4 ms·

I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that

by damon_c 11y ago

I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?

kbenson 11y ago
No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.
- MCRed 11y ago
  I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords. That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me. Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is. I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?
  - kbenson 11y ago
    That doesn't seem all that different than advertising in the yellow pages to me. You have to ask the customer how they heard about you, but if they mention the yellow pages, you're pretty sure you know what they were looking for, because you picked the section(s) you advertised in. To my knowledge, Google doesn't tell you where the keyword was found, or even if it was an exact keyword match or something they deemed similar enough to show (but I'm by no means an expert in Adwords). At some point you just have to accept that when you call a plumber, the plumber going to have a pretty good base to assume you need a plumber, and this is releasing some information to them. Without that, communication would be impossible.
  - fpgeek 11y ago
    > I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords. No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).
dragonwriter 11y ago
No, if they sell your data, the recipient can user it for many purposes, including redistributing. If they use your days to target adds, the external customer can't do anything else with it. They aren't very similar.
mkozlows 11y ago
No, it's very different. If I'm concerned about my privacy, I'm concerned about who knows stuff about me. Google knows a bunch of stuff about their customers inherently (because their customers have all their email on Google servers, do Google searches, etc.), so Google customers have already decided they trust Google with that information. If Google were selling it, they'd be passing it along to other organizations that users haven't explicitly trusted. That'd be bad. But they don't do that -- they use their information to show you things based on what they know, with targeted ads; that might bother you from an aesthetic/anti-capitalist perspective, but isn't an extra concern from a privacy perspective. (Interesting fun fact: You know who does actively sell your information? Your bank, for just about any big bank.)
- jacobolus 11y ago
  (1) Google also puts ads and other little tracking widgets (google analytics, G+ social buttons, etc.) all over the web, gathering massive amounts of information about people’s browsing habits unrelated to any direct customer relationship or informed consent. (2) Use of Google search does not at all imply that a customer wants all of their searches to be associated with their identity, processed, stored indefinitely, used to build a comprehensive dossier to better target advertising on unrelated pages, or handed over to nation-state spooks who come asking. It’s not at all clear that most customers understand what information they’re handing over or what can be done with it when they use services like search. [Yes, plenty of other ad networks, analytics companies, social media services, etc. do the same thing, and plenty of other types of companies (e.g. the banks you mention) and government agencies also build permanent profiles of people based on whatever scraps of data they can; this is not only a Google problem. It’s creepy when anyone does it, which is why there should be better regulatory oversight ensuring that customers know what data is collected and how it is used, restricting certain types of data aggregation and customer profiling, and placing limits on how long various types of data can be kept.]
  - mkozlows 11y ago
    Re 1 - I agree that is by a mile the most problematic part of Google's business. It's not a problem that Google knows what's in the emails I store on their servers -- of course they do, I put them there -- but it is problematic if they know I go to www.controversialsite.com when they should have no reason to. But the implication there is that Google's most privacy-invasive product, by a mile, is Google Analytics, which doesn't really help Cook's case in any meaningful way, because that has nothing to do with the Google services that compete with Apple.
afarrell 11y ago
I actually really wish there was a way for me to more directly tell google what targeted advertising to send me.
- noondip 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads

by damon_c 11y ago

kbenson 11y ago

No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.

MCRed 11y ago
I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords. That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me. Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is. I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?
- kbenson 11y ago
  That doesn't seem all that different than advertising in the yellow pages to me. You have to ask the customer how they heard about you, but if they mention the yellow pages, you're pretty sure you know what they were looking for, because you picked the section(s) you advertised in. To my knowledge, Google doesn't tell you where the keyword was found, or even if it was an exact keyword match or something they deemed similar enough to show (but I'm by no means an expert in Adwords). At some point you just have to accept that when you call a plumber, the plumber going to have a pretty good base to assume you need a plumber, and this is releasing some information to them. Without that, communication would be impossible.
- fpgeek 11y ago
  > I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords. No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).

dragonwriter 11y ago

No, if they sell your data, the recipient can user it for many purposes, including redistributing. If they use your days to target adds, the external customer can't do anything else with it. They aren't very similar.

mkozlows 11y ago

No, it's very different. If I'm concerned about my privacy, I'm concerned about who knows stuff about me. Google knows a bunch of stuff about their customers inherently (because their customers have all their email on Google servers, do Google searches, etc.), so Google customers have already decided they trust Google with that information. If Google were selling it, they'd be passing it along to other organizations that users haven't explicitly trusted. That'd be bad. But they don't do that -- they use their information to show you things based on what they know, with targeted ads; that might bother you from an aesthetic/anti-capitalist perspective, but isn't an extra concern from a privacy perspective. (Interesting fun fact: You know who does actively sell your information? Your bank, for just about any big bank.)

jacobolus 11y ago
(1) Google also puts ads and other little tracking widgets (google analytics, G+ social buttons, etc.) all over the web, gathering massive amounts of information about people’s browsing habits unrelated to any direct customer relationship or informed consent. (2) Use of Google search does not at all imply that a customer wants all of their searches to be associated with their identity, processed, stored indefinitely, used to build a comprehensive dossier to better target advertising on unrelated pages, or handed over to nation-state spooks who come asking. It’s not at all clear that most customers understand what information they’re handing over or what can be done with it when they use services like search. [Yes, plenty of other ad networks, analytics companies, social media services, etc. do the same thing, and plenty of other types of companies (e.g. the banks you mention) and government agencies also build permanent profiles of people based on whatever scraps of data they can; this is not only a Google problem. It’s creepy when anyone does it, which is why there should be better regulatory oversight ensuring that customers know what data is collected and how it is used, restricting certain types of data aggregation and customer profiling, and placing limits on how long various types of data can be kept.]
- mkozlows 11y ago
  Re 1 - I agree that is by a mile the most problematic part of Google's business. It's not a problem that Google knows what's in the emails I store on their servers -- of course they do, I put them there -- but it is problematic if they know I go to www.controversialsite.com when they should have no reason to. But the implication there is that Google's most privacy-invasive product, by a mile, is Google Analytics, which doesn't really help Cook's case in any meaningful way, because that has nothing to do with the Google services that compete with Apple.

afarrell 11y ago

I actually really wish there was a way for me to more directly tell google what targeted advertising to send me.

noondip 11y ago
https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads