This some great work on tracking down all of these measures to track users. I really hope we get to the point where dumb ads rules the web once more. Hopefully this results in more than a slap on the wrist, but I doubt it.
Why should ads rule the web at all? Surely the cleverest engineers to walk the planet can come up with a new way of making money that doesn’t involve psychological manipulation.
Engineers aren’t businesspeople. We’re tools of the businesspeople - we only stick around to do their bidding because they offer us equity.
>I was branded as a 'privacy nut' Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.
>Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion.
This is the lazy and ignorant method of dismissing other people's arguments. Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?
Google has been very naughty in the past few years. It does look like they removed the “don’t” be evil motto for a clear reason. And people thought that Investment Banks were bad.
The Go module hash checking seems to be more about avoiding the problems encountered by other language repos integrity and versioning issues ( cough NPM), and in terms of tracking it seems about as invasive as Debian's popcon. Enabled by default can and should be the default for security-related features. I tend to agree about the rest of the creepiness, especially anything personally behavioral.
On HN it is taken as gospel that any information sent to a server will absolutely compromise your privacy. If anyone points out that the information is trivial or useless the rebuttal is instant - it can be cross referenced with other sources to build a complete profile of you. If you want to know which Go modules I use, go check out my github. They're listed right there in import statements. If I'm hacking on a proj…
> Literally what else could that man have done?
He could have not sent all build-time network accesses to Google by default. It's that simple.
>I was branded as a 'privacy nut' Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.
I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.
>Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.
Or maybe people have widely differing views on all kinds of subjects?
I've been called all kinds of things, which I definitely am not, so I'm inclined to think that people put far to much weight on the conspiracies.
> "control" over the data after broadcast, albeit legal control via contracts with advertisers Now there's a claim only a court would buy! A court probably would buy it, though. Sigh.
That is the GDPR-default though. You're still allowed to give data to third parties, you just need to have contracts with them regarding the handling, deletion etc of that data. Of course, mostly that's for data processors, which I don't think ad networks working with Google would fall under.
No, a data processor is any entity that collected personal data gets passed on to and where it is processed as part of the business arrangement. An ad network that receives personal data is definitely a data processor.
if someone looked over your shoulder and saw you browsing HN they could infer things too
Yet, they choose to surf to HN. They're not choosing to have targeted ads that share their info around the web and cause someone over their shoulder to infer things about them. That's the point -- we should have that choice. And the default should be "no".
I understand the opt-in rather than opt-out, but does disabling Ads Personalization [1] not do what you're asking?
I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.
It doesn’t even require a ‘paid agent’ theory to explain. Large companies actively court allegiance from their employees and spend serious effort to retain it by, for example, relentlessly offering mandatory courses in the company’s Cultural Values and evaluating promotions through that lens. So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums. The best wa…
I don't know if Google is different in this regard, but every tech company I've worked at has forbidden me from "actively defending my employer's values on forums". Maybe not in so many words, but at the very least there's a prohibition against commenting on the company's business on the internet. PR depends a lot on message discipline, which is not what you get from random employees jumping into these arguments.