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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 we

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.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  >Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" Again, your list of complaints revolved about the government getting their hands on all this data and using it for purposes you don't like. If you're upset about that, there's plenty of people interested in civil rights. But if digital privacy is such a niche issue, how come Europe and the United States have GDPR? >This is a Google issue... ...the FBI... Again, you're upset with the behavior of the FBI, not Google. Vote for people who restrict the FBI's ability to request this data instead of getting mad at the existence of tracking ad data. >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. And the fact that Google captures information about what sites you've been to in order to make ad auctions more efficient is so odious to you that you want to move everyone back in time to a demonstratively less efficient business model which hurts ad buyers (other businesses) at least as much as it does Google? You must know your proposed business model isn't nearly as good, but you've yet to articulate what exactly we're getting for it that makes the cost worth it. >duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy. DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.)
  - skummetmaelk 4y ago
    > DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.) If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam sites with vapid auto content. Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to remove the doping to see how he really fares against the others.
scubbo 4y ago
I've never seen such a concise and well-articulated statement of this position. Thank you for presenting it! I instinctively disagree with it, but I can't actually provide a coherent and convincing counter-argument, which is probably a sign that I need to think more on it. Thank you for that prompt. The best counter-argument I can think of is: > the claim that only Google (or, "only organizations large enough to require ads as revenue support") can provide these services is false - Open Source solutions (like OpenStreetMap, etc.) provide "good-enough" value. That is, the drop in value from "premium shiny BigTech solution" to "less-fully-featured Open Source privacy-respecting solution" is smaller than the gain in value from the associated privacy-aesthetics. That's a subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis (is Google Maps more socially valuable than Google Drive?), and won't be true for everyone - perhaps, not many people. EDIT: for a more fully-described alternative business model - https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/
- kylevedder 4y ago
  A lot of AV companies bootstrapped their maps off of OpenStreetMaps -- it's great anything is free, but they kind of suck. The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    > The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info. This is a perfect example of the "subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis" that I was referring to.
    - kylevedder 4y ago
      There's a free market of platforms without subpoena power, and people time and time again choose the free platforms powered by ads. I'm in the overwhelming majority with my statement when you look at people's revealed preferences.
scubbo 4y ago
Putting this in a sibling comment because it's tangential to my more-relevant response about an alternative business model. --- The claim that citizens of western-style democracies have mechanisms to modify government behaviour is technically true, but meaningless. The average Western citizen has more chance of becoming an Astronaut or solving a Millenium problem than they do of effecting real govenmental change without access to extraordinary social capital or Super-PAC-level donations. Especially given that most western-style democracies' mechanisms consist of "pick which of these two broad bundles of choices you want to support" (as cogman10 pointed out, "the candidate who is opposed to data-tracking" does not really exist as a viable option; and even if they did, they would need to have a broad platform of popular positions, not just that one) - so if the option you want is not offered, you not only need to change voting behaviour to support it, you first need to create that option out of whole cloth.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  And you think that complaining about tech companies, companies owned by share holders who have no particular obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders, is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want? Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation, something which we've already seen occur with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US. It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those bills though, so I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    > And you think that complaining about tech companies[...] is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want? No, I don't. I was pointing out that your claim that individuals can effect political change is broadly incorrect. That doesn't imply that the alternative (direct petitioning of companies) is effective. Attempting political change probably _is_ a more rational strategy than petitioning tech companies. As an individual, neither seems powerful. > Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation No disagreement here! > I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government. To be clear, these are two separate claims. Privacy might or might not be a niche complaint - I feel that it is (given how little my non-technical friends care about it), but I'm purely working off anecdata, and I concede that GDPR (and the slew of other Privacy regulations following in its wake) are datapoints that contradict me. The other claim - that individuals are powerless to effect political change - remains undisproven to me. In particular, I reject the position that _individual_ privacy advocates were responsible for GDPR. It's large groups like the EFF (as a sibling commenter pointed out) that cause governments to take notice, not individuals.
throwaway4220 4y ago
I'm a trillionaire who can hire maybe 10,001 minimum wage workers to follow you and the top 10,000 earners in the US around anywhere you go and record every single thing you do from a safe distance in public spaces (including stores, malls, church etc, looking in through your windows from the street). I'm not doing anything illegal, but you probably think it's creepy. How can I explain to you that it's not? Earlier you said, tracking pays for free services you use but doesn't have a net negative effect on your life. How can you tell? And if you can tell, what's the problem with being informed of how often you're being tracked?
pclmulqdq 4y ago
The problem with your argument is that the same mechanisms that are used by government for broad-reaching surveillance are also used for legitimate government purposes. These are things like subpoenas and warrants, which are impossible to eliminate completely while keeping a functional court system. You could try to argue that we should make sure that these are narrow in scope (that's already the rule despite the current practice), but that doesn't eliminate the problem completely: someone can already subpoena Amazon for "recordings taken in kylevedder's house between 4/22/2022 and 6/22/2022" related to an investigation, and they will get them. Even if you are not the target of the investigation, but they have reason to believe that the target may have visited you during that time period. Such a subpoena has not been tried in civil court yet, but it will likely be allowed. In an alternative world where tech companies don't track you, these subpoenas wouldn't work. Google, Amazon, and other data collectors have a principal-agent problem with respect to data about you: while you would likely fight a subpoena for your location data tooth and nail, they don't care so much. They will often give up the data, and they won't even tell you they did. The alternative business models are ad support without tracking and subscriptions. Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. WolframAlpha is a search engine on a subscription model. Micro-subscriptions are already a thing (albeit invented/normalized after Google was invented), and it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products. As far as this being bad for people, allowing companies to track you invasively is a little like not buying insurance. You won't care most of the time, but you may care a lot. Lots of people don't buy insurance, even though they should, because they severely underestimate tail risk. This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates (or single-payer healthcare), and car insurance mandates in some states all operate on this rationale. So should privacy legislation.
- kylevedder 4y ago
  I don't see why you can't add guardrails to things like subpoenas -- it's not like they are allowed to engage in aggressive subpoenaing of non digital info without a due process procedure, just make the digital one more rigorous. The issue lies in the flawed execution of the current legal system, so fix that instead of taking a hatchet to big tech. >Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. A very non trivial subset of their revenue is personalized ads, and I promise you they work pretty well; if you don't believe me I recommend taking a job on the ads team. This is a huge revenue hit, for a company that's consistently putting that money into product innovations as well as societally important moonshot projects, all in order to side step the issue of your concerns with the American justice system's subpoena process. >it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products. If you're a SWE you probably have coworkers raised in India. Ask them how likely they would have been able to afford such a subscription system and by extension how much worse their life would be if they didn't have access to Google. I would bet a substantial fraction of them would still be in India and not software engineers. >This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates We have healthcare mandates and social security because if a person has no money and is out in the street or gets health care and then can't pay, it's society's problem. If you get nailed by the government for doing something illegal due to invasive subpoenas, it's not only not society's problem, depending on your opinions on the role of the state this is a feature not a bug.

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.

kylevedder 4y ago
>Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" Again, your list of complaints revolved about the government getting their hands on all this data and using it for purposes you don't like. If you're upset about that, there's plenty of people interested in civil rights. But if digital privacy is such a niche issue, how come Europe and the United States have GDPR? >This is a Google issue... ...the FBI... Again, you're upset with the behavior of the FBI, not Google. Vote for people who restrict the FBI's ability to request this data instead of getting mad at the existence of tracking ad data. >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. And the fact that Google captures information about what sites you've been to in order to make ad auctions more efficient is so odious to you that you want to move everyone back in time to a demonstratively less efficient business model which hurts ad buyers (other businesses) at least as much as it does Google? You must know your proposed business model isn't nearly as good, but you've yet to articulate what exactly we're getting for it that makes the cost worth it. >duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy. DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.)
- skummetmaelk 4y ago
  > DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.) If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam sites with vapid auto content. Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to remove the doping to see how he really fares against the others.

scubbo 4y ago

I've never seen such a concise and well-articulated statement of this position. Thank you for presenting it! I instinctively disagree with it, but I can't actually provide a coherent and convincing counter-argument, which is probably a sign that I need to think more on it. Thank you for that prompt. The best counter-argument I can think of is: > the claim that only Google (or, "only organizations large enough to require ads as revenue support") can provide these services is false - Open Source solutions (like OpenStreetMap, etc.) provide "good-enough" value. That is, the drop in value from "premium shiny BigTech solution" to "less-fully-featured Open Source privacy-respecting solution" is smaller than the gain in value from the associated privacy-aesthetics. That's a subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis (is Google Maps more socially valuable than Google Drive?), and won't be true for everyone - perhaps, not many people. EDIT: for a more fully-described alternative business model - https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

kylevedder 4y ago
A lot of AV companies bootstrapped their maps off of OpenStreetMaps -- it's great anything is free, but they kind of suck. The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info.
- scubbo 4y ago
  > The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info. This is a perfect example of the "subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis" that I was referring to.
  - kylevedder 4y ago
    There's a free market of platforms without subpoena power, and people time and time again choose the free platforms powered by ads. I'm in the overwhelming majority with my statement when you look at people's revealed preferences.

scubbo 4y ago

Putting this in a sibling comment because it's tangential to my more-relevant response about an alternative business model. --- The claim that citizens of western-style democracies have mechanisms to modify government behaviour is technically true, but meaningless. The average Western citizen has more chance of becoming an Astronaut or solving a Millenium problem than they do of effecting real govenmental change without access to extraordinary social capital or Super-PAC-level donations. Especially given that most western-style democracies' mechanisms consist of "pick which of these two broad bundles of choices you want to support" (as cogman10 pointed out, "the candidate who is opposed to data-tracking" does not really exist as a viable option; and even if they did, they would need to have a broad platform of popular positions, not just that one) - so if the option you want is not offered, you not only need to change voting behaviour to support it, you first need to create that option out of whole cloth.

kylevedder 4y ago
And you think that complaining about tech companies, companies owned by share holders who have no particular obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders, is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want? Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation, something which we've already seen occur with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US. It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those bills though, so I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.
- scubbo 4y ago
  > And you think that complaining about tech companies[...] is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want? No, I don't. I was pointing out that your claim that individuals can effect political change is broadly incorrect. That doesn't imply that the alternative (direct petitioning of companies) is effective. Attempting political change probably _is_ a more rational strategy than petitioning tech companies. As an individual, neither seems powerful. > Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation No disagreement here! > I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government. To be clear, these are two separate claims. Privacy might or might not be a niche complaint - I feel that it is (given how little my non-technical friends care about it), but I'm purely working off anecdata, and I concede that GDPR (and the slew of other Privacy regulations following in its wake) are datapoints that contradict me. The other claim - that individuals are powerless to effect political change - remains undisproven to me. In particular, I reject the position that _individual_ privacy advocates were responsible for GDPR. It's large groups like the EFF (as a sibling commenter pointed out) that cause governments to take notice, not individuals.

throwaway4220 4y ago

I'm a trillionaire who can hire maybe 10,001 minimum wage workers to follow you and the top 10,000 earners in the US around anywhere you go and record every single thing you do from a safe distance in public spaces (including stores, malls, church etc, looking in through your windows from the street). I'm not doing anything illegal, but you probably think it's creepy. How can I explain to you that it's not? Earlier you said, tracking pays for free services you use but doesn't have a net negative effect on your life. How can you tell? And if you can tell, what's the problem with being informed of how often you're being tracked?

pclmulqdq 4y ago

The problem with your argument is that the same mechanisms that are used by government for broad-reaching surveillance are also used for legitimate government purposes. These are things like subpoenas and warrants, which are impossible to eliminate completely while keeping a functional court system. You could try to argue that we should make sure that these are narrow in scope (that's already the rule despite the current practice), but that doesn't eliminate the problem completely: someone can already subpoena Amazon for "recordings taken in kylevedder's house between 4/22/2022 and 6/22/2022" related to an investigation, and they will get them. Even if you are not the target of the investigation, but they have reason to believe that the target may have visited you during that time period. Such a subpoena has not been tried in civil court yet, but it will likely be allowed. In an alternative world where tech companies don't track you, these subpoenas wouldn't work. Google, Amazon, and other data collectors have a principal-agent problem with respect to data about you: while you would likely fight a subpoena for your location data tooth and nail, they don't care so much. They will often give up the data, and they won't even tell you they did. The alternative business models are ad support without tracking and subscriptions. Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. WolframAlpha is a search engine on a subscription model. Micro-subscriptions are already a thing (albeit invented/normalized after Google was invented), and it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products. As far as this being bad for people, allowing companies to track you invasively is a little like not buying insurance. You won't care most of the time, but you may care a lot. Lots of people don't buy insurance, even though they should, because they severely underestimate tail risk. This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates (or single-payer healthcare), and car insurance mandates in some states all operate on this rationale. So should privacy legislation.

kylevedder 4y ago
I don't see why you can't add guardrails to things like subpoenas -- it's not like they are allowed to engage in aggressive subpoenaing of non digital info without a due process procedure, just make the digital one more rigorous. The issue lies in the flawed execution of the current legal system, so fix that instead of taking a hatchet to big tech. >Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. A very non trivial subset of their revenue is personalized ads, and I promise you they work pretty well; if you don't believe me I recommend taking a job on the ads team. This is a huge revenue hit, for a company that's consistently putting that money into product innovations as well as societally important moonshot projects, all in order to side step the issue of your concerns with the American justice system's subpoena process. >it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products. If you're a SWE you probably have coworkers raised in India. Ask them how likely they would have been able to afford such a subscription system and by extension how much worse their life would be if they didn't have access to Google. I would bet a substantial fraction of them would still be in India and not software engineers. >This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates We have healthcare mandates and social security because if a person has no money and is out in the street or gets health care and then can't pay, it's society's problem. If you get nailed by the government for doing something illegal due to invasive subpoenas, it's not only not society's problem, depending on your opinions on the role of the state this is a feature not a bug.