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Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

theregister.com

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Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#81

Post by codingdave »

iso1210 wrote: post #56
pibechorro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a monopoly. They are dominant. Start using duckduckgo and other similar sevices. The internet is still a free market. If you continue to use their products you are just whining. Become the change you wish to see in the world.

How do you avoid google classroom when the school demands you use google classroom? This is the same principles as the Microsoft monopoly of the 90s and 00s, and that at least gives me hope

You bring your concerns to your local school board. Google is just a vendor - the district can choose whatever vendors they wish.

The problem is that the other vendors aren't all that great. If you really want to take Google down a peg, you need to build better products than they do. Or go offer assistance to their existing competitors.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#82

Post by ConceptJunkie »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #53
jrochkind1 wrote: post #45

As a web developer, the AMP story is notable. On many HN comment-threads people complained that AMP pages were in fact a lot slower than the alternatives they could do, and undesirable in other ways too, and AMP didn't seem to be achieving Google's stated goals for it. Either Google has ulterior malicious motives, people posited; or perhaps is just inertially stuck enforcing something that didn't work out how they in…

I have some nontechnical friends who deeply distrusted and disliked Google. But I always believed Google’s “don’t be evil” line. I’ve learned a lesson.

I went through that same change of opinion several years ago. I now believe that Google is thoroughly evil.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#83

Post by WORMS_EAT_WORMS »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #6

Saying 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)

It’s not just ads - there’s a general feeling with a lot of their products and services priorities have shifted away from protecting the user.

You could find a bone to pick with any big company. It’s just clear priorities at the company have shifted from their fun growth days of just doing what’s best/right for users to optimizing for money and other KPIs - search, ads, you name it.

It’s definitely noticeable and their size/monopoly definitely has influence on society.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#84

Post by shadowgovt »

Cutting through all the commentary in the reporting, the key idea worth considering is that Google has built something very similar to a stock exchange wholly owned and operated by a trading firm that can trade on it, and that arrangement is illegal in the financial sector for a reason.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#85

Post by syshum »

skytreader wrote: post #71
syshum wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is true, in fact it really is opposite. Google has to entice people into voluntary exchange, yes the power is imbalanced but it is possible to remove yourself from google, thousands have. You can not remove yourself from government, if you try they will kill you. Google will not kill you if you stop using their services if I disconnect from my city utilities, if I stop paying taxes, if I grow an unapprov…

> many many studies have been done that prove the will of the people hardly ever changes the will of government Studies such as? Citation needed.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#86

Post by kibwen »

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.

We were all naive in believing that a company that embraced open source could still manage to exercise such ruthless control. We believed that access to source code would save us from any face-heel turn, but that turns out to be a consolation prize at best in the face of such a leviathan adversary.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#87

Post by sviswaysevil »

Honestly, Google was always evil. The founders come from an elitist Stanford background. Eric Schmidt is definitely evil and always has been. He’s a well known misogynist. Hell, all of these people were palling around with Epstein/Maxwell/Edge.org during their supposed “not evil” phase. The very substrate of the company was unethical from the get go.

Edit:

Hey Googlers you can flag this but it’s true:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/llvdoj/thick_as_th...

https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-scott-borgerson-tech...

https://mobile.twitter.com/xeni/status/1231068297505886208

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#88

Post by mech422 »

cinntaile wrote: post #34
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.

Guess it depends on what you mean by garbage... I loved altavista - especially the 'near' keyword. But it didn't have as large an index as google. As the web grew, it just fell further behind.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#89

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

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?

You absolutely can host all of OpenStreetMap yourself, and plenty of people do. https://switch2osm.org/ has instructions on how to get it into a (queryable) Postgres database and serve maps from there, but there are many other possible workflows.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#90

Post by another_why »

Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated like finance, aviation, medicine, and power. The giants who've cheated us must be broken up to their smallest viable constituent parts, and their future interactions be through a framework of radical accountability.

Considering that more than 50%(70? 90?) of IT is 100% based on those ad revenues, sounds very reasonable, yeah. Bees against honey. All those, who cry the most about evil giants, will stand in the lines demanding to fuck off from Google the moment something will REALLY start to happen with those revenues

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