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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 t

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.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Are you sure the desire not to be imprisoned or killed isn't aesthetic?
  - kylevedder 4y ago
    So truuuuu, tech companies are imprisoning people or killing them, not governments.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  At an object level, "not having XYZ actions occur from the government" is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving); it's absurd to complain about tech companies when you're actually upset with the government. This does doubly so when the primary threat to the ads tracking business model in the West is government legislation produced by elected representatives. At a meta level, this is just a list of grievances. You've not suggested a workable alternative business model that, on balance, provides more net good. It's possible that all your complaints about tracking ads are legitimate and it's still the best business model for providing the sort of massively positive societal value Google search provides.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    > is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving) Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" as one of their issues. I mean, come on. This is a niche issue that has little public awareness. To suggest "Oh, you just need to vote better" is simply laughable. I (and I'm guessing most people) don't live in a government where you can simply vote in new laws or regulations, we vote for candidates and whether or not those candidates care about privacy rights is a crap shoot. Most people don't have a cursory understanding of how data tracking works. This is a google problem. They don't have regulations pushing them to track their users in a way that makes their data easily accessible and consumable by government agencies. There aren't regulations out there forcing it. This is made evident by Apple's run ins with the FBI because their encryption wasn't crackable. And frankly, while this is an issue, there are so many other issues I care about politically that a candidate running on the "limit google tracking" platform wouldn't have enough to win my vote. It's important, but so are so many other issues of the day. > You've not suggested a workable alternative business model that, on balance, provides more net good. More net good? Or more profit for google? These are not the same things. I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model, ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular throughout the internet right up until google took things over with doubleclick. Again, this is not a business model that will be as profitable, but you are conflating "good" with "profit". And as a counter example, duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy.
kradeelav 4y ago
Putting aside the business model side of it (I can't speak for that), I agree with you about pro-privacy arguments tend to be annoyingly insufficient on the material justification ... when I can think of plenty. Put simply, it enables massive power inequalities that threaten to be permanent, if they aren't already. Several living examples: * Black advocates have already raised attention to pre-emptive tracking mixed with AI to "anticipate" crimes committed by "at risk" individuals (read, racial profiling) when this goes against everything that the Constitution stands for re: presuming innocence. * The recent controversies with Roe that another sibling comment is a textbook example about how information mined from menstrual apps or location services can be used to criminalize women seeking an abortion. * On a similar tangent, there was a case early on in adtech's history when a young woman who was pregnant and hiding it from the people she lived with got found out because ads about baby supplies were shown to them (after she had searched up the items). People's living situations can be volatile and this could have been fatal for her if they were sufficiently abusive enough. * Health/Medical apps tend to be especially obscene with tracking - collecting data on the most medically vulnerable (eg disabled people) and letting that data be resold often times means locking them to a sub-standard life because jobs and insurance can and will discriminate in obvious and subtle ways if they know about certain medical conditions, if they can get away with it. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
dogman144 4y ago
> rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful Material - During the bombings in Austin, Google provided a blanket location/data dump to the police of everyone with Google accs within x-miles of the event. That data, regardless of linked to the bombing in the end, is kept by Austin PD and likely the FBI, forever. You have given the police a warrantless log of citizens basically based on “well they use Google and live in Austin.” If you don’t see the glaring material issues, that explains a lot about why Google is Google.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  The police asked for stuff and the company complied and now you're upset that the government has it, but somehow it's actually Google's fault? Pass laws so your government can't do things you don't like. >If you don’t see the glaring material issues, that explains a lot about why Google is Google. I don't work at Google anymore. Feel free to click on my profile to see what I'm up to these days.
mola 4y ago
The attitude that if the government is using the data collected by tech companies to bypass constitutional limitation, then it's a problem with government and not big tech, is rather reductionist. This is a tangled system and you cannot completely separate the issues as you so simply claim. Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system. The citizen/consumer is massively under represented and underpowered to make changes to the system once it's in place. Not to mention the completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent. I bet that most ppl twenty years ago, if asked if they would consent to giving an exact timeline of their activities to third parties in exchange to free entertainment would probably not readily agree. Big tech lied to consumers until it normalized the new surveillance status que, that's immoral and wrong, even if it's extremely profitable. Your individualistic perspective, where you dismiss any harms if they do not relate to you personally, is very short sighted. Authoritarianism can creep up on you, first it targets the weekest, and before you know it, it could be you. Surveillance tech is a tool for authoritarianism, apart from it's inherent immorality because of how it was hidden from the consumer, it is corrupting democracies and gives them a very authoritarian tint. Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  I wholesale reject the following: 1) Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system -- they're getting raked over the coals at dog and pony show anti trust hearings. 2) completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent -- you literally gave these websites this information, and there's legal privacy policies that no one reads describing how it's used. If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't give it to them. 3) Authoritarianism can creep up on you -- ok and? The fact that Google's ad auctions are more efficient isn't going to cause authoritarianism. 4) Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? -- lmao no
ShroudedNight 4y ago
A significant quantity of the ad space is pernicious: The ads seeking to be displayed are explicitly intending to manipulate the viewer to change their cognitive orientation to the benefit of the buyer, with anywhere from callous disregard to outright contempt for the viewer's outcomes. Big tech has significantly aided in the delivery of these harmful messages, and seeks to use personalized information to find the channels, times, and context that are _most_ effective at undermining the will and agency of the viewers. Are there models where an information / recommendation broker could justifiably collect what would otherwise be concerning amounts of personal information? Potentially, if it were using that information to compute and facilitate the maximal individually beneficial outcomes of each individual user, but that's not what's happening here. Right now, we're building a system that would happily have people die painfully and preventably at 40 after living miserable lives because the economic returns of that model maximize the returns on advertisers / delivery networks.
dmitriid 4y ago
You can have ads without tracking. I don't think anyone is against ads per se. People are against pervasive continuous tracking and wholesale sale of data to anyone.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  >wholesale sale of data to anyone You know Google doesn't do this, right? Besides being against their own terms of service (and outright illegal), they're economically incentivized not to; they use the data to make their ad auctions more efficient, an edge they would lose if they sold the raw data.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Google is big enough to not need to sell that data. Doesn't make it a right thing to do.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  the data goes to the govt
fsflover 4y ago
Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
lukeschlather 4y ago
> 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 So you seem to be referring to Google (annual revenue ~$250 billion.) But Wikipedia (annual revenue $160 million) also qualifies. Also The Library of Congress (annual budget $800 million.) Another interesting data point is the USPS $77 billion annual revenue. So there are definitely proven business models that provide services basically at-cost and without all the negative externalities. And Wikipedia's budget is so small that even relatively poor countries could fund it with less than 1/5th of their education budget. (e.g. Uganda's education budget in 2020 was roughly $700 million.) And that would let them pay globally competitive salaries to hire software engineers to build indexes that are actually optimized first and foremost for knowledge that's focused on their culture rather than the US.
asdff 4y ago
I would love a model where the fees you pay anyhow for internet access go to support the servers you are visiting.

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.

pessimizer 4y ago
Are you sure the desire not to be imprisoned or killed isn't aesthetic?
- kylevedder 4y ago
  So truuuuu, tech companies are imprisoning people or killing them, not governments.
kylevedder 4y ago
At an object level, "not having XYZ actions occur from the government" is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving); it's absurd to complain about tech companies when you're actually upset with the government. This does doubly so when the primary threat to the ads tracking business model in the West is government legislation produced by elected representatives. At a meta level, this is just a list of grievances. You've not suggested a workable alternative business model that, on balance, provides more net good. It's possible that all your complaints about tracking ads are legitimate and it's still the best business model for providing the sort of massively positive societal value Google search provides.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving) Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" as one of their issues. I mean, come on. This is a niche issue that has little public awareness. To suggest "Oh, you just need to vote better" is simply laughable. I (and I'm guessing most people) don't live in a government where you can simply vote in new laws or regulations, we vote for candidates and whether or not those candidates care about privacy rights is a crap shoot. Most people don't have a cursory understanding of how data tracking works. This is a google problem. They don't have regulations pushing them to track their users in a way that makes their data easily accessible and consumable by government agencies. There aren't regulations out there forcing it. This is made evident by Apple's run ins with the FBI because their encryption wasn't crackable. And frankly, while this is an issue, there are so many other issues I care about politically that a candidate running on the "limit google tracking" platform wouldn't have enough to win my vote. It's important, but so are so many other issues of the day. > You've not suggested a workable alternative business model that, on balance, provides more net good. More net good? Or more profit for google? These are not the same things. I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model, ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular throughout the internet right up until google took things over with doubleclick. Again, this is not a business model that will be as profitable, but you are conflating "good" with "profit". And as a counter example, duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy.

kradeelav 4y ago

Putting aside the business model side of it (I can't speak for that), I agree with you about pro-privacy arguments tend to be annoyingly insufficient on the material justification ... when I can think of plenty. Put simply, it enables massive power inequalities that threaten to be permanent, if they aren't already. Several living examples: * Black advocates have already raised attention to pre-emptive tracking mixed with AI to "anticipate" crimes committed by "at risk" individuals (read, racial profiling) when this goes against everything that the Constitution stands for re: presuming innocence. * The recent controversies with Roe that another sibling comment is a textbook example about how information mined from menstrual apps or location services can be used to criminalize women seeking an abortion. * On a similar tangent, there was a case early on in adtech's history when a young woman who was pregnant and hiding it from the people she lived with got found out because ads about baby supplies were shown to them (after she had searched up the items). People's living situations can be volatile and this could have been fatal for her if they were sufficiently abusive enough. * Health/Medical apps tend to be especially obscene with tracking - collecting data on the most medically vulnerable (eg disabled people) and letting that data be resold often times means locking them to a sub-standard life because jobs and insurance can and will discriminate in obvious and subtle ways if they know about certain medical conditions, if they can get away with it. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

dogman144 4y ago

> rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful Material - During the bombings in Austin, Google provided a blanket location/data dump to the police of everyone with Google accs within x-miles of the event. That data, regardless of linked to the bombing in the end, is kept by Austin PD and likely the FBI, forever. You have given the police a warrantless log of citizens basically based on “well they use Google and live in Austin.” If you don’t see the glaring material issues, that explains a lot about why Google is Google.

kylevedder 4y ago
The police asked for stuff and the company complied and now you're upset that the government has it, but somehow it's actually Google's fault? Pass laws so your government can't do things you don't like. >If you don’t see the glaring material issues, that explains a lot about why Google is Google. I don't work at Google anymore. Feel free to click on my profile to see what I'm up to these days.

mola 4y ago

The attitude that if the government is using the data collected by tech companies to bypass constitutional limitation, then it's a problem with government and not big tech, is rather reductionist. This is a tangled system and you cannot completely separate the issues as you so simply claim. Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system. The citizen/consumer is massively under represented and underpowered to make changes to the system once it's in place. Not to mention the completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent. I bet that most ppl twenty years ago, if asked if they would consent to giving an exact timeline of their activities to third parties in exchange to free entertainment would probably not readily agree. Big tech lied to consumers until it normalized the new surveillance status que, that's immoral and wrong, even if it's extremely profitable. Your individualistic perspective, where you dismiss any harms if they do not relate to you personally, is very short sighted. Authoritarianism can creep up on you, first it targets the weekest, and before you know it, it could be you. Surveillance tech is a tool for authoritarianism, apart from it's inherent immorality because of how it was hidden from the consumer, it is corrupting democracies and gives them a very authoritarian tint. Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders.

kylevedder 4y ago
I wholesale reject the following: 1) Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system -- they're getting raked over the coals at dog and pony show anti trust hearings. 2) completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent -- you literally gave these websites this information, and there's legal privacy policies that no one reads describing how it's used. If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't give it to them. 3) Authoritarianism can creep up on you -- ok and? The fact that Google's ad auctions are more efficient isn't going to cause authoritarianism. 4) Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? -- lmao no

ShroudedNight 4y ago

A significant quantity of the ad space is pernicious: The ads seeking to be displayed are explicitly intending to manipulate the viewer to change their cognitive orientation to the benefit of the buyer, with anywhere from callous disregard to outright contempt for the viewer's outcomes. Big tech has significantly aided in the delivery of these harmful messages, and seeks to use personalized information to find the channels, times, and context that are _most_ effective at undermining the will and agency of the viewers. Are there models where an information / recommendation broker could justifiably collect what would otherwise be concerning amounts of personal information? Potentially, if it were using that information to compute and facilitate the maximal individually beneficial outcomes of each individual user, but that's not what's happening here. Right now, we're building a system that would happily have people die painfully and preventably at 40 after living miserable lives because the economic returns of that model maximize the returns on advertisers / delivery networks.

dmitriid 4y ago

You can have ads without tracking. I don't think anyone is against ads per se. People are against pervasive continuous tracking and wholesale sale of data to anyone.

kylevedder 4y ago
>wholesale sale of data to anyone You know Google doesn't do this, right? Besides being against their own terms of service (and outright illegal), they're economically incentivized not to; they use the data to make their ad auctions more efficient, an edge they would lose if they sold the raw data.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Google is big enough to not need to sell that data. Doesn't make it a right thing to do.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
the data goes to the govt

fsflover 4y ago

Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.

lukeschlather 4y ago

> 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 So you seem to be referring to Google (annual revenue ~$250 billion.) But Wikipedia (annual revenue $160 million) also qualifies. Also The Library of Congress (annual budget $800 million.) Another interesting data point is the USPS $77 billion annual revenue. So there are definitely proven business models that provide services basically at-cost and without all the negative externalities. And Wikipedia's budget is so small that even relatively poor countries could fund it with less than 1/5th of their education budget. (e.g. Uganda's education budget in 2020 was roughly $700 million.) And that would let them pay globally competitive salaries to hire software engineers to build indexes that are actually optimized first and foremost for knowledge that's focused on their culture rather than the US.

asdff 4y ago

I would love a model where the fees you pay anyhow for internet access go to support the servers you are visiting.