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A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

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Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#161
I'm glad we're finally humanizing the metaphorical David in the online privacy debate. The guy who built his business on [checks notes] tracking your online behavior.

Where would we be if not for this stick-it-to-em person, who wants to defend his life's work of fingerprinting our web browsing to assist in targeted advertising?

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is a for profit company. On the side the offer products and services. Their profits come from selling your data to others. Google does not sell the data to others. (In fact, much of Google's profits would remain intact even without any user data. That is the great thing about search ads -- the user tells you exactly what they want. There is no need to guess)

No, but a history of what you’ve previously searched massively improves search results in just a few queries.

At least that's the claim. I don't think that Google's search results are that much better than Duckduckgo's, at least for queries where I'm not searching for local businesses.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress. What would be neat is to see how much data Apple is collecting about its customers after purchase. Why wouldnt we want to know this. Could Apple provide option to hide true email address, tell app do not track and give visibility into data being sniffed without also collecting vast amounts of user data itself. We cannot answer that question until we see the data they collect. I used to be of the mind that A…

A big difference is that Apple makes money by selling me devices. Google and Facebook make money by manipulating me into buying their customer's products. Incentives matter.

Apple finds it increasingly difficult to convince people to upgrade their phones each and every year. I expect that hardware revenue will be declining over time and will be replaced with revenue generated from services like AppStore, Music subscriptions, iCloud, TV, games and more.

You can see this trend quite clearly already: in 2012 Apple generated only 6% of its revenue from services while in 2020 it was 20%. Services tend to be also more profitable compared to hardware.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#165
I recently bought my first Android device and found Google Play infested with apps that want my location, access to network, list all my apps AND send adverts.

Google is assisting them by adding extra steps to find out what permissions app requests. Also, it appears, that Android is opting you in, unless permissions are configured before starting the app. Because of that, there are apps with sole purpose of tricking you into installing it so it can get your data.

I found that many Android apps, that are also available on IOS, insist on location data and refuse to run, whereas they run fine w/o it enabled on IOS.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress. What would be neat is to see how much data Apple is collecting about its customers after purchase. Why wouldnt we want to know this. Could Apple provide option to hide true email address, tell app do not track and give visibility into data being sniffed without also collecting vast amounts of user data itself. We cannot answer that question until we see the data they collect. I used to be of the mind that A…

“Get a copy of the data associated with your Apple ID account” https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208502

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/04/a...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/account-preservatio...

Looks like they set this up in response to GDPR.

Interesting how the communications services create a pen register by default.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#167
post #69
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the vulgarity dilutes the weight of the message Actually vulgarity was invented (and has historically been used) to improve the weight of such messages. It works too: "Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science a team of researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the USA and Hong Kong report that people who use profanity are less likely to be associated with lying and deception." [1] Can…

Vulgarity was is descended from the inappropriate use of existing sacred words. It evolved into a comparative tone device. But it was always a cheap trick (just like the magic words it corrupted). ... That report doesn't say what you want it to. "Honesty" is not necessarily reality. Someone who is moved to high expressiveness is plausibly sincere , but they are not necessarily rational, reasonable, or correct. Appeal…

> inappropriate use of existing sacred words.

You're thinking of blasphemy. "Vulgar" means "coarse" or "unrefined". It used to mean "concerning the common language", i.e. as spoken by ordinary people; not the literary language, or the legal language, or the clerical language.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress. What would be neat is to see how much data Apple is collecting about its customers after purchase. Why wouldnt we want to know this. Could Apple provide option to hide true email address, tell app do not track and give visibility into data being sniffed without also collecting vast amounts of user data itself. We cannot answer that question until we see the data they collect. I used to be of the mind that A…

A big difference is that Apple makes money by selling me devices. Google and Facebook make money by manipulating me into buying their customer's products. Incentives matter.

Locked down devices. Then making more money from selling subscriptions, developer certificates, running "app stores", advertising services, etc.

To get the full functionality from the device, it is difficult to avoid obtaining an "AppleID". There is an "incentive" for users to sacrifice privacy and control to Apple. That appears to be intentional. Then the after purchase data collection and storage begins.

I am glad these practices have not spread across the entire hardware industry. Imagine buying an SBC and being asked to purchase an "RPi Developer Certificate" or register a "SiFiveID".

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#169
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My tipping point was noticing that about 30% of my DNS traffic on my home network was Android devices calling out to tracking and advertising networks. Moving to iOS has dropped that dramatically, more than an order of magnitude. The fact that we're now seeing multiple lawsuits, PR campaigns, and lobbying to damage Apple since they put a requirement to disclose privacy details in the App Store shows how much surveill…

An alternative to giving your money to one of the largest tax-dodgers on the planet is a $30 raspberry pi with "pi-hole" installed. Browsing on my phone at home with all those ad networks blocked okay... until you go outside your home network and get all the ads again. It's almost made my stop using my phone outside of my home network.

I used to run a Pi-Hole for a long time, but then I realized I was trading my day to day tech job, to screwing around with Pi-Hole (along with other RPi's in my house) on my personal time. And yes, I run a WireGuard VPN too and could/have turn on WG to tunnel back to my Pi-Hole.

Switched over to NextDNS, so that my ad blocking is on the macro network too. I'm satisfied. My wife is not, since her trashy "click here" links don't work half the time. :) Tells me it is working just fine.

https://nextdns.io

My NextDNS dashboard - https://i.imgur.com/bjJ9OZH.png (My garage door opener is a chatty bastard)

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big difference is that Apple makes money by selling me devices. Google and Facebook make money by manipulating me into buying their customer's products. Incentives matter.

Isn't it not entirely out of reason to wonder if Apple could also want to monetize their user data ?

They already are by selling privacy as a "feature".
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