Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like this site?
Well done, Mr Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Seems particularly irrelevant to this thread.
Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
21–30 of 141 posts
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#22In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
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Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#23In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
well, people could have been more willing to pay for email. Google's search engine was top notch for sure. But when we gave them the right to scan our emails we really handed over the keys to the kingdom.
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#24In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
If you go back and read the stuff from Brin and Page at the time, they do actually go to quite some lengths explaining how crucially important it is for search results to be relevant, and the original PageRank paper even outlines methods for reducing manipulation from commercial interests.
It's a jarring contrast to what Google is today.
"[...] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [2] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#25Do not use software that you cannot self host.
Except Google and Microsoft have screwed up email so that self hosting is a never-ending game of 'who will they block today?'
You can't run a business where the 2 companies that control the vast majority of email can block you for no reason, and absolutely no visibility that something is wrong until a customer directly contacts you that they are not receiving email (and how would they even know in most cases unless they knew a message should have come through?)
Google was blocking signup emails to me from the 2nd largest telecommunications company in Australia at the time, and I ended up having to use my work address.
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#26Saying society is screwed because ads are more expensive seems like quite a stretch to me. Looking at the NYTimes stock as an example it seems that they are doing pretty well these days (although some might argue their quality has gone down)
Just imagine, how content publishing and journalism alone would have developed, if publishers wouldn't be cut off by the advertising cartel of Google and Facebook.
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#27In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
>I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line
The thing is, so did the founders of Google. The issue is not that they were lying to you.
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found this rule more practical (and I hold to it): Do not rely on software you cannot self host or holds your data hostage in a proprietary format. Data export must be a supported feature.
Isn't data export a requirement for GDPR compliance? Many apps have this feature (exporting my data) and I usually take advantage of it.
The data does not have to be easely portable though, right?
I.e. they can send human readable data that can't be directly translated back to its original form.
Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#29Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated
#30I really missed the days when Yahoo! was the first choice search engine, the results were hand picked by human, limited but really relevant. Then came google, the results were much richer but relatively inferior, however still acceptable. Years later, Gmail was out and I immediately expressed my interest and got invitation directly from Google. Unfortunately, Gmail did not workout for me. From the very first day, I started receiving spams. Note that it's a new id which I never used anywhere. Then I asked for the function to reject particular senders, and the responses I got were always something like "our spam filters are good enough, blah blah blah". Wasn't feel confident with that, so Gmail was never my primary email. I felt not quite right with Google since then, but not quite sure what was wrong until recent a couple of years. Googles' recent moves such as trying to blend in Ads with search results, trying to block Chrome API access for Ad blockers' etc. made it clear that it's almost if not already time to ditch Google. The only thing I cannot find a substitute is the search engine, the others are simply not good enough.