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Serious question: Do you include those working at Google and Facebook under this group? Or equivalently ad-driven services? Those two companies (and their sibli

Serious question: Do you include those working at Google and Facebook under this group? Or equivalently ad-driven services? Those two companies (and their siblings) are certainly the most fruitful of trees for surveillance organizations (government or otherwise) to pluck information from. Further, they're not collecting this data for any purpose – vague, questionable, and slippery though it may be – of doing "good" or "protecting our country." They're doing it, solely and without an attempt at justification, for ad revenues. And they're taking tens of thousands (if not hundreds?) of some of the brightest minds in tech away from things like drug discovery, climate change, energy research, etc. Not trying to start a flame war, nor am I drawing equivalencies between Facebook and the NSA. I'm actually just legitimately curious how you think we can segment this spectrum.

nemothekid 12y ago
>And they're taking tens of thousands (if not hundreds?) of some of the brightest minds in tech away from things like drug discovery, climate change, energy research, etc. Taking them away from those things? I doubt it - the top talent will always be sold to the highest bidder and its unlikely "climate change research" is a segment that can support thousands of of mid-high six figure salaries. Next while these companies do collect a large amount of personal data - their purpose is clear and as is their boundaries. There is a strong effort to keep adopt data secure - if a user was found using private facebook data to stalk loved ones[1] I don't doubt thats activity that would (1) noticed by their systems they have in place to prevent data from ending up in the wrong place and (2) they would be fired for. Lastly with Google and Facebook you have a choice - its still in your control - if you want to use these services or not and it doesn't require a secret court to challenge them. [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg_report_nsa_employees_have_deliberately_abused_their_power.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg...
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Facebook's trying to take that choice away by getting ISPs in some countries to give free Facebook access. I see billboards in Guatemala hyping up that if you're out of credit on your account, they will still allow you to use Facebook and WhatsApp. So for many low-income people, where having to pay $10 or so for some light data plan isn't possible, their only choice to be online is Facebook. Sure, it's a choice. Just like using the Internet is a choice. Like using phones is a choice. Like choosing automobiles over walking is a choice. But not all choices are equal.
  - nemothekid 12y ago
    >So for many low-income people, where having to pay $10 or so for some light data plan isn't possible, their only choice to be online is Facebook. So what do you expect to see here? Are you expecting Facebook subsidize the cost of getting the users online to any destination, or do you wish to remove the choice to use facebook for anyone who couldn't pay $10? This is more like "Like choosing taking the bus to city centre over walking directly to my office 300ft outside the city centre is a choice." Bus or no, at the end of the day I still can't afford a full fledged automobile. Even if they paid me to use Facebook, that wouldn't affect my decision on whether or not I want them to have access to information. If the US government decides to subsidize community college and make it free, they aren't taking away my choice to go to a private school.
Sven7 12y ago
National Security VS Being part of a business (that may or may not be making any serious contribution to the common good) Both segments violate privacy. And in both cases there are ways to correct this from within.
- baddox 12y ago
  I'm aware of very few business that routinely violate privacy to anywhere remotely near the extent that the US government violates privacy.
o_____________o 12y ago
There's an entire generation that believes our government has completely lost representation of its own people, and will use any nefarious means in its power to subvert any rule it wishes to. The ostensible goal of security is questionable in both effectiveness and actual intention. In a sense, some branches of the government are viewed as a geopolitical corporation with an oligarchy in place of a CEO. Google and Facebook, as contentious as some of us feel about them, produce products people like, and are voted into power by our direct and continued usage. You can't opt out of the NSA. In the end, you're comparing an organization with a world-destroying military that regularly murders and imprisons people at all ends of the earth, to another that displays diaper ads that follow you around the internet. Not quite the same.
- zzzeek 12y ago
  > There's an entire generation that believes our government has completely lost representation of its own people, and will use any nefarious means in its power to subvert any rule it wishes to. A subculture, yes. An "entire generation", absolutely not, this is hyperbole. You can't "opt out" of the NSA, but certainly if you wanted to, the very first step is to get as far away from Facebook as possible. Yet there is no large gap in ages amongst those gleefully participating in Facebook all day which would indicate "an entire generation" seeking to avoid government surveillance.
  - fandu 12y ago
    > A subculture, yes. An "entire generation", absolutely not If you're not just being pedantic: http://www.businessinsider.com/poll-millenials-have-historically-low-levels-of-trust-in-government-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/poll-millenials-have-historic...
    - zzzeek 12y ago
      is there a link to the poll? did they poll other demographics as well?
      - 12y ago
TheBeardKing 12y ago
I think transparency and the ability to opt-in is key. With facebook, I realize I'm using a free service supported by ads and trust they abide by their end of the user agreement to use my information only in the ways they say they will. When they abuse that trust, I may choose to opt out of their service. I don't give them any information I wish to be kept secret. The NSA is not transparent and I cannot opt out of being monitored. Therefore, I do no romanticize about the free service facebook provides, but cannot agree with how the NSA conducts itself.
- dismal2 12y ago
  you can't really opt out of facebook, if you interact with ever a few people who are on it, you're as good as on it.
ditonal 12y ago
Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you act ethically (which is admittedly a question mark sometimes for any big corporation) respecting the market can often do the most social good. People who were doing silly work making video games pushed the boundaries of parallel processing, created the GPU industry, and now that is relied on for serious scientific research. People making social networks so college freshman could date made tools to help those fighting authoritarian governments connect and created infrastructure technology to work on big data problems the governments might face on social issues. Who did more to help the Asian Tigers raise from poverty to economic superpowers? Peace Corps people distorting local economies with their help, or people investing in local infrastructure because it was good value for them to make money?? What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need? Finally, a lot of really smart people end up going in to law or finance because that's where the money is. Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive. I really doubt that this idea that engineers should be this monastic underclass is so great for society. I constantly hear programmer say their salary is "inflated", to which I respond "if you feel overpaid, give your money to a good charity, don't roll over for the uber rich tech-exec/VC in charge." If you want to make a positive impact on the world, respecting market efficiency is underrated.
- ethanbond 12y ago
  I'm pretty skeptical of the invisible hand myself, but overall this seems to be a pretty good response (at least for the second caveat). I don't think they're doing as much good as they could be, but I agree that maybe it is good enough, even if only by collateral benefit.
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  > Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you act ethically (which is admittedly a question mark sometimes for any big corporation) respecting the market can often do the most social good. The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up. > What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need? That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary. > Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive. No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.
baddox 12y ago
> Serious question: Do you include those working at Google and Facebook under this group? Or equivalently ad-driven services? Those two companies (and their siblings) are certainly the most fruitful of trees for surveillance organizations (government or otherwise) to pluck information from. That's like saying that you oppose a sales tax, and you consider a retail store equivalent to the tax collectors because the retail store provides a fruitful tree for the collection of sales tax.
nostrademons 12y ago
Ex-Googler here, worked with a lot of user data, including a project to collect more of it. Within Google, data's collected primarily to build better products. Or at least that's what the majority of the rank & file believe, and personally I believe the executives believe it too. This has the effect of widening the moat between them and competitors, but it also has real, tangible convenience benefits for users. I can guarantee that the majority of folks are thinking of those benefits, not the additional ad revenue, when building new products. I worked in Search for 5 years and was explicitly told by executives to ignore Ads when making decisions; they have plenty of their own engineers whose job is to optimize revenue. This may seem hard to believe for someone who's never worked at a place that improved a product based on data, but it's a really fundamental part of the culture. You see the headlines about the NSA or Google's threat to privacy; you rarely see any news story about the A/B test they're running or the new feature in Android/Gmail/Chrome/Search that you get to use because usage logs showed that it took you too long to accomplish your task and some engineer decided to fix it.
- pdkl95 12y ago
  > data's collected primarily to build better products That's may be true today, but one of features that distinguishes modern forms of surveillance from what was possible in the past is that truly massive amounts of data can now be stored "forever"[1]. Google itself may change what it wants to do with its data in the future. Worse, the fact that data was captured at all means it will be available for a subpoena or "national security letter" and Google will have little say in what happens to the data. [1] the value of "forever" generally varies by the size of the available budget, which is "large enough" in the case of nation-states and companies the size of Google (or Apple)
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    So I'm not here to say whether or not people's fears are justified. I don't know; I can't predict the future either. There have certainly been ample cases where a belief that was true of Google management once was not true the next year. The original question posed, though, was "Why do people at Google/Facebook/NSA continue to collect all this data? What's their purpose?", which I think I answered. While it may not be true in 10 years, it's true now. Also, I think that the sheer pace of change today may insulate a lot of people from the consequences of having data available on them. The data may be out there - but by the time it gets into the wrong hands, it no longer reflects reality, which makes it largely useless. That guy who talks about having his dick sucked by sororisluts [1] may, in a couple years, be the guy with 200 million users whose company you desperately want to invest in. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-spiegel-is-kind-of-an-ass/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-sp...
pgodzin 12y ago
Not everyone working at those companies is working on something specifically related to ad revenue, the vast majority are working on creating better consumer products that improve millions of peoples' lives. That's what draws people to those companies and those are very valid and altruistic reasons.
eevilspock 12y ago
I'm so glad you bring up "ad-driven services". We've all been duped into believing that ads give us stuff for free. The truth is there is no free lunch: - The cost of ads are far greater than the loss of privacy: the opportunity cost of using products optimized for ad revenue rather than user revenue, the cost of collateral damage, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes, and perhaps the greatest cost of all, the social cost of all the manipulation and deceit inherent in advertising. - Even the "free" part is a lie. Advertisers pass the full costs back to us via the things we buy. So we are still paying, and we're paying the overhead of indirectness on top. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237.

nemothekid 12y ago

>And they're taking tens of thousands (if not hundreds?) of some of the brightest minds in tech away from things like drug discovery, climate change, energy research, etc. Taking them away from those things? I doubt it - the top talent will always be sold to the highest bidder and its unlikely "climate change research" is a segment that can support thousands of of mid-high six figure salaries. Next while these companies do collect a large amount of personal data - their purpose is clear and as is their boundaries. There is a strong effort to keep adopt data secure - if a user was found using private facebook data to stalk loved ones[1] I don't doubt thats activity that would (1) noticed by their systems they have in place to prevent data from ending up in the wrong place and (2) they would be fired for. Lastly with Google and Facebook you have a choice - its still in your control - if you want to use these services or not and it doesn't require a secret court to challenge them. [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg_report_nsa_employees_have_deliberately_abused_their_power.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg...

MichaelGG 12y ago
Facebook's trying to take that choice away by getting ISPs in some countries to give free Facebook access. I see billboards in Guatemala hyping up that if you're out of credit on your account, they will still allow you to use Facebook and WhatsApp. So for many low-income people, where having to pay $10 or so for some light data plan isn't possible, their only choice to be online is Facebook. Sure, it's a choice. Just like using the Internet is a choice. Like using phones is a choice. Like choosing automobiles over walking is a choice. But not all choices are equal.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  >So for many low-income people, where having to pay $10 or so for some light data plan isn't possible, their only choice to be online is Facebook. So what do you expect to see here? Are you expecting Facebook subsidize the cost of getting the users online to any destination, or do you wish to remove the choice to use facebook for anyone who couldn't pay $10? This is more like "Like choosing taking the bus to city centre over walking directly to my office 300ft outside the city centre is a choice." Bus or no, at the end of the day I still can't afford a full fledged automobile. Even if they paid me to use Facebook, that wouldn't affect my decision on whether or not I want them to have access to information. If the US government decides to subsidize community college and make it free, they aren't taking away my choice to go to a private school.

Sven7 12y ago

National Security VS Being part of a business (that may or may not be making any serious contribution to the common good) Both segments violate privacy. And in both cases there are ways to correct this from within.

baddox 12y ago
I'm aware of very few business that routinely violate privacy to anywhere remotely near the extent that the US government violates privacy.

o_____________o 12y ago

There's an entire generation that believes our government has completely lost representation of its own people, and will use any nefarious means in its power to subvert any rule it wishes to. The ostensible goal of security is questionable in both effectiveness and actual intention. In a sense, some branches of the government are viewed as a geopolitical corporation with an oligarchy in place of a CEO. Google and Facebook, as contentious as some of us feel about them, produce products people like, and are voted into power by our direct and continued usage. You can't opt out of the NSA. In the end, you're comparing an organization with a world-destroying military that regularly murders and imprisons people at all ends of the earth, to another that displays diaper ads that follow you around the internet. Not quite the same.

zzzeek 12y ago
> There's an entire generation that believes our government has completely lost representation of its own people, and will use any nefarious means in its power to subvert any rule it wishes to. A subculture, yes. An "entire generation", absolutely not, this is hyperbole. You can't "opt out" of the NSA, but certainly if you wanted to, the very first step is to get as far away from Facebook as possible. Yet there is no large gap in ages amongst those gleefully participating in Facebook all day which would indicate "an entire generation" seeking to avoid government surveillance.
- fandu 12y ago
  > A subculture, yes. An "entire generation", absolutely not If you're not just being pedantic: http://www.businessinsider.com/poll-millenials-have-historically-low-levels-of-trust-in-government-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/poll-millenials-have-historic...
  - zzzeek 12y ago
    is there a link to the poll? did they poll other demographics as well?
    - 12y ago

TheBeardKing 12y ago

I think transparency and the ability to opt-in is key. With facebook, I realize I'm using a free service supported by ads and trust they abide by their end of the user agreement to use my information only in the ways they say they will. When they abuse that trust, I may choose to opt out of their service. I don't give them any information I wish to be kept secret. The NSA is not transparent and I cannot opt out of being monitored. Therefore, I do no romanticize about the free service facebook provides, but cannot agree with how the NSA conducts itself.

dismal2 12y ago
you can't really opt out of facebook, if you interact with ever a few people who are on it, you're as good as on it.

ditonal 12y ago

Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you act ethically (which is admittedly a question mark sometimes for any big corporation) respecting the market can often do the most social good. People who were doing silly work making video games pushed the boundaries of parallel processing, created the GPU industry, and now that is relied on for serious scientific research. People making social networks so college freshman could date made tools to help those fighting authoritarian governments connect and created infrastructure technology to work on big data problems the governments might face on social issues. Who did more to help the Asian Tigers raise from poverty to economic superpowers? Peace Corps people distorting local economies with their help, or people investing in local infrastructure because it was good value for them to make money?? What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need? Finally, a lot of really smart people end up going in to law or finance because that's where the money is. Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive. I really doubt that this idea that engineers should be this monastic underclass is so great for society. I constantly hear programmer say their salary is "inflated", to which I respond "if you feel overpaid, give your money to a good charity, don't roll over for the uber rich tech-exec/VC in charge." If you want to make a positive impact on the world, respecting market efficiency is underrated.

ethanbond 12y ago
I'm pretty skeptical of the invisible hand myself, but overall this seems to be a pretty good response (at least for the second caveat). I don't think they're doing as much good as they could be, but I agree that maybe it is good enough, even if only by collateral benefit.
joepie91_ 12y ago
> Personally, I think the idea that Google/Facebook are hurting people by paying talented engineers a lot to work on ads is just not true. I think that if you act ethically (which is admittedly a question mark sometimes for any big corporation) respecting the market can often do the most social good. The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up. > What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need? That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary. > Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive. No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.

baddox 12y ago

> Serious question: Do you include those working at Google and Facebook under this group? Or equivalently ad-driven services? Those two companies (and their siblings) are certainly the most fruitful of trees for surveillance organizations (government or otherwise) to pluck information from. That's like saying that you oppose a sales tax, and you consider a retail store equivalent to the tax collectors because the retail store provides a fruitful tree for the collection of sales tax.

nostrademons 12y ago

Ex-Googler here, worked with a lot of user data, including a project to collect more of it. Within Google, data's collected primarily to build better products. Or at least that's what the majority of the rank & file believe, and personally I believe the executives believe it too. This has the effect of widening the moat between them and competitors, but it also has real, tangible convenience benefits for users. I can guarantee that the majority of folks are thinking of those benefits, not the additional ad revenue, when building new products. I worked in Search for 5 years and was explicitly told by executives to ignore Ads when making decisions; they have plenty of their own engineers whose job is to optimize revenue. This may seem hard to believe for someone who's never worked at a place that improved a product based on data, but it's a really fundamental part of the culture. You see the headlines about the NSA or Google's threat to privacy; you rarely see any news story about the A/B test they're running or the new feature in Android/Gmail/Chrome/Search that you get to use because usage logs showed that it took you too long to accomplish your task and some engineer decided to fix it.

pdkl95 12y ago
> data's collected primarily to build better products That's may be true today, but one of features that distinguishes modern forms of surveillance from what was possible in the past is that truly massive amounts of data can now be stored "forever"[1]. Google itself may change what it wants to do with its data in the future. Worse, the fact that data was captured at all means it will be available for a subpoena or "national security letter" and Google will have little say in what happens to the data. [1] the value of "forever" generally varies by the size of the available budget, which is "large enough" in the case of nation-states and companies the size of Google (or Apple)
- nostrademons 12y ago
  So I'm not here to say whether or not people's fears are justified. I don't know; I can't predict the future either. There have certainly been ample cases where a belief that was true of Google management once was not true the next year. The original question posed, though, was "Why do people at Google/Facebook/NSA continue to collect all this data? What's their purpose?", which I think I answered. While it may not be true in 10 years, it's true now. Also, I think that the sheer pace of change today may insulate a lot of people from the consequences of having data available on them. The data may be out there - but by the time it gets into the wrong hands, it no longer reflects reality, which makes it largely useless. That guy who talks about having his dick sucked by sororisluts [1] may, in a couple years, be the guy with 200 million users whose company you desperately want to invest in. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-spiegel-is-kind-of-an-ass/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-sp...

pgodzin 12y ago

Not everyone working at those companies is working on something specifically related to ad revenue, the vast majority are working on creating better consumer products that improve millions of peoples' lives. That's what draws people to those companies and those are very valid and altruistic reasons.

eevilspock 12y ago

I'm so glad you bring up "ad-driven services". We've all been duped into believing that ads give us stuff for free. The truth is there is no free lunch: - The cost of ads are far greater than the loss of privacy: the opportunity cost of using products optimized for ad revenue rather than user revenue, the cost of collateral damage, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes, and perhaps the greatest cost of all, the social cost of all the manipulation and deceit inherent in advertising. - Even the "free" part is a lie. Advertisers pass the full costs back to us via the things we buy. So we are still paying, and we're paying the overhead of indirectness on top. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237.