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Critics say new Google rules put profits over privacy
- zb3 2y agoPublic companies have to put profit first. We need to solve this with regulations, we can't count on their goodwill.
- segfaultex 2y agoShareholder primacy is legally dubious at best.
- dehrmann 2y agoLong-term profitability can be a goal, too. A lot of short-term profit behaviors can hurt long-term profits.
- dietr1ch 2y agoDoes being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by? Is it because the dumb ruling that companies are supposed to have the single goal of making money? Even if at the expense of cautiously ignoring or disregarding the law where it essentially acts as a fee?
- yapyap 2y ago> Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by Shouldn’t? no won’t? yes
- verisimi 2y ago> Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by? Yes. The appearance of a moral code is all that is necessary. And btw, companies cannot be moral, any more than any other object (chair, house) can be. People however, can be moral. Also, people at Google decided to drop their previous "don't be evil" motto, so perhaps that tells you something.
- darkwater 2y ago> companies cannot be moral I don't buy this. Companies _are made_ of people. The ones that set the direction can be more or less detached from the outcomes of those decisions, but are people nonetheless. Shareholders? People as well.
- verisimi 2y agoI assure you, that a company cannot have a morality. It also cannot have a preference for chocolate ice cream, basketball or have children. Companies are not made of people either. Similarly, if you want to speak to a company, you will speak to someone whose job it is to represent the company - you will not speak to the company itself - its a legal fiction. Companies are legal paperwork that real people engage with to get money - such is the way our society is organised. If you were to argue that some animals exhibit morality - I would see what you mean.
- darkwater 2y agoYes but who/what dictates the tone the company will use to answer you? Ultimately, a person. Even if they are just following a style manual, that was written by a group of people as well. And reviewed by some C-level, probably.
- verisimi 2y agoIndividuals can take on groupthink idea (ie a company) - they can re-interpret the information in a relatively coherent way. Think of the idea of say 'Christians' - there is a relatively coherent idea there being animated in all those minds. But then, at an individual level, there is difference in what is believed (eg 'the Father' idea will be be different in each). Its just assumed that the groupthink idea is the same in all. Its a pleasing illusion for an individual to believe. There is no company morality - as companies and groups cannot feel or register value. The value is entirely in the individual. Yes, one individual can affected and be affected by another. Yes, an individual can say 'We at Google blah blah' and mean what they are saying, and still be wrong. The idea of a 'group' with feelings, morality etc is just an illusory projection.
- hello_moto 2y agoRegulation is a taboo word under the current administration. JD Vance has criticized EU during AI summit. Criticized to the point of threatening not to share "Americans" AI bandwagon to EU.
- cgcrob 2y agoHe’s forgotten the EU has ASML clearly.
- chrisjj 2y agoNo. ASML is on the list after Greenland and Gaza.
- tadfisher 2y agoHe and his ilk forget all too quickly why we have regulations in the first place. People wanted them, because they were tired of polluted waterways, bank runs wiping away their life savings, and dangerous poisons being sold as medicine. Now that a functioning democracy has voted for privacy protections, it's a pretty "mask-off" moment that these regulations are the ones he rails against.
- openrisk 2y agoConflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil. Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all. Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies). Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
- okanat 2y agoIt wasn't that the people requesting certain things politely that brought regulation. It was when things turned nonprofitable or outright violent. The New Deal was the ideal of Roosevelt but other politicians knew very well what people did to the Tsar and his family. It didn't end well for them but it did scare quite a lot developed governments in the world.
- chrismcb 2y agoCompanies don't have to put profit first. But profit in a for profit is important.
- scq 2y agoThis is a common myth, but is false. Direct quote from the Supreme Court: > “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” More information: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
- pessimizer 2y agoIt's not a myth. The person you are replying to did not say that corporate law requires companies to prioritize profit. Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. Whenever it looks like a company is not prioritizing profit, what you're seeing is the employees and owners of a corporation using it as a tool to express their personalities and preferences. This is usually not good, it is corruption. There's no reason to think that the personalities and preferences of arbitrary employees and owners are good, or that they would tend to do good things. The idea that companies have moralities, and that besides bringing in profit they also have some hazy duty to do things that I agree with personally is the myth. It's self-regulation propaganda. It's better to just have rules that keep companies from doing the things that we don't want them to do, instead of hoping that they will suddenly realize that money doesn't buy love, and that the only important things in life are health and family. That's not what they're for. That's what you're for. They're not real people.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago> Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. I disagree. Corporations do things (e.g. provide goods and services): that's what they're for. The whole "money" thing is just a means-to-an-end: a system of accounting to allow the corporation to continue to do what it's supposed to do. Money, after all, is inherently valueless: it's only worth anything because it can be exchanged for goods and services. If powerful entities exist solely for making money, we risk the economy becoming completely decoupled from anything that actually matters.
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- fumar 2y agoThis is not a user first approach. Ad tech heavily relies on IP address for fingerprinting. Chrome will eventually implement IP Protection for incognito users. I believe Chrome originally planned to roll out IP protection for all users. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/ip-protection?tab=readme-ov-file#availability-of-the-ip-protection-feature https://github.com/GoogleChrome/ip-protection?tab=readme-ov-...
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoHow does IP address fingerprinting work in IP v6? I am not an expert but as I understand there are just too many addresses to establish patterns.
- nisa 2y agoIPv6 is more like /64 is an IP. Most ISP assign a /56 or /60 to the customer, you can just disregard all the other bits and basically have something like an IPv4 equivalent.
- topranks 2y agoTrue. It’s kind of the reverse of IPv4. In v4 you could have a million people behind one address. In v6 you at maximum have one person behind an address, but that one person may actually be using a million addresses.
- prasadjoglekar 2y agoExactly. IP is but one element of the fingerprint. Browser, OS, language etc. all make it quite possible to reassociate a user to a different IP v4 or 6; just takes a bit of time and processing.
- unethical_ban 2y agoIt's actually easier to track. Less NAT, ISP leases can get more specific,misconfigured privacy options... When I did a geoip lookup on my v4 address last year, it had me about 1.5 miles away from my apartment. When I did it on v6, it was within a block. Using a VPN and NAT will still be useful for privacy with ipv6.
- soygem 2y agoMore news at 11
- cbb330 2y agoinvestigative journalists conclude that water is, in fact, wet
- chrisjj 2y agoDupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43067021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43067021 Why did HN Submit not notice, I wonder.
- brikym 2y agoCompany puts profits over... I'm shocked.
- ffhhj 2y agoShocked? We had surveilance for silly stuff like ads, now we will have the one of 1984 variety. Ted K. is more like a futurist at this point.
- amelius 2y agoIf X% of people despise ads, then can we have X% of the year with a ban on ads? Maybe this will wake up more people.
- edmundsauto 2y agoThese types of survey questions do not connect with what we want them to. “Do you hate ads?” is very different than “would you rather be nickle and dined for everything at every turn?” and even that is different than how people behave when they have to pull out their wallet. At this point, pay for use has clearly lost to ad supported. People prefer ads to paying.
- serviceberry 2y ago> People prefer ads to paying. Eh. Spotify has 250 million subscribers. Netflix has 300 million. Amazon Prime has 180 million. Heck, there's something like a million people paying Twitter for a checkmark, and half a million paying Reddit for nothing at all. People don't seem to be opposed to paying for online services. They were just never given choice. I have no doubt that publishers prefer ads because it just lets them extract value "for free" - which is probably why you're increasingly seeing ads in paid services, too (Netflix, etc).
- edmundsauto 2y agoFair point, although the ad supported platforms are all 10x bigger. Meta has network effects which is a different issue. But what’re your thoughts on consumers using Google for free versus the paid search models? There, at least, there are good alternatives and people clearly prefer ads.
- flossposse 2y agoCounterexample: TextNow offers a "free"(ad-supported) mobile phone service, yet people overwhelmingly prefer to pay for T-Mobile.
- aucisson_masque 2y agoSo I've read the article and I even read the Google post they linked in and yet can't understand what exactly are these changes. It mentions fingerprinting but what exactly is Google changing ? They speak about "advances in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)" and then later on "Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are already commonly used in the broader ads ecosystem to help marketers reach people across their customer journey and measure how their ads are working, especially on CTV. At Google, we have already been using these signals responsibly to fight against spam and fraud for years. Now, with new innovations like PETs to mitigate risks, we see an opportunity to set a high privacy bar on the use of data like IP. We can do this by applying privacy-preserving protections that help businesses reach their customers across these new platforms without the need to re-identify them. And because we’re looking to encourage responsible data use as the new standard across the web, we’ll also partner with the broader ads industry and help make PETs more accessible" I consider myself fairly smart and used to read between the lines of the usual corporate bullcrap but here it's so convulated. That got to be a new high. Take a look here https://support.google.com/marketingplatform/answer/15732590?hl=en https://support.google.com/marketingplatform/answer/15732590... Not sure even Gemini ai can unbullshitify that :)
- spwa4 2y agoI think this should be interpreted as "we have become so good at identifying users without the traditional tracking signals that we are confident if privacy-preserving protections kick the industry in the nuts, it would massively lower CPI/CPC for all actors ... except Google", and therefore be really helpful. So they will now do what they can to help anyone who claims "data like IP" needs strong privacy protections.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoThis is why googletagmanager.com and googleapis.com need to be kicked in the nuts.
- topranks 2y agoThe difference is now Google will pass on user-identifying information to the advertisers who use its services. Google always has this info. Now they are going to share it with their customers.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoNot surprised. A public company like Google doesn’t have to put profit first - but without competition there’s not much else to go for.
- zeroq 2y agoin a breaking discovery scientists report that water is wet
- hotsauceror 2y agoHacker News is shocked - Shocked! - to learn that gambling happens at this establishment.
- charles_f 2y agoBaby murderers murder babies. I'm still shocked by them. I still think it's worth expressing it. Commenter on HN is shocked by hacker news being shocked. This is becoming a trope.
- -__---____-ZXyw 2y agoIf even the BBC feels obliged to publish tepid headlines on the subject, then you know things are getting bad!
- ChuckMcM 2y agoWhen you're going out of business[1], profits get a higher priority than anything in the ESG category. Like a lot of companies that have been successful for a long time, that will take time. But in the 15 years of watching them lose more and more 'margin' on the search ads business and the commensurate changes they have made to their core product, it doesn't seem like they are going to re-invent themselves. [1] Yes I know, people tell me all the time, Google's not going out of business! And I've responded that based on my observations it is, not like that authoritative or anything. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179279 on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179176
- Havoc 2y agoIt’s literally an adtech company…
- markus_zhang 2y agoWhat a surprise!