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Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

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Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#31

Post by syshum »

dtech wrote: post #12
samizdis wrote: post #2

In 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.

I find it highly ironic that in a thread about subjective evil one talks about granting more power to governments... The only institution on the planet that has granted itself the right to legally steal, plunder, and murder you...

I am no fan of Google, but as much as I despise what google has become, I am do not have a rose colored view of the evil that is government to the point here I think that government could be a viable solution to the Google problem

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#33

Post by xiphias2 »

AlgorithmicTime wrote: post #27
samizdis wrote: post #2

In 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.

Eric Schmidt put in that line because many times engineers said ,,that would be evil'' when another person suggested something, and Eric wanted to create a strong engineering culture for hiring the best software engineers. He talks about it in the first Tim Ferriss interview.

I was quite happy at Google while he was CEO and I hated it when Larry took over, things got boring....Sergey would have been so much more fun.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#34

Post by cinntaile »

samizdis wrote: post #2

In 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.

Altavista was garbage compared to Google at the time, that's why everyone switched in the first place.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#35

Post by blackhaz »

dtech wrote: post #12
samizdis wrote: post #2

In 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.

One of the biggest assaults is Google Classroom. My son goes to a school in London. He was given out a Chromebook. His Chromebook effectively became his backpack. Everything is in there. They do homework there, collaborate, get used to the "G Suite." Paper is citizen number two. He spends a good portion of his day in Google's ecosystem. I thought Microsoft dominance twenty years ago was scary, but this is something on a completely another level. Very smart move on Google's behalf and something we will all have to fight later on when kids grow up.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#36

Post by dmitriid »

It's not even the beginning of an end game. We're in midgame, at most.

10 years ago Ars Techinca published the evergreen article called "Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack...

At the time it explained, with great accuracy and insight, all that was happening in smartphones: all the visible and invisible wars and battles to control everything, from hardware to apps, in order to control ... well ... everything.

It didn't occur to me then, but it also explains everything that's happening on the web. It's the same damn war.

Alphabet aka Google derive 80% of their revenue from online ads. For all intents and purposes it has no other source of income. However, it still own just a very thin slice of the stack that brings in money.

So, it does all it can to take control of as much of the stack as possible:

- AMP, subsume websites and ad distribution channels.

- Chrome, subsume web standards and replace them with "if it works in Chrome, it's a standard" (web.dev serves as a propaganda machine for this, as well)

- Google Services, subsume as much of digital life as possible under a single controlling entity (AOSP is a lifeless husk, and will remain so)

and so on.

Google is very intentional

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#37

Post by syshum »

jojobas wrote: post #19
swiley wrote: post #3

Do not use software that you cannot self host.

Can you host your own web search? (Or can you function without a web search?) Can you host your own auction platform for everything? News aggregator? Global GIS with updates?

>>Can you host your own web search? (Or can you function without a web search?)

Yes [1]

[1]https://yacy.net/

>>Can you host your own auction platform for everything?

Seems odd to call this out, you must you ebay alot. I dont think I have every bought anything from ebay, i always found the "auction" format off putting, I prefer normal eCommerce. And there are PLENTY of self hosting eCommerce platforms, I am sure a few of them have a action function

>>News aggregator?

Yes, plent of those exist, I never use google for news, though I do not self host my own either but I could. Today I use Feedly alot, but I have run RSS readers, and other news aggregators in the past

>>Global GIS with updates?

Self Hosting does not mean you cut yourself off from the world of data, OpenStreetMap and other such service crowdsource data that you can then ingest into your selfhosted service. So yes I believe you can do this

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#38

Post by Kye »

samizdis wrote: post #2

In 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 remember a story from someone at Google about someone who emailed them with a number every once in a while, and the number kept going up. They finally figured out it was the size of the Google home page, and the person was making sure they knew when it was getting bigger. It was something small, but big for the time. It's now almost 1MB zipped.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#39

Post by 1cvmask »

I had written this regarding the rebranding of Facebook to Meta and the genius of the Google (Alphabet) co-founders extricating themselves from being the evil personas:

“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas." ("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")”

― Charles Baudelaire

The smartest thing that the Google co-founders did is to step out of the "picture" and have a "nerdish" dignitary Sundar Pichai be the face of the company.

The type of headlines we won't see anymore since they have "stepped down".

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-goo...

https://pando.com/2014/05/13/emails-showing-googles-closenes...

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#40

Post by andrewinardeer »

Kye wrote: post #38
samizdis wrote: post #2

In 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 remember a story from someone at Google about someone who emailed them with a number every once in a while, and the number kept going up. They finally figured out it was the size of the Google home page, and the person was making sure they knew when it was getting bigger. It was something small, but big for the time. It's now almost 1MB zipped.

I thought it was the number of characters on their homepage that was emailed to them, not the size of the page in mb.
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