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Google’s GDPR Workaround

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Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#621

Post by tptacek »

jacquesm wrote: post #214
philwelch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I've worked at has had an explicit policy of not commenting on that company's business on the internet.

There are regular comments by declared employees of quite a few companies including Google on HN. The commenting and vote/flag brigadeering around subjects that center on one of these companies is such that many subjects are either voted off the homepage entirely or the participants in the thread get downvoted/upvoted to better support the company position or narrative. This is all quite in the open.

Whatever else it is, it's one of the more important guidelines of the site (at least judging from the time Dan and Scott spend on it) that you not make appeals like this in public comment threads. What evidence you hsve of this, you should send to hn@yc.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#622

Post by dang »

paul7986 wrote: post #528
dang wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that your comment broke the site guidelines by insinuating astroturfing without evidence. That's the main thing you're not allowed to do here, as I explained, and have explained ad nauseum before ( https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... ). Separately, there was an issue with your copy-pasting the same comment about this story repeatedly in a previous thread. That is what I called…

Ok I understand and agree with the spamming recently. Ive never knew or heard about an astroturf guideline before. Thanks for pointing it out ... i was trying to start a debate as I wasnt sure if my comment was downvoted voraciously because of multiple posts or something else? As for telling my story and or Jie Qi's similar one in posts that detail other bad behavior from Google I wonder how that isn't relevant? Per…

Correct, for the most part I don't think that, because it tends to make the threads more generic. For example, in this case the topic was about GDPR and identifiers in real-time bid advertising. It's fine if that leaps a single hop to, say, privacy issues. But if it leaps more than that, to every bad thing that Google has ever done, then the discussion will simply be "Google bad" vs. "Google good", which is far too generic to be interesting. It's a bit like what happens when you blend too many paints together. Everything becomes the same shade of brown. And this problem gets much worse when the things people bring up are predictable, i.e. have been repeated from the past. That guarantees a predictable discussion, which although it may be very agitated, has zero curiosity in it—and curiosity is the whole point of this site (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I've written a bunch about this over the years if you or anyone wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#623

Post by trpc »

dang wrote: post #616
trpc wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest this is the only useful comment in this entire thread and that's why you're getting mass downvoted by the online army of Brave shills (they are employing shills all around 4chan and reddit too). Brave has been repeatedly exploiting this website (or maybe YC just has business interest in it?) by attacking the company that made the product Brave contributed nothing to but theming and rebranding it and sell…

Accusing others of astroturfing and shilling breaks the site guidelines. You don't know why other users downvoted a comment, and jumping to public accusations about that degrades this site badly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. You've been breaking them a lot and we've had to warn you many times already. We don't micro…

I hope you just do your job and prevent those systematic organized promotional posts by such companies on HN to get free advertising. The entire accusation in OP turned out to be invalid in the end as shown in many top voted comments. YOU know that this company with its fishy history (taking money on behalf of publishers without their knowledge or approval) and business model has been systematically exploiting HN and you're doing nothing but warning me. Banning me won't solve the problem anyway.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#624

Post by dang »

trpc wrote: post #623
dang wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accusing others of astroturfing and shilling breaks the site guidelines. You don't know why other users downvoted a comment, and jumping to public accusations about that degrades this site badly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. You've been breaking them a lot and we've had to warn you many times already. We don't micro…

I hope you just do your job and prevent those systematic organized promotional posts by such companies on HN to get free advertising. The entire accusation in OP turned out to be invalid in the end as shown in many top voted comments. YOU know that this company with its fishy history (taking money on behalf of publishers without their knowledge or approval) and business model has been systematically exploiting HN and…

Most companies that produce articles in the hope of interesting HN are trying to "get free advertising" in the sense of attracting readers' attention. If the content is genuinely interesting to the audience here, there's nothing wrong with that.

If, on the other hand, they're using voting rings, astroturfing, or other forms of abuse to spike their ranking because the content isn't interesting enough on its own, that's bad, and yes we spend a lot of time counteracting that. But if you think that's happening, you should send links to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate, not post dyspeptic complaints about it in the threads. Those just add noise.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#625

Post by MaxBarraclough »

jeena wrote: post #208
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last job the traffic was filtered through a proxy due to FINRA regulations. I’d see Portuguese ads for diabetes medication and there were 2 Brazilian guys in the office. Seemed like a major HIPAA violation to me.

It would have been a more funny story if it were ads for Viagra ;)

Not really. Those sorts of ads are sent without targeting.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#626

Post by paul7986 »

dang wrote: post #622
paul7986 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I understand and agree with the spamming recently. Ive never knew or heard about an astroturf guideline before. Thanks for pointing it out ... i was trying to start a debate as I wasnt sure if my comment was downvoted voraciously because of multiple posts or something else? As for telling my story and or Jie Qi's similar one in posts that detail other bad behavior from Google I wonder how that isn't relevant? Per…

Correct, for the most part I don't think that, because it tends to make the threads more generic. For example, in this case the topic was about GDPR and identifiers in real-time bid advertising. It's fine if that leaps a single hop to, say, privacy issues. But if it leaps more than that, to every bad thing that Google has ever done, then the discussion will simply be "Google bad" vs. "Google good", which is far too g…

Yes curiosity is indeed what this site is about and if you see below HN user "philwelch," was interested & curious about Ji Qie's story as he wasn't familiar with it. I pointed it out to him and satisfying his and other HN readers interest & curiosity it received 14 upvotes. Aren't the upvotes saying the information was useful, their interest and curiosity was satisfied?

Though are you saying I should never talk about Google getting caught stealing IP where it's relevant on Hacker News(have you censored other members b4 on certain topics)? It does not satisfy readers curiosity or is helpful to other dreamers/innovators, ones who dont have Joi Ito (MIT student's advisor) on their side, in whats the best way forward when Google R&D sends an invite?

Ive been a HN reader and commenter since 2007 and spoken freely since. I hope I am to continue to do so!

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#627

Post by adossi »

ahallock wrote: post #458
mavhc wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it's just one of 100 coincidences that happen to you every day. Easy to prove, store a log of all your network traffic, and record all the audio you speak, then when you see a match, go back, find the proof, become world famous

I stand corrected. I thought I had read this was actually happening, but it appears to only be speculation.

It was widely believed for literally years until the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in 2018 where Zuck called it a 'conspiracy theory'. Since then it has been dismissed as such. My question is - if I personally observed it before I even heard about this 'theory', and thousands of others around the world also observed the same thing, why are we dismissing it as a 'conspiracy theory'? Just because Zuck labelled it as such? Why are we trusting him to tell us the truth again?

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#629

Post by riversflow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #394
riversflow wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growt…

Your points are fair, and I'm not saying China isn't directly responsible for the environmental costs of both their internal and export manufacturing. But it's not fair to shift all of the blame, as some naïve or disingenuous people do, because most of the export manufacturing is either managed by and done for western companies (China being "the factory of the world"), or simply driven by the demand on western market…

>If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would.

I’ll point the finger at any country who lets their national environment(which is really a global resource, we all share the same air and oceans) get trashed in the name of industrialization to serve consumerism. Western countries have a system that controls those externalities at least to some extent, in the US we have the EPA, OSHA, and our various institutions of permitting make sure of that, at a very real cost to businesses and consumers. By not caring about the environment developing countries absolutely are burdening the species long term. The lack of a level playing field in this regard enables consumerism because you are allowing consumers to not pay for externalities, else we should really be placing tariffs on any country who doesn’t meet at least EPA regulations and probably all of our regulations and laws—building, safety, worker compensation—but that would likely shock the global economic system. This is what “developing” countries disrupt, and why I think that ultimately globalization and environmentalism(which I prioritize personally right now) are incompatible. This is a problematic conclusion because war is probably worse for the environment and globalism is the only thing that’s made this era so relatively peaceful.

I don’t think you can blame both sides, because on one side you have a relatively organized group of people with power who rule a country, and on the other you have a mass of people with 0 organization and no structural power whatsoever. Blaming the /populace/ of any country for a problem is a very slippery slope indeed.

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