost inorganic crafted things, and they contain unusual artifacts. The impact on society is definitely real.

guerrilla 4y ago
> The impact on society is definitely real. What impact do you mean and how do you know?
- jethkl 4y ago
  For "what" -- I don't specify. Regarding "how I know", I start with several premises: 1) search engines are the dominant way to find information now. 2) conservatively, ≥80% of searches in US are through google. 3) google is not a passive observer of user search queries, but instead actively suggests queries to users. It follows that there must be some impact. The "engagement" effect is this: I start a search for Depeche Mode, but get distracted by suggestions for J Depp. In contrast, DDG suggests Depakote, Depression, Dept of Revenue and a few other things. Other search engines seem to be less aggressive.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > For "what" -- I don't specify. Yeah, that's why I'm asking...
    - jethkl 4y ago
      There is hint of "what" at end of my previous comment, but no larger assertion is made.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        I wasn't asking for a hint, I was asking what you meant.
      - darkerside 4y ago
        I think the problem here is that your statements have all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory
        jethkl 4y ago
        interesting take, but I don't see any problems here. Conspiratorial hallmarks? I'll try to defend. My comments about ≥80% market etc. are common knowledge and the conclusion is consistent. And my post prior to that is about my observations from a few years ago. Whatever you think of that claim, it is consistent with what is widely known (or easily inferred) about Google: they have top-tier engineering talent that has incentive to get tidy searches sent to them by dynamically generating "is similar to" canonical and trending matches, and aggressively pushing those matches to users before hitting submit. My claim is simply that I noticed Google succeeded in building a better version of this than their competition. I don't see anything suspect there. The interesting artifact of this is that the dominant set of queries becomes a very small proper subset of natural/organic queries.

ABeeSea 4y ago

Facebook bought a VPN company specifically to monitor traffic to competitors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo Amazon bought Alexa (the site ranking site, not the voice assistant) for the same reason.

rhizome 4y ago
And for which FB is currently fighting a class action lawsuit: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532210053469687808.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532210053469687808.html

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tristor 4y ago

I've actually been wondering about this for years. Nearly every startup I've worked at used Google Apps and put all their strategy documents and trade secrets into platforms owned and operated by Google. I'm sure there's something that assuages this concern in the contracts, just as I'm equally sure there's some clause that completely invalidates that and lets Google do whatever they want. I wonder if they actually do mine their data to identify startups for acquisition / competition, they certainly are incentivized to do so.

skohan 4y ago

This is something I wonder about Amazon/Google/Microsoft specifically: since they’re hosting basically every startup, how much are they able to leverage that data to their own benefit? AWS alone must have quite a detailed insight into which products and services are gaining traction just based on traffic data, or even how much they’re billing customers. To what extent are they able to leverage that?

throwaway_1928 4y ago
Given that Amazon is known for knocking off physical brands belonging to its 'retail partners' in its online store and then undercutting and outranking the originals [1], why would they not do the same with software hosted on AWS? A lot of AWS itself is just copied open source projects [2]. Google does the same thing with Yelp [3]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-google-european-union-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-google-eu...
jedberg 4y ago
My friend worked in ops at Google, and they had super strict rules about accessing customer data (basically you never could) and strict monitoring around access. Even if someone gave you permission you still couldn't do it. You couldn't even access your own data with the internal tools. I had a similar experience with AWS when I worked at Netflix. We were trying to diagnose a really strange problem and I asked the engineer to look at our data from their tools to help me find it. They told me they couldn't access that data, that the tools blocked them. Then I tried to give them an SSH key for one of our instances and they told me they would get fired for doing that and could not under any circumstance log into our box. I assume MS has similar controls.
- skohan 4y ago
  But what I mean is you wouldn't even need to look at customer data. Just knowing how much traffic is going to which services would tell you a lot about a business. I don't know if they somehow obfuscate that as well.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]