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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

#121

Post by somat »

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…

any body remember the spinning cube of doom? it was a visualization for your packet sniffer. you could use it to characterize attacks. perhaps we need something like that but for outbound data.

found it.

https://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/nersc-news/nersc-cen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pgE6WiNvkA&t=107s

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

#122

Post by Nextgrid »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #24
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

At a minimum they could build cohorts of people who use your app and use that as a bit of information for ad targeting. The SHA-1 thing is a complete non-sequitur, but since you asked, small amounts of data run through unsalted SHA-1 can be brute-forced very easily if someone cared find out where you are.

You don't need the SHA1 or anything within the blobs even. Just an IP address & user-agent pair is enough to uniquely identify a user with some accuracy, and that accuracy only goes up the more data you add. It'll never be 100% accurate, but for ad targeting, it doesn't need to be - a "hunch" is more than enough since getting it wrong leaves you no worse than you were before.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

kleer001 wrote: post #59
handity wrote: post #11

I consider myself very privacy conscious, bordering on the paranoid. I use FOSS as much as possible, avoid FAANG, and remove surveillance from my life wherever I can. This tool shocked me. It exposes in a visceral way just how prevalent Google is, and does a better job getting that idea across than every video, article, post or comment I've consumed on the topic.

As a counter point (and you're not wrong, this is just my take)... I consider myself privacy and security and convenience conscious, not at all paranoid yet as I don't expect I have aroused the interest of a State power (touch wood). I use what most people use and prefer less friction over philosophically and/or ethically pure services. This tool made me shrug. Sure, yea, that's not an unexpected frequency, I guess.…

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by dmitriid »

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…

> keeps the many free services I value greatly running.

You don't need continuous pervasive tracking without people's consent to run ads and keep the free service running.

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

#125

Post by su2 »

Cool idea!

I replaced the "teller" program part also with shell script, so that one would give you the clicking without the need to compile:

  sudo tcpdump -n -l dst host 8.8.8.8 $(for a in $(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert/googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | while read; do paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/dialog-information.oga; done
Quite enlightening to have that running while browsing...

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

#126

Post by kylevedder »

tablespoon wrote: post #113
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…

> 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…

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

No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot of data is sound. The part that's missing is why is this bad.

No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in their own argue why this data collection is bad. This argument as to why is what's missing, and until nominal privacy advocates start putting together coherent arguments as to why it's bad (and, importantly, why these costs do not merit the benefits), they're not making forward progress.

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

#127

Post by dmitriid »

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…

You can have ads without tracking. I don't think anyone is against ads per se. People are against pervasive continuous tracking and wholesale sale of data to anyone.

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

#128

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

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.

> they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps business with... [their ads business]

I suspect this is what what @arrosenberg is getting at. If the Search (and maps) business is considered separate from the ads business (Search runs at a massive loss) and it's provided for free because they can subsidize it with the revenue from their ad business, then it's an anti-competetive advantage they have from a monopolistic position that their advertising business has.

Anyway, personally I have no clue how that "works" in practice, but that seems to be the perspective.

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

#129

Post by wahnfrieden »

kylevedder wrote: post #126
tablespoon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution. No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot of data is sound. The part that's missing is why is this bad . No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in their own argue why this data collection is bad. This argument as to why is what's missing, and until nominal privacy advocates start putting to…

you can go learn about state surveillance more generally to answer that instead of handwaving it away as 'seems worth it to me'

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

#130

Post by kylevedder »

dmitriid wrote: post #127
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…

You can have ads without tracking. I don't think anyone is against ads per se. People are against pervasive continuous tracking and wholesale sale of data to anyone.

>wholesale sale of data to anyone

You know Google doesn't do this, right? Besides being against their own terms of service (and outright illegal), they're economically incentivized not to; they use the data to make their ad auctions more efficient, an edge they would lose if they sold the raw data.

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