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How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

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Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#51
post #46
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of a casual, non-European observer, the only effect of the GDPR that I've witnessed is the explosion of websites being extremely aggressive about forcing me to consent to their tracking cookies. Where is the real benefit to Europeans' privacy?

I've used it 10's of times to remove my contact info from various websites and now I get 0 unsolicited unwated calls on my phone.

Which websites have you requested deletion from?

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#52
post #39

One of my "wake up" moments was when I searched for the phone number of a local physical therapy office on Google. Within the day, I started getting Youtube video recommendations for massage techniques to relieve shoulder pain. Google and all of its employees who make products like this are on the absolute wrong side of history. Society will only take so much before breaking; they need to figure out their business mo…

> Google and all of its employees who make products like this are on the absolute wrong side of history. A few things: 1. It takes a fairly high throne to look down on people for their employers issues. 2. You assume a great deal about what people are willing to put up with for free services. I think you're probably going to be wrong. Most people will whore themselves out for convenience because they don't care if th…

WRT point 1 - Wait what? You can work for not-not-evil employers now and all the ethical blame is on the CEO?

> Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility - Bierce

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#53
post #51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it 10's of times to remove my contact info from various websites and now I get 0 unsolicited unwated calls on my phone.

Which websites have you requested deletion from?

Various Czech websites, that do name squatting. (They create a web page with your name so that people searching for you get to their website loaded with ads). Some czech and EU based websites collecting information on "enterpreneurs" like infobel.com.

Every single one responded positively, or at least semi-positively. It's good to remember that there's requirement to accept GDPR requests delivered in any form. So for example infobel had a non-working contact form, and no e-mail contact on the website. So I just sent an e-mail to info@infobel.com and they had to respond, even if it looks like from their website you have to use website conctact/removal request form. The same goes for Facebook messages, or twitter DMs if the company has these communication channels.

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#54
> Indeed, large sections of the site's privacy policy were updated overnight.

So basically you get caught, so you change the rules. Companies shouldn't be able to violate their own privacy policy, or say they can change it at any time without any warning, especially retroactively - which usually these things are covered in the privacy policy. What use is that?! Why bother having a policy at all?

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#55
post #39

One of my "wake up" moments was when I searched for the phone number of a local physical therapy office on Google. Within the day, I started getting Youtube video recommendations for massage techniques to relieve shoulder pain. Google and all of its employees who make products like this are on the absolute wrong side of history. Society will only take so much before breaking; they need to figure out their business mo…

I searched for a car model and my bank called me an hour later to talk about car loans!

That was my wake up moment.

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#56
post #48
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a fairly easy thing to test rigorously (in a statistically significant way). Just create a fake account and do a search and see what the effect is on other places on the web. Are there services that does this automatically, so we don't have to rely on anecdotal "I searched for X here and now I see recommendations for that on Y, and I think it was because of X, but maybe it's just coincidence"? A site…

That could turn into an arms race of the target companies trying to detect when it's a fake account versus a real one, and the analysis service trying to make the accounts seem more real. Of course, if it became public that the target companies were trying to dodge the analysis, that could be damaging to them. Then again, automated accounts would likely be against the TOS. The analysis service could work by watching…

An arms race like that would be a help for privacy, there is no way of filtering out enough bots without a relatively high false positive rate.

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#57
post #8

I had a related thing happen a couple of months ago: I started getting some lower back pain that I thought might be kidney stones based on a couple of Google searches. Went to my doctor, who prescribed a muscle relaxant, which I got at the pharmacy across the street. It went away. Over the next few weeks I got several robocalls on my cell phone from a pain clinic offering me relief for my "chronic pain", so it was ei…

Google is not the one selling your information, one of the websites you clicked probably is. They have pixels on their websites that will then match some fingerprint they generate on your browser with audiences (that contain info such as your email/phone number/etc) that already exist. If you want to challenge my assertion that Google is not selling your information please point me to where I can buy lists of emails…

That's true, but Google is one of the companies that pushed very hard to make the current situation socially acceptable

and continues to promote and push technology that allows for it to continue as it's in their interest

Google is a bad actor but yeah they are not the worst offender yet but I'm sure that will change in time right now they are just the enabler

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#58
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google and all of its employees who make products like this are on the absolute wrong side of history. A few things: 1. It takes a fairly high throne to look down on people for their employers issues. 2. You assume a great deal about what people are willing to put up with for free services. I think you're probably going to be wrong. Most people will whore themselves out for convenience because they don't care if th…

I view it as something governments will eventually step in to fix. It's very convenient to dump toxic waste into rivers. If it weren't for regulation companies would probably still do this. That doesn't make it ok, and it doesn't mean that behaviors like that will always be allowed.

You clearly didn’t read the article. It’s the government website that sent those searches to two advertising and data collecting systems.

Re: How my sexual health searches ended up in the hands of big tech companies

#59
post #39

One of my "wake up" moments was when I searched for the phone number of a local physical therapy office on Google. Within the day, I started getting Youtube video recommendations for massage techniques to relieve shoulder pain. Google and all of its employees who make products like this are on the absolute wrong side of history. Society will only take so much before breaking; they need to figure out their business mo…

I don't necessarily disagree with you.

However, you are stating that ads for massage techniques could "break society."

That just doesn't add up to me.

What is not being stated here? How does this connect? (These are not rhetorical questions!)

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