521–530 of 549 posts
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Are you using random Mac addresses?
The MAC address is not sent to the server, or accessible to web pages client-side, so that wouldn't matter.
Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…
Maybe it’s denial or weirdness on my side... after all I am also a vegan because I don’t want to hurt animals or other people just for a little bit of taste and convenience and most people seem to think that’s stupid on my side.
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Ballpark estimate, how much would you pay for the entirety of your digital life being private? All of it, bar none?
I would probably pay at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me, for privacy and freedom from ads or any other manipulation I did not explicitly permit. Note I consider the latter at least as important as privacy.
I second that. It's somewhat reassuring to know that others realize that as well. Most people just have no idea how marketing and now 'deep learned' algorithms (applied psychology) make puppets out of human beings.
I consider "user feed control" (that users choose what, how, where, when and why things are presented to them) of equal importance to e.g. democracy as far as human freedom is concerned. But the current manipulation is so insiduous that from now to mainstream awareness to generally implementing solutions is a long, long ways away.
> at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me
I think this tends close to an upper bound — not many people willing to pay, and even fewer at that level — but certainly one more anecdotal proof that premium services are totally viable for a certain group. The question is 'how big' that group, what's the market for that, but I'd wager it's enough to sustain a few 'premium' businesses (or alternative plans) for most common services (some are harder; search notably).
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Right: fingerprinting is the general term for using something other than client-side storage (cookies, local storage) to determine identity. Incognito mode and other private sessions intentionally don't preserve client-side storage.
If I may ask you a personal question: how do you feel about working on ads for Google, given that a lot of people find Google's tracking practices (to make personalized ads possible) questionable at best? Did you specifically choose that team, or was that just were Google needed more hands? Personally, Google ads give me mixed feelings. I see how personalization is useful for everyone involved and, so long as only ma…
I've written some about this: https://www.jefftk.com/p/value-of-working-in-ads
"Many people would put ad tracking on this list of downsides: sites pass information to data brokers that build custom profiles for each user and allow personalizing ads. From my perspective, however, while having this information collected seems a bit creepy, it allows showing ads I'm more likely to be interested in. This makes publishers more money than showing untargeted ads, and I'd much rather fund them through better ad targeting (invisibly intrusive) than through more obnoxious ads (visibly intrusive)."
I chose this team because I thought the work would be interesting and I liked the people on it, and they were interested in me because of my prior work on mod_pagespeed rewriting websites so they would load faster.
> if a nation already has live data on pretty much all its enemy's subjects, war would be exceedingly efficient for them to start and quickly win
Lots of thoughts:
* I think you're dramatically overestimating how much data Google has and how well that is mapped to the kind of identity the military would care about.
* I don't think Google would share this information unless legally required to, and I don't think such a request would be constitutional.
* Many other countries are in similar positions; for example Criteo is based in France and has a similar ad tracking reach to Google.
* I'm still not sure how this is especially useful militarily. Military targets are mostly not in the data one of these companies would have, and none of these countries would go to war targeting civilians.
Sad that such a blatant ad makes it to front page of HN. Not sure how much I trust Google, but I trust these guys even less. The blog is an emotional rant. Not a single example of Google breaking anti trust laws. Translation - instead of competing by making a better product, we want our competitors to be taken out by government.
Every week we have posts about new products, often self-posted. If they're upvoted, it's that people find it interesting. Quite ironic writing the blog is an emotional rant (that I would disagree with, I find it quite argumented), while your whole comment is whining that people upvote things that you don't agree with.
There needs to be a new search engine focused on the niche of people who hate the current ad spam/SEO results that Google currently returns. A query like "best headphones" returns results like "The Best Headphones for 2019 | PCMag.com". They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN would ever click a link like t…
I feel the force of small sites like HN is precisely to be in the shadow and too small to interest spammers.
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> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive You think the post I replied to doesn't break (at the very least) that rule? Perhaps if you came down harder on the in-crowd high karma posters, other people wouldn't have to sarcastically thank them for their abuse. > Your post was downvoted and flagged by legit users. It was downvoted and flagged as soon as it was posted. So legit users…
The GP comment was teetering on the edge of that rule, and maybe toppled onto the wrong side. But your comment was way over from the beginning. I'm not aware of high karma affecting how we do HN moderation. We ask people not to break the rules when we see them breaking the rules. Sometimes we reply to everyone in a thread who did that, but not always—perfect consistency isn't possible. Nor is it necessary, because so…
Honestly bemused by this. How is the following single sentence way over the line, other than the parts I quoted (which amount to about half of it)?
So your personal experience does nothing less than illustrate Google's
tracking to an "obvious" degree, but my personal experience is simply
"making a sweeping judgement" and "confusing this with knowledge for the
sake of my own cognitive hygiene".
Thanks for the links to the newcomments/noobcomments
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Obviously using search engine sends search queries to it.. okay. But that experiment was sending most of browsing history, without explicit opt-in. Collecting browsing history from users of popular browser without asking them is just evil. (and it seems you still defend that decision)
Yes, I’m defending it, because again: We took drastic steps to never send anything private (like checking within the browser whether the URL is unique or different if logged in or out and then never sending it, not to mention that there of course was no identifier and we made record linkage impossible, so no click profile, and much more). If in doubt we drop and don’t send. And again – there were tons of (pen) tests…
>That is impossible - to us, each single URL comes as a detached datapoint
IPs could be used to aggregate those datapoints, and you obviously cannot avoid receiving these. It is only promises that you or your proxy provider doesn't store them. (though maybe it is possible to implement P2P mangling network? encrypt UDP data packet, send to randomly selected peer discovered from DHT, peer delivers it to your server. Or directly send UDP packet with spoofed source address, but this is not possible for browser sitting behind NAT)
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You're helping google by tagging its searches, so many people ask for this kind of things that they can prioritise results that gets the most clicks (people rank searches for google everytime they click). By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with Cliqz: - And the new actor playing Spider-M…
That may have been what search engines were for, but Google changed that. Very few people have the patience any more to try multiple queries to get an answer. When DDG fails, as it inevitably does, I don't spend time refining my query: I repeat the search on Google and get my answer.
But Google fails as well.
Most of the world population is not native english speaker.
Try "attore che recita la parte del giornalista in spiderman" (the actor that plays the journalist in spiderman) in Italian
- Spider-Man: Homecoming - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org)
- James Franco - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org)
- Spider-Man film: tutti gli attori | Popcorn Tv (https://popcorntv.it)
- Martin Sheen, dieci ruoli per scoprire un grande attore ... (https://www.consigli.it)
Or the simplified version "attore che fa il giornalista in spiderman" (same meaning as before, just more down to earth)
- J. Jonah Jameson - Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org)
- J. Jonah Jameson - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org)
- Spider-Man: Far From Home, nel cast anche l'attore ... (https://tg24.sky.it)
Refining is still a very present need, it's simply that for common searches on common topics in english it's less so...
It's more or less the same in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese... I can't even imagine the results in languages like Arabic, Indonesian or Balinese.
Local, culture aware, search engines are the future, despite Google efforts, the generalist "one size fits all" search engine is not.