Pot. Kettle.
No such thing as a free lunch.
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw&t=29s
Google: Open Letter to Australians
61–70 of 437 posts
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#62And surprisingly, not one mention of Murdoch. Let's be honest - this is old media trying to push their weight to keep margins. Facebook and Google have effectively replaced both clickbait and tabloid news sources, as well as the well-resourced, quality journalism by taking ad revenue off their hands. Google could easily setup a news sourcing hub themselves and self-cite news rather than relying on their external data…
> And surprisingly, not one mention of Murdoch.
"The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else who has a website, YouTube channel or small business."
This wording doesn't suggest that Murdoch would have a better advantage than any other 'news media business'. Is there anything in the new laws to suggest, apart from capital/resources, that this is set to benefit any particular Australian media business over another?
> Google could easily setup a news sourcing hub themselves and self-cite news rather than relying on their external data feeds.
So they'd be paying for news content from established media enterprise, or paying journalists to write their own - as opposed to leaching off them. Seems like a win?
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's definitely possible to have a good experience without personalization. Depending on how much you inherently value google not storing data about you, it may be the only way for you to be happy. But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.
As someone who remembers the web before personalization, the product experience was better. It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features. Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.
So Google sends metadata for 5B videos to your browser, then your browser ranks them and shows you the best one? How would your agent do personalization?
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#64404. Got a copy?
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#65Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears they've blocked access to it from non-Australian IPs. Here is the HTML they serve to me: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/skissane/05bac6c78d99e359... Text: Open letter to Australians We need to let you know about new Government regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube. A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse G…
Nice one, thanks! Maybe also do an archive.is link?
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#67Link that works globally (not just in Australia): http://g.co/australia-letter
@dang, can we change the link on this submission please?
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#68I'd probably trust the Australian govt to protect my data better than Google or even worse Facebook. The way the article has twisted the words in Google's favour is commendable though. Marketing really is everything.
I don't understand why my comment got down voted. But yes, as one of you have pointed out, it's just my opinion. And I don't think the original draft of this law as much to do with giving your data to the govt, but more about Google/Fb being more transparent with the conditions under which, our data will be used by them. I'm not a legal expert and I may have misunderstood some of it. It's my opinion that big monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon should be regulated in some ways and be held accountable. I honestly don't have an answer to the question "What if govt loses your data"!
https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/draft-...
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.
as another person who worked on personalization I can assure you that way over 90% of users prefer personalization. Decades of A/B tests have proven that. And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.
Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube?
A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.
Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.
I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience The only type of search personalisation I wan…
> I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.
You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions.
I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)