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Google’s GDPR Workaround

brave.com

211–220 of 629 posts

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#211

Is there any way to improve the matching of ads to the viewer without violating their privacy?

The matching is in itself a violation of privacy, at least if you interpret the right of privacy as "The right to be left alone", as former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#212
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about for creating and keeping up a global surveillance-capitalism system where billions of people are tracked, profiles, stripped of their privacy and manipulated, thus disrupting democracy and civic society?

[flagged]

You are ignoring that the government can and does request data from the companies. You may say 'who cares about the adidas I bought', but it doesn't stop there... google knows where you are (location services in android...), who you contact, what sites you are registered to (contatct synced / gmail), in addition of what your interests are(are you gay? involved in casual sex? voting republican or democrat? Planning a protest?). This level of data collection is wrong regardless of who does it: if a company has this data the government can get it too by definition, after thr data is there it's just a slippery slope.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#213
post #200

Brave is certainly the most shameless tech company I've ever seen in my entire life. Shame on HN to repeatedly allow such a scummy company exploits its ranking algorithm again and again. This kind of systematic exploitation used to happen before with DuckDuckGo, but it seems that Brave took shamelessness to a whole new level.

Could you expound? Exploits it's ranking algorithm? What does that mean.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#214
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no marketing expert, but I doubt that the best way Google can think of to sway public opinion is to call people privacy nuts. Google employs over 100,000 people and even more people work at similar companies like Facebook or buy targeted ads. Many of these people browse Hackernews and get offended if others accuse their livelihoods of being evil.

Every company I've worked at has had an explicit policy of not commenting on that company's business on the internet.

There are regular comments by declared employees of quite a few companies including Google on HN. The commenting and vote/flag brigadeering around subjects that center on one of these companies is such that many subjects are either voted off the homepage entirely or the participants in the thread get downvoted/upvoted to better support the company position or narrative.

This is all quite in the open.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#215

This is exactly what happened in the McDonald's "hot coffee" lawsuit. It wasn't some "Karen" who hit a bump while driving. It was an elderly woman (in her 70s, IIRC), sitting in the passenger seat. McDonalds already had complaints (and some lawsuits) over the (significantly higher than industry standard) temperature of their coffee, so this wasn't exactly out of the blue. She ended up with 3rd degree burns on her leg…

The most interesting thing to me about that McDonald's "hot coffee" lawsuit is how different the narrative is in popular circles vs. in legal circles. It's a little bit like in Rashomon.

In popular circles, the story is framed in a way that does make the lawsuit look frivolous. But this is also a case that has made it into the legal textbooks as an example of corporate negligence that's clear-cut enough to use for demonstrating the concept in introductory textbooks.

Of course, in the legal textbooks, the version of the story that's told includes a lot of details that, as you point out, get excluded from the popular version.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#216
post #125

>I was branded as a 'privacy nut' Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.

I'm no marketing expert, but I doubt that the best way Google can think of to sway public opinion is to call people privacy nuts. Google employs over 100,000 people and even more people work at similar companies like Facebook or buy targeted ads. Many of these people browse Hackernews and get offended if others accuse their livelihoods of being evil.

Most of them are drones. Infrastructure, data entry, operations, security.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/ It's not going to be entirely legitimate but there's going to be some eye opening items in there for you I suspect.

Remember when Reddit investigated the Boston Marathon bombing and discovered that it was Sunil Tripathi? And then Mr. Tripathi went missing and his body was discovered several weeks later? Thank God we have Redditors to break the case.

>And then Mr. Tripathi went missing

False. He went missing a month before the bombings:

>Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#218
I really doubt Google Adx would pass buyer_uid to buyers in EU28 countries. They were the first ones to truncate IPs in EU for privacy reasons.

We've stopped cookie matching in EU28 countries so I can't verify if they do pass the buyer_uid.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#219
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no marketing expert, but I doubt that the best way Google can think of to sway public opinion is to call people privacy nuts. Google employs over 100,000 people and even more people work at similar companies like Facebook or buy targeted ads. Many of these people browse Hackernews and get offended if others accuse their livelihoods of being evil.

I can attest to that as when you point of things like Google gets caught stealing IP from a MIT student they invited for an interview (a popular thread here on HN) it gets downvoted voraciously. Either its employees, hired guns and or something...

I have noticed this pattern over several years. A few of the times it trips the flamebait detector and gets buried. Negative stories about other big tech companies don't seem to have the same issue with staying up.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Privacy violation" is a huge, gigantic category of all kinds of things. One kind of privacy violation is completely different from another; some privacy violations are completely harmless, and some are actually directly harmful, and some in between. Giving jail time for any of these is like giving jail time for any kind of "offensive behavior". Maybe someone just didn't like what someone said and called it offensive…

How about systematic, deliberate, deceptive privacy violations in order to increase profits? That seems like a pretty distinct category from the cases you are concerned with.

> systematic, deliberate, deceptive

I'll take your word for it, the evidence doesn't look clear cut to me,

> privacy violations

Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size? We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is. Did it, or could it, do harm? This is a nearly universal standard used to assess how someone is punished according to the law.

> in order to increase profits

Of course it's to increase profits, you think they're doing it for fun? Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

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