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Google's real monopoly is on the user data

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Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#31

Post by jauntywundrkind »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #6

Canceling the end of 3rd party cookies is also an abuse of their monopoly. Users should be given the choice of how their data is used.

Firefox and Safari have massive hard coded lists of carve outs.

There is a colossal amount of specification work to do to figure out how to make various necessary web flows possible again after removing third party cookies.

Chrome has an incredible commitment to web standards, to not throwing in arbitrary browser-specific web functionality, to going through the process of improving the web holistically. Trying to live up to that high expectation is hard, and we can see a dozen third party cookies or storage isolation concerns they're having to tackle if we go look at https://github.com/orgs/explainers-by-googlers/repositories?...

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#32

Post by xnx »

cletus wrote: post #19

Story time: many years ago, user testing of search ranking worked with a process called "side by sides". This where for a certain group of people they would compare search results in production with an experiment and they would see which were preferred. The goal of Google is to make the result the user wants #1 on that list. So you would have known searches and you could compare the old result and the new. This was a…

> Chrome gave Google insights into how users interacted with search.

How did his work? Google would know what result was clicked and if another result was clicked shortly thereafter in any browser.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#33

Post by xnx »

arbuge wrote: post #3

And they own Youtube... That will be a massive benefit when it comes to training AI-powered robots I think. Conceivably, an AI that's seen every plumbing-related video on Youtube would be superior to any human plumber you can imagine, assuming a good mapping between the human hand movements in the video and its own robotic arms. And so on for other domains.

Is owning YouTube a big advantage? I assumed that nearly every public video has already been downloaded and is being used to train non-Google AI. Google definitely has some extra data (viewing behavior, clickstream, likes, etc.) that others don't, but that doesn't see critical to AI training.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#34

Post by jononor »

tomschwiha wrote: post #13
Rick76 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.

For me personally it wouldn't matter too much if YouTube would be gone. I think I have several days or even weeks I don't use YouTube at all. But I agree for alot of people the entertainment factor (and for some the educational one) would be hugely broken if YouTube went offline.

Personally I would be fine too. But there is a lot of information which is not written down anywhere online, but exists on YouTube. This is anything from conference talks, to people showing how to use or fix some equipment/machinery. And it seems that informational content is getting more and more video centric. So there is a long tail of valuable information there, I believe.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#35

Post by jononor »

nwoli wrote: post #2

They barely make use of it for things like gemini (or else their model would likely surpass gpt-4) so I’m not that convinced by this

Google is playing catch-up in the LLM space. Before 2023 they did not spend anywhere near the resources and focus on it as OpenAI - who at that point had been building for 3+years already. It is actually astounding how quickly and how many have caught up to OpenAI. But I would not expect Google advantages in data to become visible for another 2 to 5 years, if they are able to harness it at all.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#36

Post by jononor »

cletus wrote: post #19

Story time: many years ago, user testing of search ranking worked with a process called "side by sides". This where for a certain group of people they would compare search results in production with an experiment and they would see which were preferred. The goal of Google is to make the result the user wants #1 on that list. So you would have known searches and you could compare the old result and the new. This was a…

Good points. And the more reason to avoid Chrome! I do not consent to my browser behaviour being used to train ad serving models and other "AI" cases.

Glad I use Firefox. It works, and while not perfect, is considerably more respectful of my privacy and less misaligned with my interest.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#38

Post by jsnell »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #6

Canceling the end of 3rd party cookies is also an abuse of their monopoly. Users should be given the choice of how their data is used.

Funnily enough, it's exactly the other way around. Google was prevented by completion regulators from turning down third party cookie support by default.

(And users already have a choice, Chrome has a setting for whether 3p cookies are allowed, blocked, or blocked in just incognito mode. Reading between the lines, they are probably going to ask users to explicitly choose, since they're not allowed to change the default.)

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#40

Post by rapjr9 »

hschne wrote: post #15

Whenever this comes up I'm glad having read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". Not an easy read by any means, but it's core hypothesis is spot on IMO: Google (and others) core business is aggregating and processing as much user data as possible. Every product they create and every decision they make aims to increase or protect their access to data.

While "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is great, I don't understand why everyone assumes that Google uses the user data it gathers _only_ to enhance search and for selling advertising. Look at all the things people are using chatbots for today and then ask yourself what could you use a chatbot trained on user behavior for? This is like having a window into the psyche of the world, an oracle of global scope. Maybe they use it to evaluate which companies to buy? For doing market research and product evaluation? For analyzing corruption in government? Seems like there would be a million uses of it, all of them exclusive to Google because they have the most comprehensive data. Remember that they collect location data also. Imagine what China and Russia would do with that data if they had it (and look at what they are already doing with the data they have).
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