171–180 of 270 posts
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> AMP Leadership definitely did. did they though? couldn't this be a small (artificial delay) library injected server side by some higher ups at Google?
See page 90: > Google ad server employees met with AMP employees to strategize about using AMP to impede header bidding, addressing in particular how much pressure publishers and advertisers would tolerate.
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I don't think the first one is a bombshell. It was always clear google was using personal data to target ads.
The first one helps to discredit the litigation. The paragraph’s first sentence is supposed to insinuate that Google is lying about not selling people’s data, and the rest of the paragraph says that Google is not selling data. And then the last sentence makes a completely false claim using popular buzzwords. What was the point of the paragraph, other than to invoke unnecessary emotions for no reason?
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There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about it was backlash
AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owner…
This is factually incorrect: as the allegations noted, there are many cases where AMP slows page load time – it required a megabyte of render-blocking JavaScript with no fallback. I could tell which sites used AMP because they loaded slower and failed entirely if you had a less than perfect network connection — this was quite noticeable on the subway here in DC. I heard plenty of normal people complaining about it because it was a daily occurrence.
In addition to scrolling, the other thing which people noticed was that AMP broke the URL for sharing. This had several outcomes: one was that desktop users often got less usable mobile pages but the other was that it made spoofing easier because people trusted the google.com domain. This was used by fake news sites in the 2016 election cycle and at least the Russian government used it to spearphish investigative journalists.
They knew all of those risks in advance — and people accurately predicted them in 2015 – and the stated motivation was hard to reconcile with how much less work it would have taken to see the performance benefits by simply incorporating speed into search rankings at a high weight; this suggests that theories about the goal of controlling third-party ad markets were correct.
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AMP had an (intentional..?) bug on Firefox for years, making it impossible to scroll in the internal page. Luckily it wasn't a big problem, since Google also intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile version when using Fx, so one didn't get amp links.
At this point I always assume that it’s out of malice instead of incompetence. These kinds of smaller bugs for things that work by default are just too common for Google.
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And what are the implications? Is Google analyzing uploads to Google Drive to serve you targeted ads? That would be a big breach in trust.
> Is Google analyzing uploads to Google Drive to serve you targeted ads? Is there any reason to believe they're not doing that? It's already a known fact that they scan files for malware and other illegal files such as CSAM. WhatsApp backup contents are a gold mine of personal information.
> We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.
249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web page…
> I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1] [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility
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Slight nitpick I know but decrypt here is the not quite the right word. The communications are still encrypted in flight but they are necessarily decrypted (by WhatsApp) on the end (your device). This unencrypted file is then provided to drive if you select back up with Google drive in WhatsApp. I'm in two minds about this one. I'm not really a fan of Google but realistically we're talking about backing up messages f…
> This unencrypted file is then provided to drive if you select back up with Google drive in WhatsApp. Why can't they just encrypt the data?! It makes no sense. I manually back up my messages because of this. After some time WhatsApp will start nagging me to enable cloud backups. I suppose this fits into the "annoy users until they give up their privacy" theme in the litigation document.
That said, I'd also like to understand the motivation behind the fact that only red states AGs are in the plaintiffs. I rarely associate red state AGs with any form of integrity and in fact red state governments generally represent the frontiers of kleptocracy. So color me skeptical
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"Anti-American" is rich, coming from someone who would sell the 4th amendment to the highest bidder.
In the age of modern technology and the internet I think the sense and meaning of privacy is lost because everything is out there on the net waiting to be misused, abused, hacked, stolen, leaked or caught just like fish in the ocean. If I was US gov. I would've made law in the early 1990s that says every website, blog etc. is private property and no entity has right to crawl it if not given permission basically elimi…
it would have existed, just outside of the US
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> I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1] [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility
This is why principles are important. Living by a well considered and thoughtful set of beliefs, secular or otherwise, has an impact on the world. Even if things look hopeless, your actions contribute to the way life unfolds for everyone else. Even if things look trivial, not engaging in minor infractions against your beliefs is withholding that single drop from the flood. I won't ever use tiktok, and speak against i…