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Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

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Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#81

Post by ansible »

visarga wrote: post #78

This is what advanced capitalism looks like - companies that are successful use their money and lobbying power to block competition. It's sad for everyone, except them. Capitalism tends to undermine competition and turn into monopolies. But maybe now this will give a new reason to boost TOR-like anonymity tools. If millions of people participated in such networks, then they would be much faster. VPNs could suffer fro…

VPNs could suffer from the same problem as ISPs - how can we be sure they are not selling customer data?

The recent privacy rule changes for USA ISPs has me a bit worried. Enough so that I'm shopping around for a low cost, low power consumption, dual-NIC Linux box for making my own firewall.

For the VPN, there are a lot of providers, and switching among them is much easier than switching ISPs. I could also rent a small instance to run my own.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#82

Post by ksk »

thrill wrote: post #51
ksk wrote: post #46

Google's business was to stick itself between you and link you wanted to get to. Verizon is sticking itself between you and Google. I wonder whats next?

The OS is between me and the ISP - no OS provider would ever collect a bunch of data about me, would they?

I think Microsoft has that covered :)

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#83

Post by x0x0 »

rayiner wrote: post #77
nikcub wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPN's aren't easy - and they're definitely not a default behavior in the same way not accepting third-party cookies is. But part of the solution if the regulations stay the way they are may well be that VPNs are made easier by being built into operating systems and provided by for ex. Apple as part of iCloud > You can't easily avoid emailing people with gmail accounts, or communicating with people on Android phones.…

> I'm genuinely curious if you have a cite on Google using received emails in ad targeting. The point is, just as with ISPs, whether you can "opt out" of Google depends entirely on what Google chooses to do or not do (in the future, if not now). Even if you don't use Google services, its almost impossible to not send information to those who do. When I first saw ads on Google fifteen years ago I never expected that i…

I worked for a company that was sued for something similar, and as far as I could tell, you're right. You can do nearly any tracking you like, you just have to be honest about it in your privacy policy.

If your privacy policy says "we're gonna look down your pants if we can figure out how", I think you're pretty much free to do so.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#84

Post by x0x0 »

nostrademons wrote: post #57
jacques_chester wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't that local authority be delegated by statute from state governments? Google Fiber was a fluffy bunny sort of thing. Verizon trying to drain the river of gold before it reaches Google is existential-threat stuff. In their position I would go to the mattresses.

Yeah, AFAIU the local authority is delegated by state governments. Voters could fix this if they got organized and cared about it enough, but it's pretty hard to get voters organized about anything these days, and of all the political issues out there, "gigabit fiber" tends to rank below "save democracy", "get cops to stop killing black people", "preserve women's healthcare", "stop global warming", "don't go to war",…

There's national laws under consideration to force cities to lay fiber any time they dig up a road. That's imo the most promising, yet very slow, way forward. Coincidentally, Congresswoman Eshoo is one of the sponsors of the bill.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#85

Post by x0x0 »

yeukhon wrote: post #31
zeta0134 wrote: post #2

So, if I recall correctly, that "tracking supercookie" they're mentining in that account has to be injected in the headers of any request / response, right? Doesn't this mean it's easily defeated by HTTPS? Or am I misunderstanding how that works?

Correct, only encrypted traffic. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh . Verizon was fined ~1.35M by FCC on this violation. But one can still infer actual page a user is visiting by means of looking at some leakage of data. See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4388/are-urls-v... . It isn't easy but I am sure some people have done it. One thing ISP has been doing for years is with DNS. I…

They also will use your dns data.

There's existing companies that already do this.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#86

Post by mirimir »

visarga wrote: post #78

This is what advanced capitalism looks like - companies that are successful use their money and lobbying power to block competition. It's sad for everyone, except them. Capitalism tends to undermine competition and turn into monopolies. But maybe now this will give a new reason to boost TOR-like anonymity tools. If millions of people participated in such networks, then they would be much faster. VPNs could suffer fro…

> VPNs could suffer from the same problem as ISPs - how can we be sure they are not selling customer data?

Mainly because many rabid privacy freaks use VPNs, and spreading news about VPNs that pwn users is a blood sport.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#87

Post by mirimir »

nikcub wrote: post #75
rayiner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily block ISP tracking with VPN. You can't easily avoid emailing people with gmail accounts, or communicating with people on Android phones. And Google and others can also track you without cookies using e.g. browser fingerprinting techniques. http://www.venturebeat.com/2014/10/06/the-cookie-is-dead-her... .

VPN's aren't easy - and they're definitely not a default behavior in the same way not accepting third-party cookies is. But part of the solution if the regulations stay the way they are may well be that VPNs are made easier by being built into operating systems and provided by for ex. Apple as part of iCloud > You can't easily avoid emailing people with gmail accounts, or communicating with people on Android phones.…

> VPN's aren't easy - and they're definitely not a default behavior in the same way not accepting third-party cookies is.

If you can buy something from Amazon, you can lease a VPN service. If you can download and install some silly game, you can download and install a VPN client. Which just works. So yes, it's easy.

To opt out of third-party cookies, you actually need to tweak browser preferences. How is that easier than pay, download and install?

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#88

Post by raverbashing »

debt wrote: post #59

i don't see anything wrong with this. if it's shitty adtech then they're basically offering a base competitor to a market dominated by two players: facebook, google. apple does it all the time. shit, walgreens does it when you buy the waldrug instead of whatever else.

> walgreens does it when you buy the waldrug instead of whatever else.

How? I never noticed this. Is the ad printed on the receipt or something like that?

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#89

Post by awongh »

rayiner wrote: post #76
nostrademons wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, perhaps I should retract the implication that the officials involved are corrupt. There doesn't have to be outright corruption for regulations to be an effective barrier to new entrants, and to prevent consumers from getting new services they want. All it requires is a cost of compliance that is greater than the delta in perceived consumer welfare, or even just a failure to pass the benefits to consumers of reg…

Those poles, conduits, and other rights of way are regulated by the FCC (or a state agency under delegated powers). See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/224 . Nothing is preventing another company from running fiber along those telephone poles, other than the fact that there isn't any money in it.

Is that really true in practice? I've been reading lots of stories like these: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-... that talk about how hard it is for any new player to get access to these last mile infrastructure bits. Even if the rules of renting pole space are "fair" maybe we should be encouraging competition in this space by changing them.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#90

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

thrill wrote: post #51
ksk wrote: post #46

Google's business was to stick itself between you and link you wanted to get to. Verizon is sticking itself between you and Google. I wonder whats next?

The OS is between me and the ISP - no OS provider would ever collect a bunch of data about me, would they?

Sarcasm's always hard to detect in text, but in case not intended: Chrome OS, Android with Google Play Services.
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