Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 296 posts

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#281

Post by XJOKOLAT »

manigandham wrote: post #264
XJOKOLAT wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't be evil" ... ? It's not about developers being perfectly pure and moral, it's about an organisation holding themselves up to a standard that they have set themselves. And a standard which I expect them to meet and exceed.

What exactly is that standard? Google is a massive company that provides immense value to billions, and they do much of this for free (monetarily to you as the end user) while providing advertisers a great platform that allows for efficient matching of products to consumers. That is a fine standard for a company in my opinion.

Being cautious and careful with my information is an extremely basic standard considering the position they are in.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#283

Post by krotton »

temp_0xcafebabe wrote: post #227
dredmorbius wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but: 1. Older results. DDG's recent ( 2. Books and journals. Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Ngram Viewer are phenomenally useful tools, no doubt about it. There's no single resource which can substitute for them. Worldcat (library search) is good, if you've got access to various search databases (usually via an academic library) that's useful, and content access itself is possible (with questionable…

I'll certainly agree with #3 in general being less well answered by DDG. It seems to me to be mostly with compound terms and having to manually use +'s and "'s to enforce terms. Given there's no tracking (feels a bit odd saying that nowadays with any kind of seriousness), do they monitor which queries people use !g for, and try to optimize their engine for these? One feature I do like though (I'm not sure if Google e…

Google does, but DDG has done it earlier as far as I remember.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#284

Post by blowski »

RodericDay wrote: post #216
blowski wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work for me. I can do `!syear` or `!gyear` to filter on Google or Start Page, but not with DDG results.

if you type !year girugamesh vs. girugamesh you definitely get two different sets of results, one general, and one discussing the term in retrospective (with urls denoting /2016/ for example). I think they don't highlight it well, but the filtering is definitely going on.

For me at least, searching on an iPhone in the UK, I get the standard results query URL. The results are the same as when I search for "year girugamesh" (i.e. without the bang).

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#285

Post by jrnichols »

omouse wrote: post #37

The marketers and advertisers have finally won. Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe, but this confirms it. It's like Facebook, they're beholden to the non-developers and non-software engineers who frankly don't care about other people's privacy and only see the dollar bills. So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.

it's working quite well, along with the ad nauseam propaganda saying that "ad blockers = stealing content." That if you use anything to block ads, you're "entitled" and "you don't deserve to see that content."

Yet Google still finds itself held in such high regard that criticism of their advertising tactics are dismissed as trolling in many cases. And here we are.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#286

Post by jrnichols »

FUCK__GOOGLE wrote: post #44
omouse wrote: post #37

The marketers and advertisers have finally won. Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe, but this confirms it. It's like Facebook, they're beholden to the non-developers and non-software engineers who frankly don't care about other people's privacy and only see the dollar bills. So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.

I'm moving off gmail today, gonna just register my own domain and set up a server somewhere. I think that and hangouts are the last ways they got me, looking forward to deleting my account. It's so strange to be old enough to see the same mistakes of the AOL days repeated again at a much larger scale. I don't want your garden, I want my privacy, thanks.

"gonna just register my own domain and set up a server somewhere"

..... only to find that you have problems delivering email to Gmail users, who are everywhere. :/

I experienced this same problem when moving to a new hosting provider and IP set. couldn't sent mail to Google properties/hosted accounts until my IP's email reputation score was high enough to be approved by whatever lurks in Google.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#287

Post by candiodari »

the_watcher wrote: post #209
calbear81 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has never been an engineering company, it's a search company with an engineering-focused culture and an ad-driven monetization model. Please don't paint broad unsubstantiated strokes over all "non-developers and non-software engineers". You mention Facebook as an example that's not engineering focused but fail to mention that their equity structure is such that Mark Zuckerberg has control effectively through t…

Search is one of the most technically complex engineering problems out there. A search company is by definition an engineering company.

Having worked for a company designing nuclear power plants, that was very much a financial company where even the tiny sales department had far more power than the very large engineering department ... I would disagree that complexity of a problem makes companies engineering companies.

The engineers at sister companies who were working at the time on an offshore gas terminal were in the same position. Those companies are very much not engineering driven.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#288

Post by gjolund »

milcron wrote: post #248
gjolund wrote: post #240

What are the best alternative email services with a privacy focus?

Maybe not the answer you were looking for, but self-hosting email can be a fun challenge. Lavabit had a privacy focus and look what happened to them.

That is what I was thinking.

Right now I am debating an on premise email server or something on aws.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#289

Post by rtpg »

omouse wrote: post #37

The marketers and advertisers have finally won. Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe, but this confirms it. It's like Facebook, they're beholden to the non-developers and non-software engineers who frankly don't care about other people's privacy and only see the dollar bills. So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.

do you think marketers are the ones building the ad platforms? A bunch of developers knowingly go work for Google to work on this sort of stuff.

"But they offer sooooo much money" is not a moral argument.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#290

Post by piyush_soni »

nialv7 wrote: post #266
omouse wrote: post #37

The marketers and advertisers have finally won. Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe, but this confirms it. It's like Facebook, they're beholden to the non-developers and non-software engineers who frankly don't care about other people's privacy and only see the dollar bills. So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.

Off topic question: If I was to find a job right now, what's the best "engineering company" I can work for?

Google. Ads or not, it's the best 'engineering' company to work for.
Post reply on HN