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We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

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Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#91

Post by sametmax »

bambax wrote: post #79

While I agree with the gist of the article, I have a problem conflating Google and Facebook in the same evil bag. Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for. Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my…

Oh, but google is as evil, just in a different way. Google collect everything. With android it has your phone activity, postion, text messages, conversation and contacts. With gmaill is has more contacts, and emails. With search, youtube and analytics, it knows everything you are interested in. With map it has a recording of everything that has a location and a visual of it.

It keeps accumulating intimate data on a scale way larger than facebook. And we know that google, like facebook, cooperate with governments, sharing this data.

Google also has a strong AI background, using it for search, driving car, data analysis... This makes it concerning at best.

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#92

Post by worldsayshi »

mirimir wrote: post #85
blub wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You agree with the sentiment of the article but then you're muddying the waters and shifting the discussion from Big Data companies like Google and Facebook to some abstract ideal of freedom and openness. The only "misleading language" that I see here belongs to you. The author is very clear about what disease has infected software development and the internet. I don't remember many spyware as a service and data coll…

I remember extended discussions on Usenet etc about commercialization of the Internet. Not long after Eternal September, as I recall. The rest, as they say, is history. The Internet of Tim's dreams still exists. Several of them, really. But they're tiny, with relatively few users. What people now call the Internet is a horrorshow of predators and prey. So it goes. Natural selection rules.

Perhaps Ethereum is the way to an open internet?

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#93

Post by tim333 »

bambax wrote: post #79

While I agree with the gist of the article, I have a problem conflating Google and Facebook in the same evil bag. Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for. Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my…

If you went on Facebook you might be disappointed by how mild the evil is. Holiday pics, cats, people eating etc. There is also an argument for controlling that in a non open way - you don't want the kid photos up everywhere or trolls piling in with threats like Twitter etc.

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#94

Post by oliv__ »

endisukaj wrote: post #88
alphadevx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, to me, Google is quite different. I think they lost that argument when they started Google+, going into direct competition with Facebook with a comparable product, albeit unsuccessfully. If anything Google is more sinister to me, with a much broader reach than Facebook into areas like mapping and navigation, personalized ad tech, personalized search, mobile OS, PC OS, web analytics, etc. etc., all at least par…

Google+ is not as closed as Facebook though. You don't need a G+ account to view what people are talking about in there.

They trick you into getting one anyways.

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#95

Post by lucideer »

bambax wrote: post #79

While I agree with the gist of the article, I have a problem conflating Google and Facebook in the same evil bag. Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for. Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my…

In aggregate, the article may be right in conflating Google and Facebook, as my own view on them is pretty much the polar opposite of yours.

Facebook is oft-criticised for their "walled garden", but it is their walled-garden. Facebook is:

- mostly opt-in (though admittedly there's a huge social pressure to do so for many people)

- I can very easily choose what I do & don't share with Facebook and my set of connections on it (again, this has a few caveats and gotchas. Instagram shares data with Facebook by default, but does provide an opt-out, and Facebook used to allow a kind of 2-degrees of separation data sharing where friends could share your data with 3rd-parties without your consent, but they have since shut this down)

- oddly transparent about their weird, creepy, dodgy activities[1]

- they have a very open and positive (recent) history of relatively large contributions to the open-source community

---

Google on the other hand is attempting to convert the internet as a whole into their walled garden. They are:

- completely pervasive: not only opt-out, but almost impossible to opt-out of. There are thousands of vectors to consider, all of which involve significant compromise of one's ability to use the internet conveniently in order to mitigate.

- the ways in which they track you are not apparent. One particularly grievous example of this was the Google WiFi Location service, which up until recently was sending Firefox and Safari user's locations and WiFi network data to Google (desktop's and laptop's included), a fact users not reading lengthy Ts&Cs would be unaware of. Thankfully initiatives like Mozilla Stumbler are battling this feature now, but there are so many other invisible vectors. Adblockers block Google Ads and often Google Analytics, but most don't block Google CDNs, Google fonts, and many more ancillary services. This is before we get started on Maps and Youtube embeds. You're opting into Google's systems by using any popular website.

- unlike Facebook, Google are notoriously clandestine about their practices.[2]

- Google's contributions to open-source, while massive in scale, leaves a lot to be desired in execution, sentiment and commitment in my view (though there are obviously exceptions). This is kind of a lengthy topic however...

---

  TL;DR
- a Facebook account is exactly as creepy as it appears; no better, no worse. And pretty much opt-in.

- Google is invisibly everywhere, it's largely opt-in, near impossible to opt-out of completely. Choice is removed.

---

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23002166

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#96

Post by mattmanser »

bambax wrote: post #79

While I agree with the gist of the article, I have a problem conflating Google and Facebook in the same evil bag. Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for. Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my…

Try turning off any of the incredibly invasive features in Android. If you try to turn off constant location, for example, maps starts throwing all sort of cryptic messages at you. You can't use google play without an account. They want to get you to log into Chrome so they can hook up your desktop searches to your mobile searches and profile you. If you've ever used Ok Google, every word you've ever said to it is recorded and stored in their servers.

Their entire existence revolves around extracting your personal information to sell you things, to profile you and sell that information to others to sell to you.

When you actually look at what they're storing about you Google's shockingly invasive.

They steal traffic and revenue from content creators, and are getting ever more brazen about it because they know the content creators have nowhere else to go. They use their dominance in search to promote their own sub-standard offerings, exactly as Microsoft did years ago. They've systemically attacked and destroyed other aggregators, while at the same time getting those aggregators to normalise that content so they can scrape and steal it in the form of data annotations, etc. to present the data directly to users without redirecting the user to the site that's actually provided the information.

It's not at all a noble cause and it definitely hop, skipped and jumped feet first into evil years ago.

And now they're trying to take over all mobile web traffic with AMP to lock everyone into their search platform.

They're evil coated in Engineer Cool to fool people like you.

EDIT: I do think they're a necessary evil though. If the government stepped in and forced web search to run as a public utility, which sometimes I think it should be, perhaps even at cost, it would decline.

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#97

Post by notlisted »

FB did steal the web and your social network. Remember how FB grew? If not, let me remind you: "See which of your friends are also on FB! Just give us your Google and Yahoo contacts". Yes, you gave FB permission to check your contacts, but FB omitted to tell us that they would be HOLDING ON to your contacts forever and ever. FB then sent those contacts, without your permission and not per your request, an email saying YOU were on FB or and email that YOU had asked them to join. Initially there was a little quid-pro-quo, you could also export contacts from FB to Goole and/or Yahoo. This was closed down soon after they gobbled up the contact lists of the world[1][2].

Of course, LinkedIn later did a similar thing, and grew in a similar fashion, but at least there you could, and can, REMOVE the contacts you've handed over without full disclosure.

I willingly GAVE my contacts to Google/Yahoo, and they provided a service for me, GMAIL/YMAIL. Facebook STOLE what I gave to google/yahoo, and they used dark patterns.

The cat is out of the bag, but let's not forget our history.

PS Articles have even claimed that shadow-profiles were created for those who had not signed up yet, which could be matched with actual sign-ups at a later date.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/facebook-google-contacts/

[2] http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-ex...

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#98

Post by mirimir »

worldsayshi wrote: post #92
mirimir wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember extended discussions on Usenet etc about commercialization of the Internet. Not long after Eternal September, as I recall. The rest, as they say, is history. The Internet of Tim's dreams still exists. Several of them, really. But they're tiny, with relatively few users. What people now call the Internet is a horrorshow of predators and prey. So it goes. Natural selection rules.

Perhaps Ethereum is the way to an open internet?

That's one way, sure. But there is no the way, I think.

What we have is just what's won in the market.

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#99

Post by sushobhan »

Web becoming much like the economy where there are big players who control the web and others who are shouting for equality. There is another group, largest amongst these three, almost 90% of general population, who don't bother/understand and go with the wind. With big data come into the scene, things get out of hands as these "big guns" are on a spree to collect more and more of our personal details. IOT is another thing that will surely make situation much worse, as they are meant to be our personal assistance, we are allowing them to learn our behavior and act accordingly. When we see an advertisement related to our 3days earlier search, it's not the ad that is get promoted instead we are getting sold.

Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen

#100

Post by hooch »

bicubic wrote: post #17
vtange wrote: post #7

There seems to be a lot of antagonism directed at Google and Facebook in this piece, making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data. I know sometimes it's easy to play the evil mega-corp card, but we need to ask ourselves the question: what is the goal here, to take down Google and Facebook? 'Cause if you're worried about an internet with extra surveillance and restrictions,…

> making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data Both Google and Facebook are engaged in exactly those practices. Stolen and forced are apt adjectives to describe their behavior. Stolen like Whatsapp data after acquisition by Facebook, like contact lists, location history, voice recordings from your Android phone. Forced like Facebook constantly demanding you provide them you…

Living like Stallman is not so bad, actually. It's all relative :)
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