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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

#101

Post by djhworld »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #7

Did anyone get it working on MacOS? I couldn't find the audio library in homebrew and gave up.

other option is to clone the repo but pipe the output to the terminal bell instead - probably not as good as the OPs solution but has a similar effect :)

    sudo tcpdump -n -l dst net 192.0.2.1/32 $(for a in $(cat goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | xargs -I {} bash -c  "tput bel"
EDIT: it's definitely not as good as the OPs solution as the bells sometimes get skipped when there are lots of packets.

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

#102

Post by rolisz »

kylevedder wrote: post #80
arrosenberg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And Google Photos, which initially included unlimited compressed photo storage, killed off competitors and then changed it to 15 GB.

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

#103

Post by Jensson »

arrosenberg wrote: post #92
kylevedder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A majority of Googles revenue comes from running ads on their own sites. Their third party ad network is a small part of their revenue, so the correct direction is to say that Google is subsidising its third party ad network via their first party ad business.

The effect of antitrust would then be that Google separates the ad service for its own services and third party services, which would force their third party ad service to become more expensive since it can no longer rely so heavily on the draw of all the Google properties.

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

#106

Post by throwaway4220 »

kylevedder wrote: post #56
cogman10 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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'm a trillionaire who can hire maybe 10,001 minimum wage workers to follow you and the top 10,000 earners in the US around anywhere you go and record every single thing you do from a safe distance in public spaces (including stores, malls, church etc, looking in through your windows from the street). I'm not doing anything illegal, but you probably think it's creepy. How can I explain to you that it's not?

Earlier you said, tracking pays for free services you use but doesn't have a net negative effect on your life. How can you tell? And if you can tell, what's the problem with being informed of how often you're being tracked?

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

#107

Post by Karrot_Kream »

kylevedder wrote: post #82
dogman144 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive corpus of research on this that I think you’re unaware of. Start with the Snowden leaks and work your way back. Since I can’t reply to below, the general approach of “I don’t know about this so it must not exist and I won’t research” is very backward if you’re in a PhD program. I get what you’re getting at. Google just builds the technology, the rest is up to the users. That said, re: Snowden, IC p…

The Snowden leaks were about NSA data collection. Last I checked the NSA was not a tracking ads powered big tech company. Also I hope you realize pointing me to an entire metaverse of memes is not an argument. If this corpus is so massive it should be easy to concretely point to several very specific examples, not hand wave at the entirety of one of the largest national security leaks in American history .

This reminds me of the Slashdot days where commenters would have a hard time distinguishing between the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Government (TM). They were roughly convinced that the 3 just formed this nebulous malicious entity.

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

#108

Post by jer0me »

nano9 wrote: post #67
7373737373 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've noticed hcaptcha being used more widely.

I believe that hCaptcha pays the site administrator, so for a Cloudflare or Discord it could be a sizable chunk of cash. Maybe not to them, but it’s something.

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

#109

Post by ephbit »

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…

> If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse ...

You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly still get good results from google.

There are dozens if not hundreds of discussions here in HN where people complain about exactly the opposite.

Google search results have become worse and worse in recent years, mostly except for search queries that involve finding buyable products anyway.

Many other searches where the goal is to simply find a text containing the search terms in a common context (simple retrieval of information) have become consistently worse, is my impression. The results for these searches are typically littered with non sense sites that contain ads for related products and random collections of key words.

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

#110

Post by ShroudedNight »

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…

A significant quantity of the ad space is pernicious: The ads seeking to be displayed are explicitly intending to manipulate the viewer to change their cognitive orientation to the benefit of the buyer, with anywhere from callous disregard to outright contempt for the viewer's outcomes.

Big tech has significantly aided in the delivery of these harmful messages, and seeks to use personalized information to find the channels, times, and context that are _most_ effective at undermining the will and agency of the viewers.

Are there models where an information / recommendation broker could justifiably collect what would otherwise be concerning amounts of personal information? Potentially, if it were using that information to compute and facilitate the maximal individually beneficial outcomes of each individual user, but that's not what's happening here. Right now, we're building a system that would happily have people die painfully and preventably at 40 after living miserable lives because the economic returns of that model maximize the returns on advertisers / delivery networks.

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