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Welcome to Google Island

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Re: Welcome to Google Island

#81

Post by dragonwriter »

alanh wrote: post #77
moultano wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in fact, it doesn't. http://www.google.com/policies/technologies/ "We don’t sell users’ personal information."

So, there’s a semantic trick here. Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has . Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?

> Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has .

> Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?

No. Its selling the service of advertising to people for whom some fact holds.

The rest is assumption on the part of the party purchasing the advertising based on the fact of that purchase and behavior in response to the advertising. The response to the advertising is what provides personal information, just as it is in the case of nontargetted advertising in offline media where the advertising includes a call to action which is directed (through the content of the add rather than user-specific targeting) to people for whom certain facts hold.

Unless you are going to argue that everyone who sells advertising space to people who include a call to action that involves a response to the party purchasing the advertising is "selling personal information" since they are selling advertisers a mechanism by which a message to can be sent to which the response can be used to deduce personal information, then, no, what Google is doing isn't selling personal information.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#82

Post by Yen »

gaius wrote: post #51
abcd_f wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that he's the only one with the root access.

Quite. In the Star Trek example, the Captain can say "Computer, locate X", and sometimes he says "Computer, deactivate X's devices" and the computer just does it. It's very unlikely, because he's an idealized fictional hero, that anyone with that kind of power in the real work, is as wise and benevolent as Picard - and even Picard makes mistakes.

Two things about Star Trek -

1. Other characters can and do ask for locations. This is apparently considered non-private information.

2. As open and utopian as the Federation may be portrayed to be, Picard is still the commander of a military vessel, so I wouldn't be surprised if in other contexts, computers give out less personal information and grant less power to administrators.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#83

Post by methodin »

We haven't passed through the digital renaissance yet. Shouldn't be too long (10 years? - right now it's just a party) but until then lines will be gray and rules will be befuddled. You need to have the visionaries to get us through it, though. There aren't many.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#84

Post by stevenbedrick »

declan wrote: post #45
stevenbedrick wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keyword search isn't good enough anymore Citation needed. I'd actually be quite satisfied if the current state of the art for general-purpose web IR stayed about where it is now- it's pretty dang good! I can't remember the last time I needed to find something using text search and was unable to. And when Google folks talk about making search "better", what they seem to generally be talking about these days is makin…

Sometimes it's the technologists who are the most resistant to technological change. I sometimes get annoyed when Google displays results other than the 10 blue links, and tries to correct my searches when I'm searching for info on APIs, but I recognize that I'm in a minority and most people would benefit from more hand-holding. Put another way, you may be comfortable enough with computers to remember what directory…

Good point, and there are a lot of factors that go into it. r00fus made a similar point in a sibling reply, and I absolutely agree that users like us are quite different than 99.99999% of Google's other users- it definitely sounds like we have similar family members. And as I replied below, experts and novices have very different needs in terms of their information behavior.

I still don't think that lets Google off the hook, though; it just makes it more important that their personalization strategy be backed by very flexible, granular, and technically meaningful privacy controls. It means that Google should be setting an even higher bar in terms of educating their users about precisely what data gets collected and exactly how it gets used- and they should empower their users to control how that personal data impacts their experience using Google's products.

The number of their users who actually care about this stuff right now is basically a rounding error when compared to their total user numbers, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. And hopefully, as more and more of our life is conducted online, the number of people who care about this will increase.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#85

Post by alanh »

dragonwriter wrote: post #81
alanh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, there’s a semantic trick here. Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has . Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?

> Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has . > Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally? No. Its selling the service of advertising…

No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action.

That is a false equivalency.

I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google. Of course I consider my criticism to be broad enough to apply to similar situations involving other ad networks (and to Facebook), but we are discussing specifically Google’s privacy policy.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#86

Post by dragonwriter »

alanh wrote: post #85
dragonwriter wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has . > Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally? No. Its selling the service of advertising…

No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action. That is a false equivalency. I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google. Of course I consider my criticism to be broad enough to apply to similar situations involving other ad networks (and to Facebook), but we are discussing specifically Google’s privacy policy.

> No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action.

No, I'm saying that the personal information that the advertisers get is what they deduce from the response to the call to action. Filtering who sees the ad (among other functions, this isn't actually the most important) serves a mechanism to attempt to shape the pool of people who respond to the call to action, but its not really different (in terms of the advertiser being able to derive personal information) from the use of the actual content of the ad to influence which people who are exposed to it will respond.

> I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google.

Pointing out errors in your argument isn't attacking you. And, to be sure, the errors in your argument have nothing to do with the fact that it references Google, but with the fact that it posits a false equivalency between selling personal information and selling target advertising placement based on the fact that advertisers can derive personal information from the active responses of advertising viewers to the calls to action in targetted ads.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#87

Post by 205guy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #81
alanh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, there’s a semantic trick here. Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has . Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?

> Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in , Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has . > Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally? No. Its selling the service of advertising…

"People for whom some fact holds" IS the very definition of personal information.

What's missing from the GP's example is showing the ad for medication to the same user on a later unrelated search. On any given search, I would expect an ad-sponsored search provider to give me ads related to the current search term. If the seach provider stores my search history and serves me ads from previous search terms, that is personal information being sold, in my opinion.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#88

Post by 205guy »

robterrell wrote: post #21
ender7 wrote: post #20

(disclaimer: I work for Google. My words are not theirs) At first I thought "oh. Google fan fiction. This is what we have come to." After a moment, though, I realized that this article isn't really any different from the other hyperventilating blog posts that have appeared all over HN recently. I'm not saying that these aren't important topics to discuss, but everything I've read recently has come off as a prurient p…

The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. That makes sense. Why can't we have both? If Google needs to store all my context data off in the cloud somewhere, why not absolut…

> The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to.

This does not make sense to me. And actually, it sounds a lot like employee cool-aid. Not everyone wants such an interface and it's not given that you need to know anything about the person it's talking to. In fact, I want the AI that I interact with to be perfectly anonymous and give the same answers to everybody.

In fact, I think I would trust search more if it were totally anonymous. What I searched for last week may or may not impact my search this week, so don't go assuming it will. I want the "pure" results, not filtered by what some algorithm "thinks."

Example: a friend runs a car repair shop and sends me email to my gmail account. When I search for car repair shop, should the AI prioritize my friend's shop in the results? What if a car repair shop sent out spam that didn't get filtered out of my inbox yet? What if I gave my email to the shop a year ago when I entered a sweepstakes?

The more I think about it, the only reason I can see to gather personal info is to benefit Google by selling more expensive advertizing. If google provided "pure" search results without using any personalized info, that would be the best in all situations.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#89

Post by liberalfool »

bjhoops1 wrote: post #57
stevenbedrick wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keyword search isn't good enough anymore Citation needed. I'd actually be quite satisfied if the current state of the art for general-purpose web IR stayed about where it is now- it's pretty dang good! I can't remember the last time I needed to find something using text search and was unable to. And when Google folks talk about making search "better", what they seem to generally be talking about these days is makin…

I agree on "personalized" search. It can be handy (I search "Backbone" and get BackboneJS), but I worry that highly personalized search and content can lead to a feedback loop in which your pre-existing perceptions and biases are perpetually reaffirmed. Imagine someone who takes Fox News and InfoWars seriously only being presented information from those sources. They could never escape! Or take someone interested in…

I take Fox News seriously, especially when they're the only major American news outlet that asks tough questions of the establishment in D.C., especially the liberals in power.

Too bad you had to litter this thread with your naive politics, and end up displaying your ignorance as well.

Re: Welcome to Google Island

#90

Post by liberalfool »

declan wrote: post #48
robterrell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. That makes sense. Why can't we have both? If Google needs to store all my context data off in the cloud somewhere, why not absolut…

Google has done just that: 1. When DOJ sent Google a subpoena for search logs, Google fought it in court, while Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL did not: http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/... 2. Google is lobbying to change federal law to require search warrants backed by probable cause and signed by a judge for stored cloud email (and Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, etc.) files, a privacy protectio…

Oh please Google's top brass are in bed with Obama, regardless of a few differences on this or that.
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