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Google Fights Back

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Re: Google Fights Back

#191

Post by clairity »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #126
clairity wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I nominally pay for these services..." you give them all that valuable personal and private data and then also pay them? why are you so resigned to this? the tradeoff for knowing everything about you gives you what, a few less taps on your phone? people ignored or minimized it then, but their direction was abundantly clear by 2004 or so: search -> adwords -> adsense -> gmail ---> all-your-data-everywhere (gmail se…

Is it really that hard to understand? What's the concrete harm so far? I've been using Google for a couple decades, and I can't really articulate a specific way that I've been harmed. Yes, I realize that there's the potential for harm from a leak or something like that, but it's hardly surprising that the abstract notion of possible harm isn't super compelling to the average user when they're currently getting useful…

you're rationalizing, i.e., looking the other way to avoid cognitive dissonance. but part of why we have such big brains is to anticipate the future, not simply accept events as they occur. what might the future you say? should we ignore that gas leak in the kitchen because it hasn't killed anyone yet?

it's important to expose this kind of mis-rationalization, especially when tiny individual harms accumulate otherwise silently to become population-level dangers (e.g., measles).

Re: Google Fights Back

#193

Post by Larrikin »

pgeorgi wrote: post #135
Nextgrid wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal action requires you to be able to prove they still hold the data. If they only use it for something where other factors affect the outcome (ad targeting, etc) they can still keep your data forever while hiding behind plausible deniability the other factors provide them (from outside, there’s no way to prove that a particular ad was served to you because of your data instead of another factor they use as input f…

> from outside, there’s no way to prove that a particular ad was served to you because of your data instead of another factor they use as input for the algorithm Create an account, use it to excessively look for tea pots until you predominantly get ads for tea pots. Store the cookie[0] that encodes your user id. Delete the account. After the advertised account retention period, try the cookie again in an otherwise sq…

I don't believe for a second they keep the data at a company of Google's size. But they don't need to anymore if they just feed your data through some neural network training that outputs a black box filled with weights. They can legally show your data is gone but now their model knows that people with similar browsing history, location, etc have a weak signal for tea cups. You'll get the occasional ad for them if their other networks don't filter out all the history for appearing suspicious. Google can bring in a bunch of experts saying how much data they've processed and no one really knows how the ML algorithm learns, etc.

They've improved their model none the less even if you delete your data after the fact.

Re: Google Fights Back

#194

Post by craftinator »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #62
falcolas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is also holding the plunger that helped create the dam breakage. Not to mention the pry-bars being applied to any attempts to fix the dam. EDIT: For those who want to downvote, consider that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads, and that most of the advances in ad targeting using personal data have been made by Google.

I think you are espousing an "ADS ARE INHERENTLY BAD" mentality that just doesn't resonate with people. I want to know about the best services that are useful for me. I do not want to be advertised women's swimsuits on Instagram (I'm a male with no interest in purchasing said item). When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much i…

Targetted ads are inherently bad, and that resonates with most people I've talked to about it. I want to be able to specifically search for things that solve my problems; I don't need a torrent of competing products that I have no interest in distracting me from reading a cool article. I blacklist products advertised to me, refuse to buy them, because I hate the snake oilery the advertising profession has become. And, Google is evil and has perpetuated and propagated (and profiteered) the monetization of personal information, and bolstered that environment by sabotaging the open web.

Re: Google Fights Back

#195

Post by dewiz »

The problem with google’s mission is that it doesn’t say which information has to be accessible to whom and in what way it’s going to be useful.

Given that google’s income is mostly from advertising, it feels like the mission is about making my information available to someone else, and useful for them to make money.

Re: Google Fights Back

#196

Post by Liquix »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #126
clairity wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I nominally pay for these services..." you give them all that valuable personal and private data and then also pay them? why are you so resigned to this? the tradeoff for knowing everything about you gives you what, a few less taps on your phone? people ignored or minimized it then, but their direction was abundantly clear by 2004 or so: search -> adwords -> adsense -> gmail ---> all-your-data-everywhere (gmail se…

Is it really that hard to understand? What's the concrete harm so far? I've been using Google for a couple decades, and I can't really articulate a specific way that I've been harmed. Yes, I realize that there's the potential for harm from a leak or something like that, but it's hardly surprising that the abstract notion of possible harm isn't super compelling to the average user when they're currently getting useful…

The 'concrete harm' part comes into play when a corporation or nation-state weaponizes this data in order to sell you a product, influence your thoughts on a political matter, or otherwise manipulate you.

If you're of the opinion that this is not problematic on a fabric-of-society level, could you please explain why?

Re: Google Fights Back

#197

Post by jtolmar »

joefkelley wrote: post #178
holy_city wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blatant disregard for privacy is what bothers me the most. Like when I started getting push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my exact balance due, which they could only have gathered by parsing my emails from the bank. It's easy to resolve that by changing the contact info/settings with the bank, but just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their priva…

Wait, so you trust them to store the email, and parse it for something like spam detection, but not for some smarter feature? What specifically are you concerned about that is a problem with this and not with them having the email in the first place? Sounds like you shouldn't be using Gmail at all tbh.

You trust snail mail carriers not to read your mail.

The digital equivalent of the envelope is encryption - the carrier is allowed to see the outside but not the inside. The function of encryption is lack of comprehension - the carrier still knows the exact encrypted bytes of your mail, but cannot comprehend it. We generally accept that this is already a useful proxy for privacy.

Imagine a mail protocol that somehow lets you encrypt everything but the part necessary for spam identification. The carrier is able to apply some algorithm to determine whether it's spam, but no other information. I'll assume everyone thinks this sounds good (though impossible). Because encryption is just lack of comprehension, an algorithm that is only capable of parsing an "is spam" feature from email has the same level of privacy as this hypothetical. But an algorithm that is capable of parsing "your credit card payment is overdue" is able to comprehend something else, which is a different level of privacy.

(Of course, encryption is better than "They're not running anything that can parse this," because it says "Nobody can parse this.")

Re: Google Fights Back

#198

Post by metamet »

everdev wrote: post #87
hammock wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is well taken, but 100 years will anyone care that you had the flu on May 7 2019? >Who the fuck owns MySpace now? It's all deleted. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/18/18271023/myspace-music-vi...

> It's all deleted. They deleted 12 years of music uploads, not everything. Username, email, bio, friends, etc. still exists somewhere, but who owns it? What do they intend to do with it?

> What do they intend to do with it?

Reveal my Top 8 when I run for congress?

Re: Google Fights Back

#199

Post by holy_city »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #113
holy_city wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature, I think it's deeply unethical the way it was presented to me as a user. And it's not the reminder that bothers me. It's that I don't trust Google not to share the data they extract from my private communications. Financial information in particular can be used against you by a number of parties, and it's been used to discriminate against people in the past. When it comes…

> I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature And yet > just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. > It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature. That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be usefu…

Apologies for poorly wording things. My point wasn't on the feature, but the culture that allowed the feature to be created.

That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion.

Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical to scrape private financial information and then present it as a nifty notification, and even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it.

Re: Google Fights Back

#200

Post by [deleted] »

gervase wrote: post #93
darkwizard42 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are espousing an "ADS ARE INHERENTLY BAD" mentality that just doesn't resonate with people. I want to know about the best services that are useful for me. I do not want to be advertised women's swimsuits on Instagram (I'm a male with no interest in purchasing said item). When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much i…

It resonates with me, because I view ads as (intrinsically) mentally intrusive. I find seeing any ad, regardless of its relevance, infuriating; the advertiser is paying someone, not me, to place a thought or perception into my brain that I do not want there . If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) i…

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