16 ms·

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad, as the logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data about your browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill in the logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot more persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making fancy graphs.

dmitriid 4y ago
> keeps the many free services I value greatly running. You don't need continuous pervasive tracking without people's consent to run ads and keep the free service running.
rockostrich 4y ago
Same here when it comes to how it affects me personally, but I can see how it affects society as a whole (or how it could affect kids) so easily. Most people don't have an understanding about how their browsing is a part of a positive feedback loop that pushes them into echo chambers on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc. It's a consequence of relying on advertising as a revenue generator for these services. Teaching your kids about how their data is being used for this purpose is important. Sending them raw DNS logs to do that is definitely not going to be effective though.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  It's valid to point out to children that platforms have an incentive to suck them in and keep them on there, but this has nothing to do with ads. Netflix is a paid subscription service that does not show you ads, yet they have just as strong of an incentive to keep you on their platform as much as possible so you don't go to a competitor. This is simply the nature of online services -- a better online service keeps you on there longer, and in a world of significant online competition, everyone is trying to suck you in.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    The same is true of all media really, including books (e.g. the various tactics used by the authors of novels to keep the reader turning the next page). It's just that online media is more potent and compelling to most people so the effect is more noticeable.
kylevedder 4y ago
This a bit orthogonal so I put it in a separate comment, but let me be even more aggressive and do a bit of offense: I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having this information, rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful. But attacking ads and ad tracking, the revenue model of the free web, is materially harmful. Imagine how much worse the world would be if Google search weren't free -- even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge (not to mention how much worse the user experience would be to quickly Google something). Humanity collectively would be very non trivially worse off. Seriously, what other business model besides tracked ads can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, let alone power growth, at companies providing free services like Google Search, Maps, etc, that don't have such grossly negative externalities like severely curtailing human development and don't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of people who are prima facie annoyed by a company using the interactions with their free service to make money?
- cogman10 4y ago
  So let me bring up some of the exceptions I can think of. Recently, a woman got an abortion and part of what the prosecution used against her was data collected from facebook. With google's tracking, is it not unlikely that a government body could subpoena them for search histories? (which, they do already) to look for questions like "has this individual asked about abortions recently?" Perhaps you view that as moral, but what about other things a totalitarian government might want to control? What about China trying to find the identities of people protesting them? Is it not unlikely that they might have search history data betraying that they are a protestor or likely protestor? But then there is the question of why they even need that data in the first place. You argue "how else would they make money?" and I'd argue "well, ads?". The reason, the real reason, google collects this data isn't because they have to, it's because it's more profitable if ads are better targeted and more customized per individual. Google would certainly take a profit hit if they stopped the data tracking, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still be one of the biggest and best places to advertise on the internet. They'd simply be less profitable.
drcongo 4y ago
Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn't pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you once googled a symptom, or your flight prices because your search history reveals your disposable income? Or even, taken to extremes, it could even preclude your from even getting health insurance because it can prove knowledge of a pre-existing condition.
- CWuestefeld 4y ago
  Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn't pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you once googled a symptom Yes, I do, at least for the very large majority of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer. As problematic as that relationship may be, it does set up a wall such that (a) the cost to me, personally, is completely standardized; and (b) there's a large gap between my individual online identity and my identity as an employee within my organization. Further, health insurance is just about the most heavily-regulated industry in the universe. Aside from the trivial assertion that it's absurd to refer to this industry as "capitalism" because it's so far from a free market, the fact is that the insurance companies are watched very closely, and I think it's improbable that they could have a setup like this without anyone having learned about it. Finally, again for the majority who are covered through their employer, most of these policies are self-insured. That is, it's the employer themselves who pays the charges, and they're also paying the insurance company to administer the program, but not to shoulder any risks. The more the insurance company has to spend on that administration, the less likely they're going to be hired. To make such a trade-off there would need to be a pretty clear demonstration to the employer that more money is being saved in medical payments than is being spent on that additional administration - and again, that's consistent with my argument in the prior paragraph.
kornhole 4y ago
The visualization is useful for those who already understand how it harms them and society. If someone likes to be watched and controlled, this type of visualization is not of much value.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  "if you know you know" isn't an argument. This is just empty rhetoric -- dogmatically asserting that tracking ads damage society and that I'm being controlled by it is a pretty strong claim, and a claim that requires evidence to support it. If this is the typical quality of your privacy argumentation then it should be no surprise that your children don't buy your arguments.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    You're not going to win this "fight" on HN, I've been here for years. People here are convinced that every piece of data being collected is a moral evil. They'll vaguely wave at things like DNS logs or server IP logs, and always assume that everything is always feeding huge tracking machines at big companies. They'll mix up tracking used for logs with tracking used for ads with tracking used to improve the product. There's no real understanding of what cohort sizes or signals are needed to make tracking meaningful. It's a mess. IMO it's good to be sensitive about the data we send and hold tech companies accountable for how much data they take. I've also worked on big tech teams that collect data. But the arguments here are always so black-and-white that they don't make any meaningful point.
    - kylevedder 4y ago
      The target audience for my comments are the hundreds of people reading and not commenting. If you're casually reading the comments, without a foil of reasonability, I think it's easy to get sucked into implicitly accepting the premises of the zealots frothing at the mouth in the comments. You're right that I don't imagine I'm going to change the mind of the zealots.
      - 4y ago
dogman144 4y ago
This is a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance that causes AdWords to keep growing despite the people building it being smart folks. It doesn’t affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine. There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  >There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic. If you can't mount a coherent argument that doesn't assume the conclusion, you should consider the possibility that the conclusion simply isn't true.
  - dogman144 4y ago
    There is a massive corpus of research on this that I think you’re unaware of. Start with the Snowden leaks and work your way back. Since I can’t reply to below, the general approach of “I don’t know about this so it must not exist and I won’t research” is very backward if you’re in a PhD program. I get what you’re getting at. Google just builds the technology, the rest is up to the users. That said, re: Snowden, IC piggybacked off Google cookies and direct taps into Google infra (PRISM). Email, chat, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, logins, all tracked. The classic approach from tech until recently is what I said above - we just build it! That didn’t work well for the cigarette companies. In other words, it is difficult to convince people that they are doing wrong/causing wrong when their research and pay is dependent on not believing they are.
    - kylevedder 4y ago
      The Snowden leaks were about NSA data collection. Last I checked the NSA was not a tracking ads powered big tech company. Also I hope you realize pointing me to an entire metaverse of memes is not an argument. If this corpus is so massive it should be easy to concretely point to several very specific examples, not hand wave at the entirety of one of the largest national security leaks in American history.
arrosenberg 4y ago
“Free services” are not free. They are ad-subsidized, and thus anticompetitive. They are affecting your life by messing up the competitive market economy. The fact that you value them greatly means you should pay for them, which you are - with your limited attention span. Its an insidious price to pay. You may accept this bargain, but most of us hate it, and are not being offered a competitive market alternative to this version of reality.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  How are ad funded websites "anti competitive"? Start by defining "anti competitive", as I suspect you're using a non standard definition.
  - arrosenberg 4y ago
    They are using their ad business (wherein they have an effective monopoly on search engine advertising) to subsidize their other businesses. That is a fairly standard definition for predatory pricing in the US.
    - kylevedder 4y ago
      Their other businesses being what search or maps? Those are ads properties. You could setup competitors that also serve ads.
      - arrosenberg 4y ago
        Thats not how antitrust laws work.
        kylevedder 4y ago
        You're asserting that's not how they work, but you're also asserting they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps business with... the revenue they generate from selling ads space on their search and maps businesses. I'll leave it as an exercise to the lurkers to decide who is probably right.
y42 4y ago
With financing through ads comes a dependency of the content provider aka publisher. And this leads to a lower quality. Its about getting attention, not about quality content. It does affect you, you just dont see it, I dare to say.
tablespoon 4y ago
> Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad, as the logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data about your browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill in the logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot more persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making fancy graphs. But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution. Making the invisible visible creates a situation where people can start asking questions about that thing, instead of ignoring or being ignorant of it.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  >But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution. No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot of data is sound. The part that's missing is why is this bad. No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in their own argue why this data collection is bad. This argument as to why is what's missing, and until nominal privacy advocates start putting together coherent arguments as to why it's bad (and, importantly, why these costs do not merit the benefits), they're not making forward progress.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    you can go learn about state surveillance more generally to answer that instead of handwaving it away as 'seems worth it to me'
    - kylevedder 4y ago
      Google making ad auctions more efficient and "state surveillance" aren't the same thing. Did you legitimately not know this or are you being intellectually dishonest in your argumentation?
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Google making ad auctions more efficient becomes state surveillance the instant a subpoena arrives at their door. You might believe you are safe from a subpoena because you haven't done anything wrong, but you would be wrong about that: * Things like geofence warrants are used to surveil people who are merely within a given radius of a crime. * Subpoenas don't have to be for criminal cases, they can also be civil or investigatory (eg congressional subpoenas). * Things you don't think are wrong are often crimes. Abortion clinic visits in Texas are the most obvious example. Other examples are things like using someone else's WiFi without permission, using a fake name online, or carrying around things like screwdrivers (which are a burglary tool) or permanent markers (which are used for vandalism). Estimates suggest that the average American breaks 3-5 federal laws per day. A couple of examples: Alexa recordings were used in a criminal court: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-echo-alexa-smart-speaker-privacy-data https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-ech... Amazon received 2000 subpoenas: https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/08/subpoenahappy_us_government_sought_record_amount_of_info_from_amazon/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/08/subpoenahappy_us_gove...
yosito 4y ago
> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all Like a frog boiling in hot water, just because you don't perceive it, doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. The business model of ad-based services is that they sell the ability to manipulate real world behavior to the highest bidder. That manipulation ranges from innocuous ads for products you don't need, to political ideas and misinformation. There's a chance that you're self aware, self disciplined and very observant and manage to avoid this manipulation. But given the fact that it works extremely well at scale, it's more likely that you're just not noticing how you're being manipulated.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
You're only seeing things from the Google bubble where the data they collect is kept only for themselves and law enforcement/nation states. There's a whole ecosystem of unscrupulous trackers selling your personal details indiscriminately to anyone who wants it. It all goes into profiles that most definitely have an impact on you in real life. No amount of goodwill for supporting free services is enough to permit this activity to operate without your knowledge or consent.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  >It all goes into profiles that most definitely have an impact on you in real life Such as? I might add the initial discussion was about Google tracking ads but I'm curious to hear what you have to say about these down market trackers.
  - asf988f6728g 4y ago
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA John Oliver is informative here, though some of his jokes fall flat on this one. It's just not a funny subject I suppose.
water-your-self 4y ago
> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Your data is not worthless, and generally I consider data harvesting harmful because of the nation-state subpoenas it enables. If I attend a protest for abortion rights, and my geo data is bound to that event and then I seek an abortion in another state, ive now created a wonderful fingerprint that may soon lead to my incaerceration. (For americans) But the united states is not even the worst perpetrator. Imagine your least favorite government demanding google gives them a list of anyone that might be a political dissident based on audio they have collected. Data is a liability.
- mrhands556 4y ago
  Has this happened before?
  - t-writescode 4y ago
    Well, the "before Google" was librarians, and they have a history, a long, long history of saying "no" to the feds when it comes to giving out reading and checkout lists of people. *Of course* Google and friends happily give that information out "pre-warrant".
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Well, the "before Google" was librarians, and they have a history, a long, long history of saying "no" to the feds when it comes to giving out reading and checkout lists of people. In the US they lost that fight and now reading lists are handed over to the state.
  - jwalton 4y ago
    Yesterday: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-dad-took-photos-of-his-naked-toddler-for-the-doctor-google-flagged-him-as-a-criminal/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-dad-took-photos-...
    - 4y ago
madrox 4y ago
I once had an idea for a project where I would roughly attempt to translate personal information into a value amount. For example, how much is it worth to companies to know your gender, on average? You could probably figure this out with some rough ideas of CPC for various segments. Obviously the economics don't work quite the same as money, but there's something to it. This is all to say I don't think it's "bad" in the way malware is bad or a security breach is bad, but there's a dollar amount attached to these things, and you may be giving a company more money than you're willing to pay.
hackernewds 4y ago
If everyone started blocking their data even when used in aggregate we would have no more free services. $10/month for video hosting (YouTube,), $50/month for GPS navigation (GMaps), $5/month for IM (Messenger) Is that the world we'd like to live in?
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Yes, and am happy with the FLOSS alternatives and Netflix et al.
jwalton 4y ago
> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life It’s nice you’re willing to make this trade, but obviously some of us are not. I value my privacy, and I do not want Google to know what I’m interested in, how old I am, or my gender. I find the fact that Google tries to infer these things about me deeply, deeply creepy. Google also goes out of their way to collect information you don’t want to share. Turn off “Location history” on your phone, and Google Maps will no longer remember where your “Home” is (or, actually, it will claim it won’t remember, but it will still randomly tell you how long it will take to get home). This is of course nonsense. I can want to tell someone where I live and also not want that same someone to track everywhere I go in minute detail. Google’s position here is kind of like an abusive partner saying if you give them your phone number they obviously have the right to see everything in your phone. All the while claiming “You’re in control!” Soooo creepy! The more insanely creepy things Google does with my data, the less I trust them. Again, it’s fine if you trust them. You’re free to trust anyone you want (even my abusive ex partner, although I’d caution against it). But some of us don’t trust Google, and we don’t want to move to the opt-out-village[0] so here we are. [0]: https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy-by-mo-1819594840 https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-p...
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
I agree with most of what you wrote. That said, the biggest tangible negative impact of tracking is that the profiles companies build on you are overly simplistic caricatures that reinforce societal biases. For example, for many complex reasons, women do not apply to executive roles as much as men. Google is thus less likely to show me an ad for an executive role knowing that I’m a woman [0], since statistically, I’m less likely to click it. This further reinforces the societal trend of women applying to executive roles at a lower rate than men. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/06/googles-algorithm-shows-prestigious-job-ads-to-men-but-not-to-women-heres-why-that-should-worry-you/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07...
tarakat 4y ago
> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running "My leash is long enough to reach all the places I care to visit, and the food is good." Look at China for a glimpse of what will happen when they shorten the leash. But you didn't bother to remove the leash while you still could. > But that's the State, not Google! Will it matter? The State will use Google, and Google will use the State.

dmitriid 4y ago

> keeps the many free services I value greatly running. You don't need continuous pervasive tracking without people's consent to run ads and keep the free service running.

rockostrich 4y ago

Same here when it comes to how it affects me personally, but I can see how it affects society as a whole (or how it could affect kids) so easily. Most people don't have an understanding about how their browsing is a part of a positive feedback loop that pushes them into echo chambers on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc. It's a consequence of relying on advertising as a revenue generator for these services. Teaching your kids about how their data is being used for this purpose is important. Sending them raw DNS logs to do that is definitely not going to be effective though.

kylevedder 4y ago
It's valid to point out to children that platforms have an incentive to suck them in and keep them on there, but this has nothing to do with ads. Netflix is a paid subscription service that does not show you ads, yet they have just as strong of an incentive to keep you on their platform as much as possible so you don't go to a competitor. This is simply the nature of online services -- a better online service keeps you on there longer, and in a world of significant online competition, everyone is trying to suck you in.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  The same is true of all media really, including books (e.g. the various tactics used by the authors of novels to keep the reader turning the next page). It's just that online media is more potent and compelling to most people so the effect is more noticeable.

kylevedder 4y ago

This a bit orthogonal so I put it in a separate comment, but let me be even more aggressive and do a bit of offense: I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having this information, rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful. But attacking ads and ad tracking, the revenue model of the free web, is materially harmful. Imagine how much worse the world would be if Google search weren't free -- even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge (not to mention how much worse the user experience would be to quickly Google something). Humanity collectively would be very non trivially worse off. Seriously, what other business model besides tracked ads can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, let alone power growth, at companies providing free services like Google Search, Maps, etc, that don't have such grossly negative externalities like severely curtailing human development and don't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of people who are prima facie annoyed by a company using the interactions with their free service to make money?

cogman10 4y ago
So let me bring up some of the exceptions I can think of. Recently, a woman got an abortion and part of what the prosecution used against her was data collected from facebook. With google's tracking, is it not unlikely that a government body could subpoena them for search histories? (which, they do already) to look for questions like "has this individual asked about abortions recently?" Perhaps you view that as moral, but what about other things a totalitarian government might want to control? What about China trying to find the identities of people protesting them? Is it not unlikely that they might have search history data betraying that they are a protestor or likely protestor? But then there is the question of why they even need that data in the first place. You argue "how else would they make money?" and I'd argue "well, ads?". The reason, the real reason, google collects this data isn't because they have to, it's because it's more profitable if ads are better targeted and more customized per individual. Google would certainly take a profit hit if they stopped the data tracking, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still be one of the biggest and best places to advertise on the internet. They'd simply be less profitable.

drcongo 4y ago

Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn't pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you once googled a symptom, or your flight prices because your search history reveals your disposable income? Or even, taken to extremes, it could even preclude your from even getting health insurance because it can prove knowledge of a pre-existing condition.

CWuestefeld 4y ago
Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn't pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you once googled a symptom Yes, I do, at least for the very large majority of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer. As problematic as that relationship may be, it does set up a wall such that (a) the cost to me, personally, is completely standardized; and (b) there's a large gap between my individual online identity and my identity as an employee within my organization. Further, health insurance is just about the most heavily-regulated industry in the universe. Aside from the trivial assertion that it's absurd to refer to this industry as "capitalism" because it's so far from a free market, the fact is that the insurance companies are watched very closely, and I think it's improbable that they could have a setup like this without anyone having learned about it. Finally, again for the majority who are covered through their employer, most of these policies are self-insured. That is, it's the employer themselves who pays the charges, and they're also paying the insurance company to administer the program, but not to shoulder any risks. The more the insurance company has to spend on that administration, the less likely they're going to be hired. To make such a trade-off there would need to be a pretty clear demonstration to the employer that more money is being saved in medical payments than is being spent on that additional administration - and again, that's consistent with my argument in the prior paragraph.

kornhole 4y ago

The visualization is useful for those who already understand how it harms them and society. If someone likes to be watched and controlled, this type of visualization is not of much value.

kylevedder 4y ago
"if you know you know" isn't an argument. This is just empty rhetoric -- dogmatically asserting that tracking ads damage society and that I'm being controlled by it is a pretty strong claim, and a claim that requires evidence to support it. If this is the typical quality of your privacy argumentation then it should be no surprise that your children don't buy your arguments.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  You're not going to win this "fight" on HN, I've been here for years. People here are convinced that every piece of data being collected is a moral evil. They'll vaguely wave at things like DNS logs or server IP logs, and always assume that everything is always feeding huge tracking machines at big companies. They'll mix up tracking used for logs with tracking used for ads with tracking used to improve the product. There's no real understanding of what cohort sizes or signals are needed to make tracking meaningful. It's a mess. IMO it's good to be sensitive about the data we send and hold tech companies accountable for how much data they take. I've also worked on big tech teams that collect data. But the arguments here are always so black-and-white that they don't make any meaningful point.
  - kylevedder 4y ago
    The target audience for my comments are the hundreds of people reading and not commenting. If you're casually reading the comments, without a foil of reasonability, I think it's easy to get sucked into implicitly accepting the premises of the zealots frothing at the mouth in the comments. You're right that I don't imagine I'm going to change the mind of the zealots.
    - 4y ago

dogman144 4y ago

This is a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance that causes AdWords to keep growing despite the people building it being smart folks. It doesn’t affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine. There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.

kylevedder 4y ago
>There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic. If you can't mount a coherent argument that doesn't assume the conclusion, you should consider the possibility that the conclusion simply isn't true.
- dogman144 4y ago
  There is a massive corpus of research on this that I think you’re unaware of. Start with the Snowden leaks and work your way back. Since I can’t reply to below, the general approach of “I don’t know about this so it must not exist and I won’t research” is very backward if you’re in a PhD program. I get what you’re getting at. Google just builds the technology, the rest is up to the users. That said, re: Snowden, IC piggybacked off Google cookies and direct taps into Google infra (PRISM). Email, chat, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, logins, all tracked. The classic approach from tech until recently is what I said above - we just build it! That didn’t work well for the cigarette companies. In other words, it is difficult to convince people that they are doing wrong/causing wrong when their research and pay is dependent on not believing they are.
  - kylevedder 4y ago
    The Snowden leaks were about NSA data collection. Last I checked the NSA was not a tracking ads powered big tech company. Also I hope you realize pointing me to an entire metaverse of memes is not an argument. If this corpus is so massive it should be easy to concretely point to several very specific examples, not hand wave at the entirety of one of the largest national security leaks in American history.

arrosenberg 4y ago

“Free services” are not free. They are ad-subsidized, and thus anticompetitive. They are affecting your life by messing up the competitive market economy. The fact that you value them greatly means you should pay for them, which you are - with your limited attention span. Its an insidious price to pay. You may accept this bargain, but most of us hate it, and are not being offered a competitive market alternative to this version of reality.

kylevedder 4y ago
How are ad funded websites "anti competitive"? Start by defining "anti competitive", as I suspect you're using a non standard definition.
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  They are using their ad business (wherein they have an effective monopoly on search engine advertising) to subsidize their other businesses. That is a fairly standard definition for predatory pricing in the US.
  - kylevedder 4y ago
    Their other businesses being what search or maps? Those are ads properties. You could setup competitors that also serve ads.
    - arrosenberg 4y ago
      Thats not how antitrust laws work.
      - kylevedder 4y ago
        You're asserting that's not how they work, but you're also asserting they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps business with... the revenue they generate from selling ads space on their search and maps businesses. I'll leave it as an exercise to the lurkers to decide who is probably right.

y42 4y ago

With financing through ads comes a dependency of the content provider aka publisher. And this leads to a lower quality. Its about getting attention, not about quality content. It does affect you, you just dont see it, I dare to say.

tablespoon 4y ago

> Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad, as the logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data about your browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill in the logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot more persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making fancy graphs. But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution. Making the invisible visible creates a situation where people can start asking questions about that thing, instead of ignoring or being ignorant of it.

kylevedder 4y ago
>But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution. No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot of data is sound. The part that's missing is why is this bad. No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in their own argue why this data collection is bad. This argument as to why is what's missing, and until nominal privacy advocates start putting together coherent arguments as to why it's bad (and, importantly, why these costs do not merit the benefits), they're not making forward progress.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  you can go learn about state surveillance more generally to answer that instead of handwaving it away as 'seems worth it to me'
  - kylevedder 4y ago
    Google making ad auctions more efficient and "state surveillance" aren't the same thing. Did you legitimately not know this or are you being intellectually dishonest in your argumentation?
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Google making ad auctions more efficient becomes state surveillance the instant a subpoena arrives at their door. You might believe you are safe from a subpoena because you haven't done anything wrong, but you would be wrong about that: * Things like geofence warrants are used to surveil people who are merely within a given radius of a crime. * Subpoenas don't have to be for criminal cases, they can also be civil or investigatory (eg congressional subpoenas). * Things you don't think are wrong are often crimes. Abortion clinic visits in Texas are the most obvious example. Other examples are things like using someone else's WiFi without permission, using a fake name online, or carrying around things like screwdrivers (which are a burglary tool) or permanent markers (which are used for vandalism). Estimates suggest that the average American breaks 3-5 federal laws per day. A couple of examples: Alexa recordings were used in a criminal court: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-echo-alexa-smart-speaker-privacy-data https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-ech... Amazon received 2000 subpoenas: https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/08/subpoenahappy_us_government_sought_record_amount_of_info_from_amazon/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/08/subpoenahappy_us_gove...

yosito 4y ago

> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all Like a frog boiling in hot water, just because you don't perceive it, doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. The business model of ad-based services is that they sell the ability to manipulate real world behavior to the highest bidder. That manipulation ranges from innocuous ads for products you don't need, to political ideas and misinformation. There's a chance that you're self aware, self disciplined and very observant and manage to avoid this manipulation. But given the fact that it works extremely well at scale, it's more likely that you're just not noticing how you're being manipulated.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

You're only seeing things from the Google bubble where the data they collect is kept only for themselves and law enforcement/nation states. There's a whole ecosystem of unscrupulous trackers selling your personal details indiscriminately to anyone who wants it. It all goes into profiles that most definitely have an impact on you in real life. No amount of goodwill for supporting free services is enough to permit this activity to operate without your knowledge or consent.

kylevedder 4y ago
>It all goes into profiles that most definitely have an impact on you in real life Such as? I might add the initial discussion was about Google tracking ads but I'm curious to hear what you have to say about these down market trackers.
- asf988f6728g 4y ago
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA John Oliver is informative here, though some of his jokes fall flat on this one. It's just not a funny subject I suppose.

water-your-self 4y ago

> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Your data is not worthless, and generally I consider data harvesting harmful because of the nation-state subpoenas it enables. If I attend a protest for abortion rights, and my geo data is bound to that event and then I seek an abortion in another state, ive now created a wonderful fingerprint that may soon lead to my incaerceration. (For americans) But the united states is not even the worst perpetrator. Imagine your least favorite government demanding google gives them a list of anyone that might be a political dissident based on audio they have collected. Data is a liability.

mrhands556 4y ago
Has this happened before?
- t-writescode 4y ago
  Well, the "before Google" was librarians, and they have a history, a long, long history of saying "no" to the feds when it comes to giving out reading and checkout lists of people. *Of course* Google and friends happily give that information out "pre-warrant".
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Well, the "before Google" was librarians, and they have a history, a long, long history of saying "no" to the feds when it comes to giving out reading and checkout lists of people. In the US they lost that fight and now reading lists are handed over to the state.
- jwalton 4y ago
  Yesterday: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-dad-took-photos-of-his-naked-toddler-for-the-doctor-google-flagged-him-as-a-criminal/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-dad-took-photos-...
  - 4y ago

madrox 4y ago

I once had an idea for a project where I would roughly attempt to translate personal information into a value amount. For example, how much is it worth to companies to know your gender, on average? You could probably figure this out with some rough ideas of CPC for various segments. Obviously the economics don't work quite the same as money, but there's something to it. This is all to say I don't think it's "bad" in the way malware is bad or a security breach is bad, but there's a dollar amount attached to these things, and you may be giving a company more money than you're willing to pay.

hackernewds 4y ago

If everyone started blocking their data even when used in aggregate we would have no more free services. $10/month for video hosting (YouTube,), $50/month for GPS navigation (GMaps), $5/month for IM (Messenger) Is that the world we'd like to live in?

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Yes, and am happy with the FLOSS alternatives and Netflix et al.

jwalton 4y ago

> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life It’s nice you’re willing to make this trade, but obviously some of us are not. I value my privacy, and I do not want Google to know what I’m interested in, how old I am, or my gender. I find the fact that Google tries to infer these things about me deeply, deeply creepy. Google also goes out of their way to collect information you don’t want to share. Turn off “Location history” on your phone, and Google Maps will no longer remember where your “Home” is (or, actually, it will claim it won’t remember, but it will still randomly tell you how long it will take to get home). This is of course nonsense. I can want to tell someone where I live and also not want that same someone to track everywhere I go in minute detail. Google’s position here is kind of like an abusive partner saying if you give them your phone number they obviously have the right to see everything in your phone. All the while claiming “You’re in control!” Soooo creepy! The more insanely creepy things Google does with my data, the less I trust them. Again, it’s fine if you trust them. You’re free to trust anyone you want (even my abusive ex partner, although I’d caution against it). But some of us don’t trust Google, and we don’t want to move to the opt-out-village[0] so here we are. [0]: https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy-by-mo-1819594840 https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-p...

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

I agree with most of what you wrote. That said, the biggest tangible negative impact of tracking is that the profiles companies build on you are overly simplistic caricatures that reinforce societal biases. For example, for many complex reasons, women do not apply to executive roles as much as men. Google is thus less likely to show me an ad for an executive role knowing that I’m a woman [0], since statistically, I’m less likely to click it. This further reinforces the societal trend of women applying to executive roles at a lower rate than men. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/06/googles-algorithm-shows-prestigious-job-ads-to-men-but-not-to-women-heres-why-that-should-worry-you/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07...

tarakat 4y ago

> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running "My leash is long enough to reach all the places I care to visit, and the food is good." Look at China for a glimpse of what will happen when they shorten the leash. But you didn't bother to remove the leash while you still could. > But that's the State, not Google! Will it matter? The State will use Google, and Google will use the State.