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Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

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Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#41

Post by rockostrich »

kylevedder wrote: post #40
kornhole wrote: post #10

A common explanation I get from people with poor digital hygiene is that they do not see how it is affecting them. Making the imperceptible perceptible is a great concept for more innovations. I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool of all the data that shows impact…

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an ar…

Same here when it comes to how it affects me personally, but I can see how it affects society as a whole (or how it could affect kids) so easily.

Most people don't have an understanding about how their browsing is a part of a positive feedback loop that pushes them into echo chambers on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc. It's a consequence of relying on advertising as a revenue generator for these services. Teaching your kids about how their data is being used for this purpose is important. Sending them raw DNS logs to do that is definitely not going to be effective though.

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#42

Post by 7373737373 »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #5
nousermane wrote: post #2

Or alternatively, you can send all the traffic destined to google, into dev-null instead: U=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert\ /googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt for i in $(wget -qO - $U); do ip route add unreach $i done ...but you'd be surprised how many of seemingly unrelated places on the Internet would break without google.

Yeah, their captcha is everywhere for starters. Obviously a lot of other deps too.

How come there isn't a single open source captcha solution?

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#43

Post by kylevedder »

kylevedder wrote: post #40
kornhole wrote: post #10

A common explanation I get from people with poor digital hygiene is that they do not see how it is affecting them. Making the imperceptible perceptible is a great concept for more innovations. I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool of all the data that shows impact…

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an ar…

This a bit orthogonal so I put it in a separate comment, but let me be even more aggressive and do a bit of offense:

I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having this information, rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful.

But attacking ads and ad tracking, the revenue model of the free web, is materially harmful. Imagine how much worse the world would be if Google search weren't free -- even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge (not to mention how much worse the user experience would be to quickly Google something). Humanity collectively would be very non trivially worse off.

Seriously, what other business model besides tracked ads can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, let alone power growth, at companies providing free services like Google Search, Maps, etc, that don't have such grossly negative externalities like severely curtailing human development and don't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of people who are prima facie annoyed by a company using the interactions with their free service to make money?

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#44

Post by surfpel »

kornhole wrote: post #10

A common explanation I get from people with poor digital hygiene is that they do not see how it is affecting them. Making the imperceptible perceptible is a great concept for more innovations. I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool of all the data that shows impact…

Maybe you could log the same things that trackers do and creep them out by it somehow. Kids especially have a harder time truly comprehending things that don’t come with some emotional weight.

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#45

Post by leodriesch »

7373737373 wrote: post #42
jnsaff2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, their captcha is everywhere for starters. Obviously a lot of other deps too.

How come there isn't a single open source captcha solution?

I’d say captchas are reliant on not being open about their detection methods, otherwise they would be easier to game.

AFAIK the image selection is only part of determining you’re a human, the other part is tracking your mouse movement and so to see if you’re real.

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#46

Post by kylevedder »

rockostrich wrote: post #41
kylevedder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an ar…

Same here when it comes to how it affects me personally, but I can see how it affects society as a whole (or how it could affect kids) so easily. Most people don't have an understanding about how their browsing is a part of a positive feedback loop that pushes them into echo chambers on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc. It's a consequence of relying on advertising as a revenue generator for these services. Teaching you…

It's valid to point out to children that platforms have an incentive to suck them in and keep them on there, but this has nothing to do with ads.

Netflix is a paid subscription service that does not show you ads, yet they have just as strong of an incentive to keep you on their platform as much as possible so you don't go to a competitor. This is simply the nature of online services -- a better online service keeps you on there longer, and in a world of significant online competition, everyone is trying to suck you in.

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#47

Post by zwkrt »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15
akie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I can't imagine Google would know how to do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs. They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them. Their whole suite of "free" developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online.

> They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them But if they don't know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to? The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?

You’re not thinking on a big enough scale. No big tech company cares about “your” data. They care about everyone’s data in aggregate as much as they can get from every location at every granularity. Even thinking of a tech company as collecting all of “your” data to create an ad profile “for you” is rather inaccurate. They’re collecting everyone’s data to create an ad profile for everybody, tailored to what makes the most money in aggregate across all ad slots.

When you think of it like this you’ll stop asking questions like “what would they do with this piece of data?” Because the answer is always that it is a drop in a giant ocean of machine learning data.

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#48

Post by cogman10 »

kylevedder wrote: post #43
kylevedder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an ar…

This a bit orthogonal so I put it in a separate comment, but let me be even more aggressive and do a bit of offense: I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having this information, rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful. But attacking ads and ad trackin…

So let me bring up some of the exceptions I can think of.

Recently, a woman got an abortion and part of what the prosecution used against her was data collected from facebook.

With google's tracking, is it not unlikely that a government body could subpoena them for search histories? (which, they do already) to look for questions like "has this individual asked about abortions recently?"

Perhaps you view that as moral, but what about other things a totalitarian government might want to control? What about China trying to find the identities of people protesting them? Is it not unlikely that they might have search history data betraying that they are a protestor or likely protestor?

But then there is the question of why they even need that data in the first place. You argue "how else would they make money?" and I'd argue "well, ads?". The reason, the real reason, google collects this data isn't because they have to, it's because it's more profitable if ads are better targeted and more customized per individual. Google would certainly take a profit hit if they stopped the data tracking, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still be one of the biggest and best places to advertise on the internet. They'd simply be less profitable.

Re: Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

#49

Post by drcongo »

kylevedder wrote: post #40
kornhole wrote: post #10

A common explanation I get from people with poor digital hygiene is that they do not see how it is affecting them. Making the imperceptible perceptible is a great concept for more innovations. I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool of all the data that shows impact…

>they do not see how it is affecting them I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running. Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an ar…

Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn't pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you once googled a symptom, or your flight prices because your search history reveals your disposable income? Or even, taken to extremes, it could even preclude your from even getting health insurance because it can prove knowledge of a pre-existing condition.
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