Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google’s GDPR Workaround

brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 629 posts

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#321

Post by ori_b »

nindalf wrote: post #304
stonogo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Literally what else could that man have done? He could have not sent all build-time network accesses to Google by default. It's that simple.

No it isn't. Please tell me how you achieve security without storing hashes in a DB? The default is only for those who'd prefer not to run their own DB. You are welcome to run your own DB if you want. Why are you so upset that other people will be using a feature you obviously won't? Why are you upset when this leaks literally no info that your github repo doesn't already?

> No it isn't. Please tell me how you achieve security without storing hashes in a DB?

I bet the DB is small enough that you could default to just downloading it and syncing on your machine.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#322

Post by jeremyjh »

tzs wrote: post #270
hexadec wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you in theory, but until we can figure out micro-transactional payments that work globally it seems ads are good stepping stone. People want to get paid for work, some users are willing to pay (cash) some with attention to ads. We should not give up our privacy or anonymity for this attention though.

Micro-transaction payments are probably a long way away, for non-tech reasons. Briefly, you might have to deal with collecting and remitting sales taxes or VAT in any jurisdiction in which you have paying readers. Until there is some sort of agreement among the relevant jurisdictions to greatly reduce the pain of this, direct micro-transactions with your site's visitors are likely to be a bureaucratic nightmare.

These platforms already exist. They fail because most people won’t pay for content, full stop.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#323

Post by wtdata »

wtdata wrote: post #38
Dirlewanger wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you didn't mean to say that what's actually sad is that the US federal government/DoJ doesn't take real action?

Well, I am an European, it's sad about the US Gov./DoJ, but that is not something I have the right to demand from my part.

Seriously, what kind of idiots have downvoting rights on HN that they downvoted the above comment?

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#324

Post by philwelch »

fmajid wrote: post #202
philwelch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this. As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy…

China or Russia don't need to pay shills in all case, there are always nationalists to do it for free. In other cases, it's Stockholm Syndrome. As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.

> As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.

Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#325

Post by mtgx »

pornel wrote: post #287
frogpelt wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the McDonald's lawsuit is framed that way in popular circles is because it is easily fits the mold for a frivolous lawsuit. 1. A woman willingly purchased hot coffee from McDonald's. 2. She spilled it on herself. 3. She sued McDonald's because of her injuries. Those three things are true no matter which circle you ask. A lot of people I talk to, even when given all of the facts of the case still consider i…

It's mostly harmless to spill regular drinkable-temperature coffee on yourself, so she took appropriate level of precaution (i.e. very little) for that reasonable assumption. She shouldn't be to blame even if she showered in the coffee. To bring it back on topic: when web users are told "we care about your privacy", they should be able to take it at face value. When the company then weasels out of the headline promis…

Yes, once again, when an issue is systemic (in this case, all coffees by McDonalds are super-hot), the user is not to blame but the vendor/system designer.

It reminds me of that recent case of 90%+ passengers "putting the oxygen masks wrong" because they are "idiots" - an opinion that seemed to be shared by a lot of people even here on HN, but even more so on Twitter.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/103226206/alm...

To me, someone whose never seen an airplane oxygen mask up-close, it's pretty clear that the design of the masks would make people think that this is how you use it, and not over your nose. When you're going down with your plane, fear for your life ending, and have like 30 seconds to act, it's like not you have time to think about the "proper usage of an oxygen mask" - you use it instinctually, based on the design of the thing.

Therefore, those people were not "idiots". Idiots were the people designing the masks in a way that doesn't make sense for humans in an extremely high-pressure situation with little time to react.

Also, as usual, when the vast majority of people do something "wrong", that's the first and only red flag you need to know that the issue is a system design flaw, not a user error one. Same with Apple's "you're holding it wrong" antenna issue, etc.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#326

Post by phreack »

hobofan wrote: post #117
intopieces wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should ads rule the web at all? Surely the cleverest engineers to walk the planet can come up with a new way of making money that doesn’t involve psychological manipulation.

> Surely the cleverest engineers to walk the planet can come up with a new way of making money that doesn’t involve psychological manipulation. If they could, they would've already done so. One of the things "the cleverest engineers to walk the planet" would probably need to do is to increase consumers willingness to pay for good content by a factor of ~10 for e.g. online newspapers with quality journalism to be prof…

Not that I think their proposition is better but the Brave people particularly are trying to push a different model with their attention token scheme, so it's not that no one can think of something different, just that it's enormously hard to get people on board when the old advertisers are holding on to everyone using every single way at their disposal, legal or not.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#327

Post by briandear »

idlerig wrote: post #192

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…

How did the coffee spill? Did she hold a cup of a beverage that is traditionally served very hot between her legs?

That lawsuit was frivolous. Coffee is hot. If you spill it, it might burn you.

As far as just asking for medical bills — that might have been true until her lawyers smelled a multi-million payday.

Lawyers like that are the reason we have warnings on hair dryers to not use while showering and warnings on coffee cups that warn of the hot beverage inside. Coffee is traditionally made using boiling or near boiling water — unless McDonalds super-heated the water, the temperature at which it was served was consistent with how coffee is normally served.

That it was an elderly lady makes no difference. That’s just emotional distraction and has no relevance. The McDonalds lawsuit ushered in the “nanny” era where people have to be warned against such hazards as “boating carries a risk of serious injury or drowning.” And product costs (including medical care) is dramatically more expensive than it should be because the trial lawyers had to all get paid. Punishment under statute is one thing, but unlimited punitive damages is absurd. We talk about CEOs getting paid to much — not even close to the payday trial lawyers get.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#328

Post by lern_too_spel »

rvz wrote: post #8

It's really funny to see that yesterday, I was branded as a 'privacy nut' after the release of Android 10 as I was concerned about the privacy issues that are in Android. Then the Go modules proxy issue around the Go Programming language that raised suspicions about tracking usage statistics around downloading modules turned on by default without any consent and now this. I think there are some folks at Google who ha…

You were branded a privacy nut for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20868489 because you didn't note any actual privacy issues in Android.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#329

Post by nindalf »

ori_b wrote: post #321
nindalf wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. Please tell me how you achieve security without storing hashes in a DB? The default is only for those who'd prefer not to run their own DB. You are welcome to run your own DB if you want. Why are you so upset that other people will be using a feature you obviously won't? Why are you upset when this leaks literally no info that your github repo doesn't already?

> No it isn't. Please tell me how you achieve security without storing hashes in a DB? I bet the DB is small enough that you could default to just downloading it and syncing on your machine.

> I bet

Care to maybe check real quick before making bets?

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#330

Post by riversflow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #221
mannykannot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simpler explanation is that they are individuals defending against what they perceive as a personal attack via 'tribal' affiliations.

How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit? I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't…

Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else.

Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.

Post reply on HN