Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 210 posts

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

#111

Post by y42 »

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…

With financing through ads comes a dependency of the content provider aka publisher. And this leads to a lower quality. Its about getting attention, not about quality content. It does affect you, you just dont see it, I dare to say.

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

#113

Post by tablespoon »

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…

> Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad, as the logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data about your browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill in the logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot more persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making fancy graphs.

But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution.

Making the invisible visible creates a situation where people can start asking questions about that thing, instead of ignoring or being ignorant of it.

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

#114

Post by alcover »

rolisz wrote: post #102
kylevedder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Holly.. you made me understand why vertical anti-trust is a thing. (I'm slow..).

A single company, google, gives a photo-service for free, while making enormous bread through ads. On its own the free service would be dead on arrival but now it's sustained by the ads branch of the company, making it unbeatable. Then pure-photo-service competitors die and you get a monopoly.

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

#116

Post by wizofaus »

ephbit wrote: post #109
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…

> 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 p…

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

Add me to that list. Google results are invariably superior every time I've tried out alternatives. I wish it weren't so, as there's still a lot of room for improvement with Google but they have such a monopoly they're unlikely to invest heavily in further advances if there's any risk it reduces their ad revenue.

Do you have some specific examples where an alternative web search returned better results than Google?

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

#117

Post by neurostimulant »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #9

Not to make excuses for Google, but is this an entirely accurate portrayal? Like, I've been working on a web project that doesn't contain any analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool, I would hear lots of noise. But, I just can't imagine how Google could do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.

Even without any app opened, my manjaro installation seems to ping detectportal.firefox.com which is hosted in google ip address which trigger the noise. With firefox open, the noise got worse. I think firefox sync servers might be located on GCP. But then I tried pinging my GCP server and it didn't trigger the noise.

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

#118

Post by filoleg »

cogman10 wrote: post #48
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…

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…

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

Two crucial details you omitted:

1. Facebook didn't just hand over the data. It was a court order. At no point had the data just randomly got collected in some dragnet. They got a targeted precise warrant from the court to obtain specific messages of a specific person. Unless you got a court warrant against you, I don't see a reason to worry about here. None of this is related to "data collection".

2. It was unencrypted messages where the defendant was conspiring with another person to perform an abortion past 23 weeks (aka 5mo+, which is illegal almost everywhere in the world), and then conceal the crime by burning (in a literal fire) the physical evidence. Mind you, abortions are totally legal up to 22 weeks in Nebraska. Meanwhile, EU has only 2 countries with limits up to 24 weeks, with the rest being 20 weeks or less[0].

Tldr: if you send an unencrypted message to your crime co-conspirator (where you are discussing specific details of your actual plan to commit a crime), and then get caught via other methods, don't be surprised when the court sends a legal order to obtain your unencrypted messages as evidence.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe

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

#119

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

I see 2 problems with ad-funded services:

1) nobody can compete with free.

2) the service and the advertising are tied together, with the amount of money being earned by said advertising is private.

The second point can be addressed without necessarily banning advertising, but having the advertising separate from the services - you have some kind of ad platform/etc that by itself is neutral and you can browse it (and look/click at ads) to earn money, which you can then choose to spend on anything, including other services. This means services still have to compete on price, even though that price remains "free" to the end-user as they're using the advertising platform to earn money to then spend it on services.

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

#120

Post by Nextgrid »

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?

Given the amount of factors that go into ad targeting it's pretty much impossible to prove without a source code audit. It also means it's easy for Google to do it and get away with it as nobody can prove it. Given the business model of Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they did it, especially considering they've already proven their bad faith with various dark patterns and their intentional refusal to comply with the GDPR (for 4 years their "consent" flow wasn't compliant as you couldn't decline as easily as accept).
Post reply on HN