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Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

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Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#91

Post by ryanianian »

ucaetano wrote: post #80
ryanianian wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly. I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Ba…

"Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly." Are you criticizing Google or companies in general? Because your criticism applies to any company in the world. > I like…

I prefer companies whose products and services I pay for directly. They're incentivized to keep me happy and paying. The more they invest in me, the more attractive they become to me and the more I may be willing to pay. Google and FB invest more and more in their ad business and can let the consumer products slide for a very long time in a way that would never fly if they charged real money and didn't have ad revenue to fill in the gap. (Case in point is google calendar - it just got a revamp but it was what like 10 years of garbage before that?)

I don't think corp gsuite lets you opt out of ad targeting and general tracking (I could be wrong).

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#93

Post by ryanianian »

jankeymeulen wrote: post #79
ryanianian wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly. I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Ba…

2016 had $90B revenues and 1.5B 30d active users (for YouTube) so $60 per year would be a good guess. (Disclaimer: I'm a Googler but I just got these numbers from public statements. No way I'm well paid enough to be able to see more detailed numbers. :-D )

Personally I'd happily pay $5/mo for all of my google services if it meant I was entirely removed from the whole advertising/"customer-is-a-product" offering and I could have confidence that I wasn't being sold as a product in other regards.

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#94

Post by fwdpropaganda »

Zhyl wrote: post #2

I read the opening paragraph and thought 'wow, this guy has clearly just taken the release statement from Duckduckgo's privacy app announcement (or possibly their much-upvoted AMA) and just copied and pasted some statistics.' Then I saw the author.

Well spotted, very funny.

Speaking of which, I recently moved to DDG and couldn't be happier.

Frankly the only thing I don't like about DDG is the name.

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#95

Post by Y_Y »

maxxxxx wrote: post #65
linsomniac wrote: post #56

I feel like I'm in the minority, but I'm mostly ok with Google. I feel like they are good stewards of my data (encrypting even internal traffic, severe restrictions on who can get access to my data, doing useful things with that data). I believe Facebook has similar policies in place. I think their biggest sins are just being big. It makes them a larger target (which probably necessitates them taking extreme protecti…

The need for exponential growth will force all big players into making more money and doing shadier things more and more. I am especially concerned about Google and Facebook since they haven't figured any way for making for making money other than selling ads. Apple and MS at least have products they sell. I think we really should start making it difficult for companies to grow beyond a certain size. I think they are…

I think this is an excellent idea. Once a company grows beyond a certain market share/ market cap it gets split down the middle. Thus kind of happened in an ad-hoc way before, e.g. Bell. The only trouble is these mega companies have lots of clout and a strong self preservation instinct.

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#96

Post by dsfyu404ed »

metalliqaz wrote: post #50
astro_robot wrote: post #42

Honest question. I'm unsure what the danger is in letting these companies acquire data on us. We get a lot of benefit from using their products for free. Why should I care about giving my data to them as a cost of admission?

The aggregation of data is extensive and the ubiquity of the net means the data covers nearly every aspect of your life. Such information can be misused in many ways. Unfortunately, those misuses don't really become clear until the data set is already built, so there is no way to undo it. Even if Facebook or Google don't exploit the data themselves, the data could be stolen by criminals or seized by the government. A…

>Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay up?

Once tabloid journalists start trying to infer embarrassing things about politicians based on metadata we'll probably have some progress.

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#97

Post by Slansitartop »

resu_nimda wrote: post #59

Google and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble — an alternate digital universe that controls what you see in their products, based on what their algorithms think you are most likely to click on. These echo chambers distort people's reality, creating a myriad of unintended consequences such as increasing societal polarization. How is this an…

>> Google and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble

> How is this any different from the pre- or sans-Google and Facebook world?

Easy: the bubbles are tighter and harder to pierce. In the old days, you'd have to get your information from the same news sources as everyone else, only customized at a fairly coarse level (e.g. a city). That regularly pierced your bubble and gave the community a common reference point. Now, many, many more people get all their information from individually-customized feeds that are precisely matched to their biases and their bubble. There's so many fewer common reference points which makes is harder for many people in the same communities to even communicate.

tl;dr: it's an emergent qualitative difference caused by scale.

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#98

Post by kasey_junk »

ams6110 wrote: post #67
gaius wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A service ISPs should offer as standard is regularly randomising your outbound IP from their pool for all but a whitelist you specify. So you can have a static IP for say you work firewall, but are harder to track otherwise

Most ISPs are in bed with the advertisers and tracking. That's one reason I don't use my ISP's DNS.

Do you use googles?

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#99

Post by Slansitartop »

morganvachon wrote: post #57
PuffinBlue wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ublock didn't block anything. Then I realised that this site allows auto-playing videos so at some point in the past I seem to have disabled JavaScript on this site. I wish it was easier to control JavaScript usage as the visitor. It's either very complex or just 'turn it all off and go somewhere else if nothing works'. Perhaps the second option is the 'correct' response though.

If you're using Firefox and you want to keep JavaScript enabled but stop auto-playing videos, you can go into about:config and set media.autoplay.enabled to false . I'm not sure if other browsers have a similar switch, but this works in any current version of Firefox. It only affects HTML5 video containers; Flash and Silverlight video containers may still auto-play.

I do this, but also be prepared for video you expect to play to no work as expected. For instance, a video might appear to be frozen or "loading" until you click on it.

Re: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online

#100

Post by ucaetano »

addicted wrote: post #85
ucaetano wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly." Are you criticizing Google or companies in general? Because your criticism applies to any company in the world. > I like…

It doesn't apply to all companies. Apple, for example, has very strong incentives to maintain your privacy, to the point that they have made it a selling point for their devices and are also suffering in the realms of machine learning because they are not leveraging your data the way Google or FB would.

> has very strong incentives to maintain your privacy

> their incentives aren't really aligned with yours

No, they have a very strong incentive to appear to maintain your privacy. And that's only temporary.

Don't fall for any company saying that they're doing something in the user's interests. They aren't. Companies exist to make profits, if for a brief period of time that means helping users in some way, it's only a coincidence, and you're being fooled by it.

Take a look at China, Apple didn't even blink before deciding to hand over all data to the Chinese government.

I trust companies, because I know exactly what matters for them: profits. I trust them to follow profits and act on their best interest.

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