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Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google the Hardest

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Re: Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google the Hardest

#81
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I briefly worked for google this year, and “don’t be evil” doesn’t appear in any of their on-boarding materials (anymore at least).

> I briefly worked for google this year I apologize in advance if the reason is personal and you do not want to share, but why did you stay at Google for such a short period of time?

I joined just after last years protests in the (misplaced) belief that that much of an outcry would result in the google management actually improving.

They did not, and showed an unwillingness to consider fixing any behavior. They even pushed back on removing forced arbitration for harassment and abuse. They spent most of the time I was there retaliating against people who organized the protest, and people who reported harassment.

There was an ongoing double standard wrt to homophobic, racist, and abusive content on their many platforms. They were super good at marking lgbt content as adult only, and super good at flagging 2s of “copyrighted content” as worthy of removal from the platform. While absolutely opposing any restriction and racist, homophobic, transphobic, islamophobic, antisemitic, or just completely false content. Despite all such content violating their repeatedly reworded rules.

The weekly “talks” basically consisted of them saying that everything was ok, and they were “working on” the harassment and arbitration problems. While avoiding any discussion of the promotion of false and bigoted content, or claiming that all the studies of their algorithms were wrong and that they didn’t promote such content.

For those talks there were unending bigoted questions and comments on the question submission form. Questions related to any of the aforementioned issues were routinely skipped and/or vote bombed to oblivion by a clearly super invested group of employees who supported the actions of the company.

After a while I decided I couldn’t accept money that was “earned” through such atrocious behavior.

I am not saying other big tech companies don’t have problems, but my experience was that google was hell bent on protecting the abusers over the victims in every circumstance and context it came up.

Re: Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google the Hardest

#82
> simple text files called Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs) to allow or block third-party requests from specific domains

Sounds like a hosts file, and the same end result could be achieved in any browser/system-wide by using a curated one such as:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Or is Edge Tracking Prevention more effective in some way?

Re: Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google the Hardest

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

targeting ads is only one teeny tiny use case for user data. Building general AI is a race and the more user data you have the faster your AI will learn. You definitely want to limit the amount of data your competitors have.

The vast majority of the revenue for half of the biggest tech companies is one teeny use case? It's the biggest one, followed by company specific recommendation engines.

teeny tiny use case for general AI, yes.

Re: Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google the Hardest

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

targeting ads is only one teeny tiny use case for user data. Building general AI is a race and the more user data you have the faster your AI will learn. You definitely want to limit the amount of data your competitors have.

How users use computers has very little to do for a useful AI.

That's pretty absurd considering the average american has a screen in front of their face 8-10 hours a day. You're basically saying what people do for 8-10 hours a day, every day, for their entire lives isnt useful information to AI.

Re: Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google the Hardest

#85
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I briefly worked for google this year I apologize in advance if the reason is personal and you do not want to share, but why did you stay at Google for such a short period of time?

I joined just after last years protests in the (misplaced) belief that that much of an outcry would result in the google management actually improving. They did not, and showed an unwillingness to consider fixing any behavior. They even pushed back on removing forced arbitration for harassment and abuse. They spent most of the time I was there retaliating against people who organized the protest, and people who repor…

Thank you for replying. Comments like these are very helpful as I regularly think about working for Google, but (so far at least) I never do.

I hope you're happier wherever you're working now.

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