3 ms·

Yes and Apple has publicly available papers about how they use big data and still ensure users privacy.

shadowgovt 4y ago
In the short run, shifting from Google to Apple is probably the best of both worlds: Apple can provide those Big Data benefits without the data landing in Google's warehouse. (In the long run, of course, if the set of Apple users approaches "everyone" the risk model shifts considerably and simply becomes, not unlike Google, "How much do you trust Apple isn't just lying to you?" Google also publishes various documents on how they protect user privacy, for example https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html... The issue they encounter is people just don't believe them).
- scarface74 4y ago
  It’s not about trusting that Google is telling the truth. I believe Google is telling the truth. You know that they are collecting your data to advertise to you and the only way they can do that is by having access to your unencrypted data.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Surprisingly, they've actually solved the issue of keeping the data secure while using it for advertising (at least for display ads). The secret is compartmentalization, which is one of the reasons your web client makes so many damn calls to render a page these days. I can't find a paper describing the whole process right now, but the broad-strokes flow as it was once described to me is - a third-party site resolves who you are based on their knowledge of you. - they send a cookie representing your interests (but anonymized) to Google, where it's collated with similar interest data to figure out what kind of ad someone with your interests should see (but the system doesn't know who you are; you're just "someone with some interests"). So yes, individual sites track your interests on those sites, but they don't hand that data raw to Google; it's valuable to them and (this is key) on this dimension, Google is a competitor in the ad space. These companies don't want to hand Google raw user / interest correlation data because they don't trust Google not to roll it into better advertising products. Your privacy is, ironically, protected by third-party corporate paranoia. - nonces representing the ads that should be displayed are generated and bounced to the third-party, where they're routed to your client as the data your client should fetch - your client gets the list of ads to display from the third party's display ads integration, then makes the request for ads from the ads server with the relevant nonce The third party can't learn more about you because they don't see what ads you got, and Google doesn't know you got those ads; only that someone with a profile like the one the third party sent you got those ads. The only place in the world enough information is consolidated to deanonymize you is on your client. (Hypothetically, Google could do a timing attack on its own nonce-generator + ad server on a low-traffic site to make an educated guess if they also had your browsing history, but they basically pinky-swear they don't correlate the signal that way and it's warehoused in different places; someone trying to do that correlation would raise red flags because it threatens the privacy guarantees Google relies upon).
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I don’t know whether to be impressed about the design or saddened because of the inefficiency and latency of loading a web page because of the design.

In the short run, shifting from Google to Apple is probably the best of both worlds: Apple can provide those Big Data benefits without the data landing in Google's warehouse. (In the long run, of course, if the set of Apple users approaches "everyone" the risk model shifts considerably and simply becomes, not unlike Google, "How much do you trust Apple isn't just lying to you?" Google also publishes various documents on how they protect user privacy, for example https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html... The issue they encounter is people just don't believe them).

scarface74 4y ago
It’s not about trusting that Google is telling the truth. I believe Google is telling the truth. You know that they are collecting your data to advertise to you and the only way they can do that is by having access to your unencrypted data.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Surprisingly, they've actually solved the issue of keeping the data secure while using it for advertising (at least for display ads). The secret is compartmentalization, which is one of the reasons your web client makes so many damn calls to render a page these days. I can't find a paper describing the whole process right now, but the broad-strokes flow as it was once described to me is - a third-party site resolves who you are based on their knowledge of you. - they send a cookie representing your interests (but anonymized) to Google, where it's collated with similar interest data to figure out what kind of ad someone with your interests should see (but the system doesn't know who you are; you're just "someone with some interests"). So yes, individual sites track your interests on those sites, but they don't hand that data raw to Google; it's valuable to them and (this is key) on this dimension, Google is a competitor in the ad space. These companies don't want to hand Google raw user / interest correlation data because they don't trust Google not to roll it into better advertising products. Your privacy is, ironically, protected by third-party corporate paranoia. - nonces representing the ads that should be displayed are generated and bounced to the third-party, where they're routed to your client as the data your client should fetch - your client gets the list of ads to display from the third party's display ads integration, then makes the request for ads from the ads server with the relevant nonce The third party can't learn more about you because they don't see what ads you got, and Google doesn't know you got those ads; only that someone with a profile like the one the third party sent you got those ads. The only place in the world enough information is consolidated to deanonymize you is on your client. (Hypothetically, Google could do a timing attack on its own nonce-generator + ad server on a low-traffic site to make an educated guess if they also had your browsing history, but they basically pinky-swear they don't correlate the signal that way and it's warehoused in different places; someone trying to do that correlation would raise red flags because it threatens the privacy guarantees Google relies upon).
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I don’t know whether to be impressed about the design or saddened because of the inefficiency and latency of loading a web page because of the design.