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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

#91

Post by kylevedder »

mola wrote: post #71
kylevedder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/con…

I wholesale reject the following:

1) Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system -- they're getting raked over the coals at dog and pony show anti trust hearings.

2) completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent -- you literally gave these websites this information, and there's legal privacy policies that no one reads describing how it's used. If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't give it to them.

3) Authoritarianism can creep up on you -- ok and? The fact that Google's ad auctions are more efficient isn't going to cause authoritarianism.

4) Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? -- lmao no

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

#92

Post by arrosenberg »

kylevedder wrote: post #86
arrosenberg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not how antitrust laws work.

You're asserting that's not how they work, but you're also asserting they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps business with... the revenue they generate from selling ads space on their search and maps businesses. I'll leave it as an exercise to the lurkers to decide who is probably right.

> you're also asserting they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps business with... the revenue they generate from selling ads space on their search and maps businesses.

Yes, that is how these things tend to work! Seriously, read some books on antitrust, you have no idea what you are talking about. Tim Wu is a good starting point.

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

#93

Post by kylevedder »

scubbo wrote: post #64
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…

I've never seen such a concise and well-articulated statement of this position. Thank you for presenting it! I instinctively disagree with it, but I can't actually provide a coherent and convincing counter-argument, which is probably a sign that I need to think more on it. Thank you for that prompt. The best counter-argument I can think of is: > the claim that only Google (or, "only organizations large enough to requ…

A lot of AV companies bootstrapped their maps off of OpenStreetMaps -- it's great anything is free, but they kind of suck. The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info.

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

#94

Post by skummetmaelk »

kylevedder wrote: post #73
cogman10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.)

If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam sites with vapid auto content.

Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to remove the doping to see how he really fares against the others.

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

#95

Post by advisedwang »

somedude895 wrote: post #85
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.

> Their whole suite of "free" developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online. Is this actually confirmed to be true? It would make a lot of sense for them to use free-tier GA data for profiling for Display ads etc, but has it ever actually been proven?

Probably not for the CDN stuff

From https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq:

> The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection ... the Google Fonts API does not set or log cookies ... resource-specific domains...don't contain any credentials ... IP addresses are not logged.

From https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/terms

> Google Hosted Libraries uses resource-specific domains... Requests unauthenticated ... Google Hosted Libraries only uses cookies as necessary for security and to prevent abuse ... Our systems are designed to remove HTTP referer information before logging

But analytics is a totally different story. https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

> when you visit a website that uses...Google Analytics...your web browser automatically sends certain information to Google. This includes the URL of the page you’re visiting and your IP address. We may also set cookies on your browser or read cookies that are already there. Apps that use Google advertising services also share information with Google, such as the name of the app and a unique identifier for advertising > Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to ... personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps

So Google's policies do let them use 3rd party Google Analytics data to target ads.

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

#96

Post by kylevedder »

scubbo wrote: post #69
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…

Putting this in a sibling comment because it's tangential to my more-relevant response about an alternative business model. --- The claim that citizens of western-style democracies have mechanisms to modify government behaviour is technically true, but meaningless. The average Western citizen has more chance of becoming an Astronaut or solving a Millenium problem than they do of effecting real govenmental change with…

And you think that complaining about tech companies, companies owned by share holders who have no particular obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders, is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want?

Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation, something which we've already seen occur with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US. It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those bills though, so I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.

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

#98

Post by kylevedder »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #94
kylevedder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 natu…

>If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO

This is just nonsense. If there were no ads, hyperoptimized SEO would only be more important because it's the only way for you as a web admin to surface your content in people's searches.

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

#99

Post by Karrot_Kream »

scubbo wrote: post #69
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…

Putting this in a sibling comment because it's tangential to my more-relevant response about an alternative business model. --- The claim that citizens of western-style democracies have mechanisms to modify government behaviour is technically true, but meaningless. The average Western citizen has more chance of becoming an Astronaut or solving a Millenium problem than they do of effecting real govenmental change with…

I disagree vehemently as someone involved in transit and housing activism. The cause did, does, and probably will continue to feel hopeless. There are days I walk out of talking with others about issues or days where a Mayor walks back a commitment that punch you in the gut. But through organization and by looking back over the last 5 years of activism in my community/area, I can see the real work that's been done. (It helps that our work results in infrastructure changes, of course.)

As far as a candidate, trust me there are hungry junior political candidates all the time that are happy to take campaign donations and meet their constituents demands. The quickest way to become a popular, well-funded candidate is to represent a wealthy, grassroots cause with no representation. If you're concerned about this, contribute to the EFF, and maybe even consider joining them! Don't put your anger into online zealotry if you live in a democratic country, use that energy to petition the government for change.

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

#100

Post by skummetmaelk »

kylevedder wrote: post #98
skummetmaelk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 natu…

>If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO This is just nonsense. If there were no ads, hyperoptimized SEO would only be more important because it's the only way for you as a web admin to surface your content in people's searches.

Okay, and that's going to benefit blogspam and auto generated content how exactly? That's the SEO that people complain about. Not being able to search for reviews for products because the results are all spammy "BEST VACUUM IN 2022" type results. Googling tech support questions leads you to auto generated mirror sites that only exist to scam you into viewing ads. etc. etc.

Anyway, you conveniently ignored the rest of the post.

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