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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

#71

Post by mola »

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…

The attitude that if the government is using the data collected by tech companies to bypass constitutional limitation, then it's a problem with government and not big tech, is rather reductionist. This is a tangled system and you cannot completely separate the issues as you so simply claim. Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system. The citizen/consumer is massively under represented and underpowered to make changes to the system once it's in place.

Not to mention the completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent. I bet that most ppl twenty years ago, if asked if they would consent to giving an exact timeline of their activities to third parties in exchange to free entertainment would probably not readily agree. Big tech lied to consumers until it normalized the new surveillance status que, that's immoral and wrong, even if it's extremely profitable.

Your individualistic perspective, where you dismiss any harms if they do not relate to you personally, is very short sighted. Authoritarianism can creep up on you, first it targets the weekest, and before you know it, it could be you. Surveillance tech is a tool for authoritarianism, apart from it's inherent immorality because of how it was hidden from the consumer, it is corrupting democracies and gives them a very authoritarian tint.

Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders.

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

#72

Post by Karrot_Kream »

kylevedder wrote: post #62
kornhole wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The visualization is useful for those who already understand how it harms them and society. If someone likes to be watched and controlled, this type of visualization is not of much value.

"if you know you know" isn't an argument. This is just empty rhetoric -- dogmatically asserting that tracking ads damage society and that I'm being controlled by it is a pretty strong claim, and a claim that requires evidence to support it. If this is the typical quality of your privacy argumentation then it should be no surprise that your children don't buy your arguments.

You're not going to win this "fight" on HN, I've been here for years. People here are convinced that every piece of data being collected is a moral evil.

They'll vaguely wave at things like DNS logs or server IP logs, and always assume that everything is always feeding huge tracking machines at big companies. They'll mix up tracking used for logs with tracking used for ads with tracking used to improve the product. There's no real understanding of what cohort sizes or signals are needed to make tracking meaningful. It's a mess.

IMO it's good to be sensitive about the data we send and hold tech companies accountable for how much data they take. I've also worked on big tech teams that collect data. But the arguments here are always so black-and-white that they don't make any meaningful point.

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

#73

Post by kylevedder »

cogman10 wrote: post #61
kylevedder wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At an object level, "not having XYZ actions occur from the government" is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving); it's absurd to complain about tech companies when you're actually upset with the government. This does doubly so when the primary threat to…

> is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving) Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" as one of their issues. I mean, come on. This is a niche issue that has little public awareness. To…

>Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies"

Again, your list of complaints revolved about the government getting their hands on all this data and using it for purposes you don't like. If you're upset about that, there's plenty of people interested in civil rights.

But if digital privacy is such a niche issue, how come Europe and the United States have GDPR?

>This is a Google issue... ...the FBI...

Again, you're upset with the behavior of the FBI, not Google. Vote for people who restrict the FBI's ability to request this data instead of getting mad at the existence of tracking ad data.

>I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model, ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular throughout the internet right up until google took things over with doubleclick.

And the fact that Google captures information about what sites you've been to in order to make ad auctions more efficient is so odious to you that you want to move everyone back in time to a demonstratively less efficient business model which hurts ad buyers (other businesses) at least as much as it does Google? You must know your proposed business model isn't nearly as good, but you've yet to articulate what exactly we're getting for it that makes the cost worth it.

>duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.)

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

#74

Post by UncleMeat »

dogman144 wrote: post #66
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 is a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance that causes AdWords to keep growing despite the people building it being smart folks. It doesn’t affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine. There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.

How is it anti-democratic? I'm on board with a ton of criticisms of surveillance capitalism, but "anti-democratic" isn't one I understand.

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

#75

Post by easrng »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #21
phh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you need a proprietary firebase SDK in your app to use it? Do you know what data are included in the requests? I would argue that anything as simple as IP + UA/OSidentifier can be of interest to Google

I've just been using XMLHttpRequest and the Firebase REST API, no SDK. I imagine Google can see the IP address, but I think that's it? (This is my first time building anything that involves a "backend", so I am pretty new to this!)

It depends what browser you're using and what parameters you're using on the XMLHttpRequest. They definitely get the IP, user agent (so what OS and browser), and potentially more.

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

#76

Post by kylevedder »

dogman144 wrote: post #66
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 is a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance that causes AdWords to keep growing despite the people building it being smart folks. It doesn’t affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine. There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.

>There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.

If you can't mount a coherent argument that doesn't assume the conclusion, you should consider the possibility that the conclusion simply isn't true.

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

#77

Post by kylevedder »

arrosenberg wrote: post #68
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…

“Free services” are not free. They are ad-subsidized, and thus anticompetitive. They are affecting your life by messing up the competitive market economy. The fact that you value them greatly means you should pay for them, which you are - with your limited attention span. Its an insidious price to pay. You may accept this bargain, but most of us hate it, and are not being offered a competitive market alternative to t…

How are ad funded websites "anti competitive"? Start by defining "anti competitive", as I suspect you're using a non standard definition.

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

#78

Post by arrosenberg »

kylevedder wrote: post #77
arrosenberg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free services” are not free. They are ad-subsidized, and thus anticompetitive. They are affecting your life by messing up the competitive market economy. The fact that you value them greatly means you should pay for them, which you are - with your limited attention span. Its an insidious price to pay. You may accept this bargain, but most of us hate it, and are not being offered a competitive market alternative to t…

How are ad funded websites "anti competitive"? Start by defining "anti competitive", as I suspect you're using a non standard definition.

They are using their ad business (wherein they have an effective monopoly on search engine advertising) to subsidize their other businesses. That is a fairly standard definition for predatory pricing in the US.

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

#79

Post by kylevedder »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #72
kylevedder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you know you know" isn't an argument. This is just empty rhetoric -- dogmatically asserting that tracking ads damage society and that I'm being controlled by it is a pretty strong claim, and a claim that requires evidence to support it. If this is the typical quality of your privacy argumentation then it should be no surprise that your children don't buy your arguments.

You're not going to win this "fight" on HN, I've been here for years. People here are convinced that every piece of data being collected is a moral evil. They'll vaguely wave at things like DNS logs or server IP logs, and always assume that everything is always feeding huge tracking machines at big companies. They'll mix up tracking used for logs with tracking used for ads with tracking used to improve the product. T…

The target audience for my comments are the hundreds of people reading and not commenting. If you're casually reading the comments, without a foil of reasonability, I think it's easy to get sucked into implicitly accepting the premises of the zealots frothing at the mouth in the comments. You're right that I don't imagine I'm going to change the mind of the zealots.

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

#80

Post by kylevedder »

arrosenberg wrote: post #78
kylevedder wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are ad funded websites "anti competitive"? Start by defining "anti competitive", as I suspect you're using a non standard definition.

They are using their ad business (wherein they have an effective monopoly on search engine advertising) to subsidize their other businesses. That is a fairly standard definition for predatory pricing in the US.

Their other businesses being what search or maps? Those are ads properties. You could setup competitors that also serve ads.
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