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

151–160 of 210 posts

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

#151

Post by mixmastamyk »

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 .

For the obtuse, NSA's primary sources are big-tech, among others. There's an information-superhighway from one to the other. But you must have known that already, right?

Information is power. Lot of examples from history, say WWII, holocaust and Japanese internment from IBM census data. Stasi, Red scare, blacklisting, Alan Turing coming and going.

More recently, IRS targeting the tea-party, facial recognition, DEA parallel construction, data brokers, data breaches, Chinese persecution, social credit.

Yes, Snowden outlined in his writing what was specifically immoral and undemocratic, such as x-key-score sourced largely from google and friends. Educate yourself.

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

#152

Post by water-your-self »

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…

> tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running.

Your data is not worthless, and generally I consider data harvesting harmful because of the nation-state subpoenas it enables.

If I attend a protest for abortion rights, and my geo data is bound to that event and then I seek an abortion in another state, ive now created a wonderful fingerprint that may soon lead to my incaerceration.

(For americans) But the united states is not even the worst perpetrator. Imagine your least favorite government demanding google gives them a list of anyone that might be a political dissident based on audio they have collected.

Data is a liability.

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

#153

Post by mixmastamyk »

UncleMeat wrote: post #74
dogman144 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance that causes AdWords to keep growing despite the people building it being smart folks. It doesn’t affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine. There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.

How is it anti-democratic? I'm on board with a ton of criticisms of surveillance capitalism, but "anti-democratic" isn't one I understand.

What's the quickest way to bend folks to your will? Apply pressure at their weak points. How would one find them?

Anyone who shares information (even inadvertently) with a third-party, that info becomes government property. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557745

Watch "The United States of Secrets" on Kanopy and sometimes PBS.

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

#154

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

The problem with your argument is that the same mechanisms that are used by government for broad-reaching surveillance are also used for legitimate government purposes. These are things like subpoenas and warrants, which are impossible to eliminate completely while keeping a functional court system.

You could try to argue that we should make sure that these are narrow in scope (that's already the rule despite the current practice), but that doesn't eliminate the problem completely: someone can already subpoena Amazon for "recordings taken in kylevedder's house between 4/22/2022 and 6/22/2022" related to an investigation, and they will get them. Even if you are not the target of the investigation, but they have reason to believe that the target may have visited you during that time period. Such a subpoena has not been tried in civil court yet, but it will likely be allowed. In an alternative world where tech companies don't track you, these subpoenas wouldn't work.

Google, Amazon, and other data collectors have a principal-agent problem with respect to data about you: while you would likely fight a subpoena for your location data tooth and nail, they don't care so much. They will often give up the data, and they won't even tell you they did.

The alternative business models are ad support without tracking and subscriptions. Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. WolframAlpha is a search engine on a subscription model. Micro-subscriptions are already a thing (albeit invented/normalized after Google was invented), and it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products.

As far as this being bad for people, allowing companies to track you invasively is a little like not buying insurance. You won't care most of the time, but you may care a lot. Lots of people don't buy insurance, even though they should, because they severely underestimate tail risk. This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates (or single-payer healthcare), and car insurance mandates in some states all operate on this rationale. So should privacy legislation.

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

#155

Post by pclmulqdq »

filoleg wrote: post #118
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…

> 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…

It is a lot easier to get a court order for something than you probably think. Dragnet versions of court orders also exist, such as geofence warrants. Also, that data is often sold packaged up and sold to third parties via data brokers. The FBI has been known to buy data from data brokers instead of getting it by court order.

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

#156

Post by pclmulqdq »

kylevedder wrote: post #91
mola wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

1) The antitrust hearings are literally dog and pony shows. Nothing has come of them, except slightly increased lobbying spending by Google and Amazon.

2) Other people give it to them, not just you. I tried for years to keep my face off Facebook, and finally made a page to take control of my "shadow profile" because people kept putting it there. Companies often give it to them too, through data brokers.

3) Google's ad auction technology will make authoritarian government much more efficient, the same way IBM's census technology did in the 1930's and 1940's.

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

#158

Post by sedeki »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #148
kylevedder wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google making ad auctions more efficient and "state surveillance" aren't the same thing. Did you legitimately not know this or are you being intellectually dishonest in your argumentation?

Google making ad auctions more efficient becomes state surveillance the instant a subpoena arrives at their door. You might believe you are safe from a subpoena because you haven't done anything wrong, but you would be wrong about that: * Things like geofence warrants are used to surveil people who are merely within a given radius of a crime. * Subpoenas don't have to be for criminal cases, they can also be civil or…

Thank you for this concise information. This is disturbing to me.

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

#159

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dogman144 wrote: post #147
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve worked for the govt and no they aren’t a nebulous blob of power with tech. What they are though is an entity that has a set of directives supported by access to the data tech provided in conjunction with either not understanding tech or really getting it. The tech company approach of staying willfully ignorant or positions like ITT with “we just build it!” has caused a lot of damage in the hands of the govt user…

> I’ve worked for the govt and no they aren’t a nebulous blob of power with tech.

Yes and I've worked for tech companies that use tracking in their products, though not (my products) for ads, so I know what a tech company can and cannot do.

> The tech company approach of staying willfully ignorant or positions like ITT with “we just build it!” has caused a lot of damage in the hands of the govt users it’s delivered to.

This isn't what anyone in this thread is saying at all, this is a strawman. There are material concerns about collecting too much data. Everything from leaked credentials allowing attackers to access personal data to accidents in targeting systems allowing individual level targeting.

But unless you have proof that there are internal systems in tech companies that build up surveillance platforms and that the government is given access to these surveillance platforms, both of which need proof, then this nebulous concern of "all data gathering is EVIL" is just FUD. The fact of the matter is, individual surveillance isn't useful for most tech companies. Cohort or product level information is required to make decisions. Moreover, storing surveillance data is extremely expensive. The amount of drive space and the systems necessary to facilitate this kind of per-human level surveillance requires large engineering teams and systems. Have you ever created a data warehouse? Imagine that but for this supposed surveillance machine.

> I don’t think it’s possible to in good faith ignore this dynamic or pretend it doesn’t exist and tech products’ role in it. This is actually the first time I’ve run into it like this where both the dynamic and the impact is just totally denied.

Yes everyone on HN and Twitter are convinced that data gathered by tech companies is all evil and that evil billionaires are twirling their mustaches as they enslave entire nations. This is clear. And there are clear risks to data gathering, cogent concerns about social media addiction, and definite monopoly concerns over the networks and moats that social media creates. But to have a coherent conversation on this, we need to move away from "all data gathering is EVIL" to understanding what kinds of data gathering is necessary and useful, and offering individuals rights over their data. TikTok was able to create its own network from scratch which is at least a small counterpoint to the idea that the incumbents are impossible to unseat due to their network advantages.

GDPR is a great step in the right direction and I'm hopeful for even more potent legislation to come out. But the sort of fearmongering that happens in these online spaces over data gathering makes it impossible to have a reasoned conversation.

And if you think tech companies are terrible entities abusing your data, then what are the telecoms doing? Telecoms in every country control the flow of information in every direction. The metadata available at a telecom down to an individual subscriber far dwarfs what is available at most tech companies. Moreover the PRISM scandal actually happened because of telecom companies. So why the ire at tech companies?

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

#160

Post by filoleg »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #155
filoleg wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is a lot easier to get a court order for something than you probably think. Dragnet versions of court orders also exist, such as geofence warrants. Also, that data is often sold packaged up and sold to third parties via data brokers. The FBI has been known to buy data from data brokers instead of getting it by court order.

Sure, those things might happen. None of those things happened in that Nebraska case though, so using it to as a specific example to support your claim feels a bit off.

Especially considering the fact that the original comment omitted some pretty crucial details that end up painting the overall situation in a very different light.

Post reply on HN