New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking • Hacker News Board

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#171

Post by beezischillin » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #150

beezischillin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same goes for trying to turn on Voice Match (and the voice activated OK, Google), a feature that's supposed to take a snapshot of your voice and activate the assistant, like "Hey, Siri!". They will force you to activate: 1. web/activity history, 2. saving all your voice requests to the Google and they push you to activate Location History. While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely lo…

>While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task But voice rec is not local. The reason it asks to store your voice is because they need to send it to their backend for recognition.

They don't need to explicitly save and store a history of every voice command to do voice recognition.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#172

Post by DennisAleynikov » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #129

_ptgt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is IBM included in metaphorical Silicon Valley? What about Expedia? Or Concur? Seems very arbitrary. Is metaphorical Silicon Valley only applicable to negative actions of tech companies or does it apply to all big tech companies? I searched for “metaphorical Silicon Valley” and didn’t see anything relevant. Right, and while we're at it Goldman Sachs shouldn't be considered part of Wall Street. They're headquartered…

Goldman Sachs is obviously a “Wall Street” company because they are based in NYC and participate in the financial industry. Amazon, Microsoft, Concur and Expedia are all headquartered in Washington State which is nowhere near Silicon Valley. Similarly IBM is headquartered in New York. My question is what makes a company outside SV a “SV Company”. This usage of the term is new to me so I am attempting to get a more co…

just being a tech company.

thats it.

NYC had Silicon Alley. Utah has Silicon Slopes, London, Seattle etc all harbor "SV-style" companies which mostly are internet services with clients.

Its not a confusing or uncommon term especially because theres a lions share of these cheaply made internet services being created left and right in silicon valley and beyond.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#173

Post by ntaylor » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #45

This dark pattern seems to be spreading. Amazon recently pushed out an update to their (beta last I knew) web app that allows you to use their smile.amazon.com charity donation through the app. But in order to turn that on, you have to turn on all the notifications the app has, including their rather constant pushes of "deals I may be interested in". They're holding you hostage to their notifications because "it's fo…

Somewhat more sinister, I think, is that they added a TTL on the Amazon Smile opt-in. Now, you must re-opt-in every 90 (I think) days.

Fair bet that this small change substantially hurts the effectiveness of this charity and drives a whole bunch of money back to Amazon.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#174

Post by Phenomenit » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

The librem 5 can't come fast enough.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#175

Post by NeedMoreTea » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

ranit wrote: post #167

jerf wrote: post #45

This dark pattern seems to be spreading. Amazon recently pushed out an update to their (beta last I knew) web app that allows you to use their smile.amazon.com charity donation through the app. But in order to turn that on, you have to turn on all the notifications the app has, including their rather constant pushes of "deals I may be interested in". They're holding you hostage to their notifications because "it's fo…

> Silicon Valley has no intention of retraining itself in any manner. Historically, no industry, once became major, intended to retrain itself to be more positive to the society. If any improvement happened, it was forced from outside.

So who was forcing the many famous Victorian philanthropist industrialists to build their railway and model villages, with free schools, hospitals and more for workers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_village

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#176

Post by Casseres » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #109

nmg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old.reddit.com still works well for me (as well as it ever did) on mobile. The login is (intentionally?) broken, so I use i.reddit.com to login.

It's a pain if you follow links to reddit that don't explicitly link the old subdomain. I think maybe if you have an account you can force it (?) but for us lurkers it's annoying. Of course I could create an account to browse reddit but then... well they've already won, haven't they?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#177

Post by DennisAleynikov » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

beezischillin wrote: post #171

jayd16 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While Voice Match learning the sound of your voice sounds like a completely local task But voice rec is not local. The reason it asks to store your voice is because they need to send it to their backend for recognition.

They don't need to explicitly save and store a history of every voice command to do voice recognition.

there might be implementations that don't do this for instance Siri or Bixby but that doesn't mean Googles approach is wrong.

It can be unacceptable for your privacy and security threat model but for most it makes 0 difference wether the training continuously happens in the cloud or locally on the NPU inside your phone.

Saving all the clips as much as people love to fear monger it is literally the strategy that objectively leads to the highest quality implementation on the market. Googles Assistant by far understands language most naturally and we owe that to all the free vocal training data google diligently uses.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#178

Post by marricks » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

Privacy is like drinking water: no one in the US cares about it until it's on the news.

Why don't people care about clean water? Because federal agencies set standards and test for them. You could bore someone to death talking about it until Flint happened. And sure some people buy water tests to verify they're not getting poisoned, or setup their own filtration systems but most people don't want to waste the time or don't have the knowledge. Just the same as privacy.

Not every can or will get educated about privacy, and really they shouldn't have to, it should be a waste of their time. But it's not because we don't set standards for it. Most people give it away without knowing it's value only to have it bite them in the ass later through identify theft, data breaches, or eventually giving into a surveillance state where the government and big corporations know more about your than your mom does.

This is why it needs government intervention, because without it corporations will claim to give you a choice every step of the way but no one will understand what those choices entail, and it turns out they'll badger and pester you to make the choices that benefit themselves.

Relatedly, this is why I am OK with iOS being a walled garden. Sure, they make bank from it, but that incentivises them to make it protected. As I said in another thread, they're the only one capable and willing of enforcing privacy rules until the government steps up.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#179

Post by dataflow » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #57

jerf wrote: post #45

This dark pattern seems to be spreading. Amazon recently pushed out an update to their (beta last I knew) web app that allows you to use their smile.amazon.com charity donation through the app. But in order to turn that on, you have to turn on all the notifications the app has, including their rather constant pushes of "deals I may be interested in". They're holding you hostage to their notifications because "it's fo…

I think the ad-tech industry has tapped into what can only be called -- and no offense to anyone here -- "virtue signalling." There's no doubt studies done on this, hence the new "controversial" sort of nature of some of the advertising. Who knew that Gillette and Nike were so interested in social issues, and not a bottom line PNL result. In the same way, perhaps, Amazon marketing teams found some research to suggest…

I hear it's (also?) called 'woke' capitalism.

Re: New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

#180

Post by rifung » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

levesque wrote: post #4

I tried using Google Maps without search history turned on. It's basically a downgraded version. They tied saving locations with the search history, so it won't let you search for friends' contacts, set a home address, etc. Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history?

> Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history?

I work at Google but not on Maps, opinions are my own.

I don't know if this is why they did it that way, but it wouldn't surprise me if the reason was merely that 99.9% of users opt in to location sharing and the developers didn't feel it useful to spend time supporting the use case for the 0.1%.

You have to also keep in mind that Google is just a company with thousands of individuals who each have their own motives and are given incentives by the company. If a developer is career driven (and many if not most are) they have to work on "high impact" things to get a good performance review. Since Google tries to be very objective, you have to measure your impact with data and sadly 0.1% of users is not really considered impactful. Unfortunately good will earned by customers is hard to measure.

Again just my observation from working here.