Google Fights Back • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Fights Back

#321

Post by bduerst » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #182

darkwizard42 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are espousing an "ADS ARE INHERENTLY BAD" mentality that just doesn't resonate with people. I want to know about the best services that are useful for me. I do not want to be advertised women's swimsuits on Instagram (I'm a male with no interest in purchasing said item). When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much i…

First and foremost - ads do not require personal information. Newspapers, television, and blogs have thrived on non-personalized ads for decades. The advent of targeted ads (the dam getting blown to hell) is what made general ads unfavorable (personalization and the absolute saturation of ads in every aspect of our lives). /rant That said, given that ads are a psychological trick to get you to purchase something (oft…

Newspapers, television, blogs, direct mail, billboards, etc. all rely on a modicum of audience targeting. Don't pretend that P&G would naively pay for laundry detergent ads in Playboy magazine because they didn't know who the magazine's audience was.

As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).

Re: Google Fights Back

#322

Post by bashinator » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

throwayEngineer wrote: post #202

areoform wrote: post #7

Google owns my soul. Their boxes know when I sleep, when I wake, how much I exercise, what I listen to, my innermost thoughts, my chats with loved ones, what I watched on Netflix last night, what my company does, the flu I have at the moment, what the hypochondriac in me looks up in the middle of the night, what I buy, whom I call, what I spend money on, where I spend it... I nominally pay for these services, but I s…

You think Apple is less evil than Google? Remember that Apple has been cracked by the FBI, has proprietary connectors, and charges more than anyone. I couldn't disagree more. Apple is horrible to customers and developers.

So proprietary that I'm charging my Lenovo with an Apple power brick.

Re: Google Fights Back

#323

Post by kbenson » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

paavoova wrote: post #305

Daniel_sk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android Q is adding scoped storage and it's more or less the end of a visible file system. Even the existing file manager apps will have trouble to show files without special permissions.

Key word is "permissions", right? Meaning apps that don't wish to scare users with permissions will adopt the new API, but existing filesystem access should continue to function. Otherwise this would be crippling to some users and apps and I doubt it would go over well.

That sounds like the right way to do it. I would love a file browser that has no network permissions but special file permissions, and my network capable apps to have no extra file permissions beyond their own needs.

Re: Google Fights Back

#324

Post by aerique » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

lwhsiao wrote: post #237

mceachen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't discount how deep the rabbit hole goes with adtech. I spent over a decade in adtech. I have several patents from > 8 years ago for metadata-based ad targeting. While I agree with you that it is better to see relevant ads over irrelevant ads, the datastores that enable fine-grained behavioral targeting is, simply put, just too much power for any corporation (or government) to wield. Corporations directly…

> One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work. This sounds interesting. Do you have any links you can share?

Or perhaps an ad supported blog?

Re: Google Fights Back

#325

Post by hathawsh » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

sidyapa wrote: post #177

Regarding that lady. I am from India and I see 100s of people everyday struggling with this exact problem, unable to read what's written. BUT as awesome the technology is it doesn't solve the advertised problem. The very same people, almost everyone I know/see are above the age of 20 and don't even bother to learn the language when they easily can from the $.01 books available almost everywhere. You can give them a t…

I found that lady fascinating. I wonder if she has a learning disability. In any case, Google's solution is amazing: by highlighting the word while reading it to her, she is likely to learn to recognize words, leading her to improved literacy. If this solution works as well as Google hopes, Google may end up raising literacy throughout the world. Even if that means Google gets more data about everyone, I think the effects on the world would be a net positive.

Re: Google Fights Back

#326

Post by Nextgrid » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #306

pgeorgi wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from outside, there’s no way to prove that a particular ad was served to you because of your data instead of another factor they use as input for the algorithm Create an account, use it to excessively look for tea pots until you predominantly get ads for tea pots. Store the cookie[0] that encodes your user id. Delete the account. After the advertised account retention period, try the cookie again in an otherwise sq…

If you're coming from the same device or IP address/range, that's enough of a link. An anecdote: I stayed with relatives for a few days one time, and my two-year-old niece really liked one particular music video on YouTube, so it got played on their TV box 3-4 times during my visit. Not on my laptop, but I used said laptop on their wifi (not logged into Google products, as I never am). When I got home, YouTube highly…

I notice a similar behaviour. I don’t have a Google account and don’t keep cookies, so the only way for them to track me is my IP.

My IP seems to be permanently associated with my YouTube habits. They’re even being sneaky about it, as in they’ll give you a default homepage and generic recommendations first, but watching any video similar to the previous viewing habits will bring back not just videos related to that one, but the entire history they’ve collected over the years (some of the topics I watch are completely separate and would never intersect normally, so the only way for them to both come up in suggestions is from previous viewing history).

I didn’t create an account, didn’t agree to any privacy policies, and am blocking any and all cookies just like they advise in their own privacy policy and yet I am still being tracked.

Re: Google Fights Back

#327

Post by ok_coo » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

areoform wrote: post #48

hammock wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is well taken, but 100 years will anyone care that you had the flu on May 7 2019? >Who the fuck owns MySpace now? It's all deleted. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/18/18271023/myspace-music-vi...

> but 100 years will anyone care that you had the flu on May 7 2019 My future health care provider might. Maybe they’ll spike rates by figuring out how often I’m ill using this data. Maybe I will marry a congressman someday and the sext that I sent today to my BF will be used to blackmail us. Maybe 30 years from now, people will be able to use my youthful indiscretions as leverage. Maybe I won’t get certain jobs beca…

These would be big problem, but even worse is that you wouldn't know if they know.

Like getting ghosted after a job interview. You will have _no idea_ what caused the rejection. Or, as to your examples, you will have no idea if and/or why you're getting charged more.

Re: Google Fights Back

#328

Post by Nextgrid » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

skinner_ wrote: post #300

Larrikin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe for a second they keep the data at a company of Google's size. But they don't need to anymore if they just feed your data through some neural network training that outputs a black box filled with weights. They can legally show your data is gone but now their model knows that people with similar browsing history, location, etc have a weak signal for tea cups. You'll get the occasional ad for them if th…

And that is fine by me. Using my behavioral data to train an underfitting model is very different from actually storing my behavioral data. Sure, the word 'underfitting' does the heavy lifting in my previous sentence. But I don't think that overfitting is even feasible at this scale. Google does not train models that just memorize the habits of 3 billion people. Such a model would be useless.

Unless your behavioural data is enough of an outlier to identify you.

Re: Google Fights Back

#329

Post by fjp » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #302

fjp wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is why you use iMessage whenever possible

Doesn't matter if you're a Chinese user on an iPhone: >Fast forward to today: China Telecom, a government owned telco, is taking over the iCloud data from Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. This essentially means that a state-owned firm now has access to all the iCloud data China-based users store, such as photos, notes, emails, and text messages. https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...

You don't have to back anything up to iCloud. You can keep on your locked device and backup elsewhere.

My point was that iMessage is an easy way to have your default mode of messaging be E2E encrypted

Re: Google Fights Back

#330

Post by mkl » Wed, May 08, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #166

I think this is all just a PR stunt and Google's business model goes against user privacy. It's quite interesting the way people are more willing to trust Google than Facebook with their data though. I think this might come from Google actually offering more "useful/needed/can't live without" offerings vs facebook's more vanity based services. For example, Google takes your very privacy sensitive location data but al…

> For example, Google takes your very privacy sensitive location data but also returns you amazing mapping capabilities (google maps), transit information, nearby points of interests etc.

I think it's more that it returns you what will keep you using the product, so they can sell more ads. Every time I open Google maps on mobile (to see how busy the traffic is, for example), I get a big useless "Explore nearby" window taking up 40% of the screen, which I have to close to be able to actually use the map. I will never want to explore ads for businesses near my house or workplace, and the fact that the app doesn't remember that suggests the true intention.