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Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications. It is meaningless to present an option you are forced to

Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications. It is meaningless to present an option you are forced to agree to. Additionally there is, to me, a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else.

vineyardmike 2y ago
> enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else. I completely agree, but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life, or at least recognize that they have an association cost to the user. What is the reasonable expectation of a business to profit off a product that we’ve deemed “required”? Who would make or support a product they can’t profit on? In the EU, they required Facebook to offer a no-tracking version of the product, which meta replied by making a paid tier. Then they required Facebook to not charge for their no-tracking version. So why should facebook stay in the EU if it can’t profit from providing a service? While no one will shed a tear over Meta’s business, it is a massive way for people to connect with each other. Google Maps could theoretically suffer the same fate - and free access to maps seems like a public good. YouTube is another example that can be for the public good due to its educational content. The list of products that are “free” and probably good for society is huge now thanks to effective online advertising. I don’t want us to shed a tear for billionaire-corporations profit margins, but instead address that we’ve come to rely on them and they probably won’t be altruistic about watching their profits legislated away.
- m463 2y ago
  > but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life The following sites use google services and google analytics: irs.gov ftb.ca.gov (california state tax authority) dmv.ca.gov (california department of motor vehicles) how can you avoid these things? if money is involved, recaptcha is generally a non-blockable requirement.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > I completely agree, but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life, or at least recognize that they have an association cost to the user. What is the reasonable expectation of a business to profit off a product that we’ve deemed “required”? Who would make or support a product they can’t profit on? We kind of urgently need new models for certain things that start as for-profit and then fade towards more publicly owned utilities. This is the essence of the idea behind things like patents and copyright, and when we're talking about a service where the creators have been wildly successful the basic issues are mostly the same. Fair compensation, but not ownership in perpetuity. The thing about maps and similar is, it's not an idea to be protected because the idea is the easy part but the data is hard. Since google did some part of the actual mapping, they certainly deserve credit, but of course the whole thing could not exist if GPS wasn't essentially available as a public utility. Maybe if they want to be stingy with the map data forever, they should pay license fees for the GPS technology, since that's a piece of infrastructure they outsource to the public? Or for our individual data, since it's required to build their models? Regardless of your stance on political/economic ideology, surely individuals can agree that it's not sustainable for society to be beholden to for-profit corporations forever for things like maps, the ability to use a flashlight or a toaster, the ability to open doors on houses or cars you own, or access to water/air. Maintenance is a real issue for most technology even after it's figured out, so probably the corporations should be forced towards spinning off actually separated co-ops/nonprofits/utilities in the fullness of time. So basically wild profits and all the awful antisocial and anti-competitive behaviour you can get away with, but having some explicit expiration date for service-monopoly as well as idea-monopoly. And as for the question of motivation.. does it really disincentivize creative crooks to know that the next generation of crooks will need a new scam? I think not because the whole point is that this type of person is out for themselves.
  - chii 2y ago
    > they [google] should pay license fees for the GPS technology but you yourself don't pay for your own access to GPS - so why should google foot a bill? > access to water/air. there's no universally free access to water. And i imagine in a future dystopian world, air could be metered out for which you have to pay, or breath polluted air. > having some explicit expiration date for service-monopoly as well as idea-monopoly. i think this is just another way of having the gov't authorities nationalize assets. If google maps is so useful, and you can't live without it, they are by definition generating value and they needs to be paid, in perpetuity as long as said value from the service is being produced. It's actually somewhat amazing that they're able to sustain this value production fueled by purely using advertising and private data extraction/exploitation. I mean, if you use farms as a example of your idea of expiration dates, it will start to sound like communism!
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  They're missing the profit/ altruism of me just giving them £€$ right out of the gate so as not to have ads thrown at me. I just don't like ads (and tracking).
- chmod775 2y ago
  First off you're making the mistake of equating ads with tracking. You do not need tracking for ads - context based advertising is widespread on YouTube already. Secondly there's nothing special about these services except their moat. Even when serving video was a novel problem, there was dozens of competitors. Nowadays it's a solved problem. If they leave, they'll be replaced overnight, just like many other social networks, messengers, video platforms, etc. before them. They'll go far not to give up a position they will likely never claw back.
gruez 2y ago
>Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications From the second paragraph in the linked article: >Location History is turned off by default, so a user must take several affirmative steps before Google begins tracking and storing his Location History data. [...] Roughly one-third of active Google users have enabled Location History. This is specifically about the opt-in location history service, not some sort of opt-out/mandatory location reporting that's on android phones.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Google used to (still does?) disable many features of Maps if location history was disabled. I kept it off, but could easily see many people felt forced to give up on their privacy for the convenience.
  - gruez 2y ago
    Source? I remember them disabling search history if you didn't sign in, but not any other critical features. Moreover as I mentioned in my previous comment, only a third has this feature enabled, so whatever feature google is withholding must not be that important to most people.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information. I had multiple addresses I had to store elsewhere because Maps would purposely forget them.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information I didn't say that you had share location history to get search history, only to sign in. Maybe there was some point in the past where sharing location history was tied to having search history, but I don't remember it, and it's certainly not the case today. If you think that's the case you'll have to provide some third party corroboration.
_heimdall 2y ago
> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero in on the same transient topic like a solar eclipse or an interest in atching movies about both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. We're parts of that world, we aren't victims of it.
- justinpombrio 2y ago
  > Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. Well my apartment building is about to replace the doorbells with a cell phone app (or phone calls as an alternative). No cell phone -> no door bell. I'm just a renter; I get no say in the matter.
  - dabber 2y ago
    > I'm just a renter; I get no say in the matter. Surely you evaluated alternative apartments before deciding to rent at the one you are currently in, right?
    - paganel 2y ago
      You provably missed the “is about to replace” part, not sure the OP was aware of what would be coming when he moved in.
      - dabber 2y ago
        No, I saw that. My comment was a poorly worded attempt to suggest that, as a renter, they can certainly choose to avoid it by moving just as they chose to avoid the other apparents they evaluated but never moved into. They're not forced into anything.
  - deleted 2y ago
rayiner 2y ago
That’s neither here nor there. The question is do you reasonably expect that this information is private. The answer is obviously “no,” because you’re handing the information over to a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Whether you think you have a good reason to give up your privacy like that or not is neither here nor there.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  This is a terrible take. I expect that any such company has more than sufficient wherewithal to enforce good privacy practices on my data, which belongs to me. If they do some calculations on my behalf using that data on their servers, the data still belongs to me.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    The data Google has about you belongs to Google. The Supreme Court has already held in Riley that your documents stored in the cloud are covered by the 4th amendment. But this case is about Google tracking your whereabouts for its own purposes.
- brookst 2y ago
  Wait, so if I get medical care a company with United Health, a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, I have no expectation of privacy just because of their headcount?
  - rayiner 2y ago
    “Expectation of privacy” isn’t in the constitution. The 4th amendment says: “ The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” Other people’s records concerning you plainly aren’t “[your] … papers.”
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      I guess FOIA doesn’t emanate from the Constitution either?
dotancohen 2y ago
> a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else. Making this distinction a legal requirement was a very important part of the GDPR.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

vineyardmike 2y ago

> enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else. I completely agree, but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life, or at least recognize that they have an association cost to the user. What is the reasonable expectation of a business to profit off a product that we’ve deemed “required”? Who would make or support a product they can’t profit on? In the EU, they required Facebook to offer a no-tracking version of the product, which meta replied by making a paid tier. Then they required Facebook to not charge for their no-tracking version. So why should facebook stay in the EU if it can’t profit from providing a service? While no one will shed a tear over Meta’s business, it is a massive way for people to connect with each other. Google Maps could theoretically suffer the same fate - and free access to maps seems like a public good. YouTube is another example that can be for the public good due to its educational content. The list of products that are “free” and probably good for society is huge now thanks to effective online advertising. I don’t want us to shed a tear for billionaire-corporations profit margins, but instead address that we’ve come to rely on them and they probably won’t be altruistic about watching their profits legislated away.

m463 2y ago
> but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life The following sites use google services and google analytics: irs.gov ftb.ca.gov (california state tax authority) dmv.ca.gov (california department of motor vehicles) how can you avoid these things? if money is involved, recaptcha is generally a non-blockable requirement.
photonthug 2y ago
> I completely agree, but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life, or at least recognize that they have an association cost to the user. What is the reasonable expectation of a business to profit off a product that we’ve deemed “required”? Who would make or support a product they can’t profit on? We kind of urgently need new models for certain things that start as for-profit and then fade towards more publicly owned utilities. This is the essence of the idea behind things like patents and copyright, and when we're talking about a service where the creators have been wildly successful the basic issues are mostly the same. Fair compensation, but not ownership in perpetuity. The thing about maps and similar is, it's not an idea to be protected because the idea is the easy part but the data is hard. Since google did some part of the actual mapping, they certainly deserve credit, but of course the whole thing could not exist if GPS wasn't essentially available as a public utility. Maybe if they want to be stingy with the map data forever, they should pay license fees for the GPS technology, since that's a piece of infrastructure they outsource to the public? Or for our individual data, since it's required to build their models? Regardless of your stance on political/economic ideology, surely individuals can agree that it's not sustainable for society to be beholden to for-profit corporations forever for things like maps, the ability to use a flashlight or a toaster, the ability to open doors on houses or cars you own, or access to water/air. Maintenance is a real issue for most technology even after it's figured out, so probably the corporations should be forced towards spinning off actually separated co-ops/nonprofits/utilities in the fullness of time. So basically wild profits and all the awful antisocial and anti-competitive behaviour you can get away with, but having some explicit expiration date for service-monopoly as well as idea-monopoly. And as for the question of motivation.. does it really disincentivize creative crooks to know that the next generation of crooks will need a new scam? I think not because the whole point is that this type of person is out for themselves.
- chii 2y ago
  > they [google] should pay license fees for the GPS technology but you yourself don't pay for your own access to GPS - so why should google foot a bill? > access to water/air. there's no universally free access to water. And i imagine in a future dystopian world, air could be metered out for which you have to pay, or breath polluted air. > having some explicit expiration date for service-monopoly as well as idea-monopoly. i think this is just another way of having the gov't authorities nationalize assets. If google maps is so useful, and you can't live without it, they are by definition generating value and they needs to be paid, in perpetuity as long as said value from the service is being produced. It's actually somewhat amazing that they're able to sustain this value production fueled by purely using advertising and private data extraction/exploitation. I mean, if you use farms as a example of your idea of expiration dates, it will start to sound like communism!
Ylpertnodi 2y ago
They're missing the profit/ altruism of me just giving them £€$ right out of the gate so as not to have ads thrown at me. I just don't like ads (and tracking).
chmod775 2y ago
First off you're making the mistake of equating ads with tracking. You do not need tracking for ads - context based advertising is widespread on YouTube already. Secondly there's nothing special about these services except their moat. Even when serving video was a novel problem, there was dozens of competitors. Nowadays it's a solved problem. If they leave, they'll be replaced overnight, just like many other social networks, messengers, video platforms, etc. before them. They'll go far not to give up a position they will likely never claw back.

gruez 2y ago

>Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications From the second paragraph in the linked article: >Location History is turned off by default, so a user must take several affirmative steps before Google begins tracking and storing his Location History data. [...] Roughly one-third of active Google users have enabled Location History. This is specifically about the opt-in location history service, not some sort of opt-out/mandatory location reporting that's on android phones.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Google used to (still does?) disable many features of Maps if location history was disabled. I kept it off, but could easily see many people felt forced to give up on their privacy for the convenience.
- gruez 2y ago
  Source? I remember them disabling search history if you didn't sign in, but not any other critical features. Moreover as I mentioned in my previous comment, only a third has this feature enabled, so whatever feature google is withholding must not be that important to most people.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information. I had multiple addresses I had to store elsewhere because Maps would purposely forget them.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information I didn't say that you had share location history to get search history, only to sign in. Maybe there was some point in the past where sharing location history was tied to having search history, but I don't remember it, and it's certainly not the case today. If you think that's the case you'll have to provide some third party corroboration.

_heimdall 2y ago

> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero in on the same transient topic like a solar eclipse or an interest in atching movies about both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. We're parts of that world, we aren't victims of it.

justinpombrio 2y ago
> Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. Well my apartment building is about to replace the doorbells with a cell phone app (or phone calls as an alternative). No cell phone -> no door bell. I'm just a renter; I get no say in the matter.
- dabber 2y ago
  > I'm just a renter; I get no say in the matter. Surely you evaluated alternative apartments before deciding to rent at the one you are currently in, right?
  - paganel 2y ago
    You provably missed the “is about to replace” part, not sure the OP was aware of what would be coming when he moved in.
    - dabber 2y ago
      No, I saw that. My comment was a poorly worded attempt to suggest that, as a renter, they can certainly choose to avoid it by moving just as they chose to avoid the other apparents they evaluated but never moved into. They're not forced into anything.
- deleted 2y ago

rayiner 2y ago

That’s neither here nor there. The question is do you reasonably expect that this information is private. The answer is obviously “no,” because you’re handing the information over to a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Whether you think you have a good reason to give up your privacy like that or not is neither here nor there.

skywhopper 2y ago
This is a terrible take. I expect that any such company has more than sufficient wherewithal to enforce good privacy practices on my data, which belongs to me. If they do some calculations on my behalf using that data on their servers, the data still belongs to me.
- rayiner 2y ago
  The data Google has about you belongs to Google. The Supreme Court has already held in Riley that your documents stored in the cloud are covered by the 4th amendment. But this case is about Google tracking your whereabouts for its own purposes.
brookst 2y ago
Wait, so if I get medical care a company with United Health, a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, I have no expectation of privacy just because of their headcount?
- rayiner 2y ago
  “Expectation of privacy” isn’t in the constitution. The 4th amendment says: “ The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” Other people’s records concerning you plainly aren’t “[your] … papers.”
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    I guess FOIA doesn’t emanate from the Constitution either?

dotancohen 2y ago

> a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else. Making this distinction a legal requirement was a very important part of the GDPR.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]