[HN Gopher] Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feed...
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Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google
Author : zimmerfrei
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-08-22 10:35 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| p1mrx wrote:
| goog-prefixes.txt only contains IPv4 addresses, so if you have
| IPv6, it'll miss most of the traffic.
| paulwilsondev wrote:
| as if I wasn't already paranoid enough... this makes me more
| so... I was afraid it was going to read me what google learns,
| but hearing the pops makes me realize just how much I'm producing
| for Google every second.
| felipelalli wrote:
| Is it possible to customize / extend? Apple? Twitter? Facebook
| etc?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Not to make excuses for Google, but is this an entirely accurate
| portrayal?
|
| Like, I've been working on a web project that doesn't contain
| _any_ analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in
| Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool,
| I would hear lots of noise.
|
| But, I just can't imagine how Google could do anything useful (to
| them) with my random JSON blobs.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| Even without any app opened, my manjaro installation seems to
| ping detectportal.firefox.com which is hosted in google ip
| address which trigger the noise. With firefox open, the noise
| got worse. I think firefox sync servers might be located on
| GCP. But then I tried pinging my GCP server and it didn't
| trigger the noise.
| akie wrote:
| > But I can't imagine Google would know how to do anything
| useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.
|
| They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people
| accessing them. Their whole suite of "free" developer tools
| (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a
| means to get information about what people do online.
| eps wrote:
| Don't know why parent comment is in gray, but it's spot on.
|
| The one and only _genuine_ business reason for Google Fonts
| is to vacuum visits data from sites that don 't have GA
| installed or by users who have GA blocked. That's it. Free
| cheese and all that.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people
| accessing them
|
| But if they don't know what the blobs are, how does this help
| them? What can they tie it to?
|
| The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location
| have an sha1 hash of
| 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful
| information?
| viraptor wrote:
| In isolation, no. But given enough other actors that use
| the same firebase + can be tracked by adsense, they can
| infer connections useful for targeting you.
| akie wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, because that's
| exactly what they're doing.
|
| Do people really think Google just gives away things for
| free because they're being nice?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Do people really think Google just gives away things
| for free because they're being nice?
|
| No, I assumed they gave the low tier away for free so
| people would eventually upgrade to the higher tiers.
| viraptor wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not saying that's what they do
| currently. Just that you can get useful metadata from an
| aggregate of very basic info like this.
| zwkrt wrote:
| You're not thinking on a big enough scale. No big tech
| company cares about "your" data. They care about everyone's
| data in aggregate as much as they can get from every
| location at every granularity. Even thinking of a tech
| company as collecting all of "your" data to create an ad
| profile "for you" is rather inaccurate. They're collecting
| everyone's data to create an ad profile for everybody,
| tailored to what makes the most money in aggregate across
| all ad slots.
|
| When you think of it like this you'll stop asking questions
| like "what would they do with this piece of data?" Because
| the answer is always that it is a drop in a giant ocean of
| machine learning data.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| At a minimum they could build cohorts of people who use
| your app and use that as a bit of information for ad
| targeting.
|
| The SHA-1 thing is a complete non-sequitur, but since you
| asked, small amounts of data run through unsalted SHA-1 can
| be brute-forced very easily if someone cared find out where
| you are.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You don't need the SHA1 or anything _within_ the blobs
| even. Just an IP address & user-agent pair is enough to
| uniquely identify a user with some accuracy, and that
| accuracy only goes up the more data you add. It'll never
| be 100% accurate, but for ad targeting, it doesn't need
| to be - a "hunch" is more than enough since getting it
| wrong leaves you no worse than you were before.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > The SHA-1 thing is a complete non-sequitur
|
| Sorry about that. I just couldn't figure out where GP was
| going.
| weberer wrote:
| If the requests are client side, they know that the user
| has accessed your domain. They can analyze the frequency
| and timestamps of these requests and add that information
| to the ad profile they have built for that user.
| phh wrote:
| Don't you need a proprietary firebase SDK in your app to
| use it? Do you know what data are included in the requests?
| I would argue that anything as simple as IP +
| UA/OSidentifier can be of interest to Google
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I've just been using XMLHttpRequest and the Firebase REST
| API, no SDK. I imagine Google can see the IP address, but
| I think that's it?
|
| (This is my first time building anything that involves a
| "backend", so I am pretty new to this!)
| easrng wrote:
| It depends what browser you're using and what parameters
| you're using on the XMLHttpRequest. They definitely get
| the IP, user agent (so what OS and browser), and
| potentially more.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Their whole suite of "free" developer tools (google
| analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to
| get information about what people do online.
|
| Is this actually confirmed to be true? It would make a lot of
| sense for them to use free-tier GA data for profiling for
| Display ads etc, but has it ever actually been proven?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Given the amount of factors that go into ad targeting it's
| pretty much impossible to prove without a source code
| audit. It also means it's easy for Google to do it and get
| away with it as nobody can prove it. Given the business
| model of Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they did it,
| especially considering they've already proven their bad
| faith with various dark patterns and their intentional
| refusal to comply with the GDPR (for 4 years their
| "consent" flow wasn't compliant as you couldn't decline as
| easily as accept).
| advisedwang wrote:
| Probably not for the CDN stuff
|
| From https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq:
|
| > The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection
| ... the Google Fonts API does not set or log cookies ...
| resource-specific domains...don't contain any credentials
| ... IP addresses are not logged.
|
| From https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/terms
|
| > Google Hosted Libraries uses resource-specific domains...
| Requests unauthenticated ... Google Hosted Libraries only
| uses cookies as necessary for security and to prevent abuse
| ... Our systems are designed to remove HTTP referer
| information before logging
|
| But analytics is a totally different story.
| https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
|
| > when you visit a website that uses...Google
| Analytics...your web browser automatically sends certain
| information to Google. This includes the URL of the page
| you're visiting and your IP address. We may also set
| cookies on your browser or read cookies that are already
| there. Apps that use Google advertising services also share
| information with Google, such as the name of the app and a
| unique identifier for advertising > Google uses the
| information shared by sites and apps to ... personalize
| content and ads you see on Google and on our partners'
| sites and apps
|
| So Google's policies do let them use 3rd party Google
| Analytics data to target ads.
| nousermane wrote:
| Or alternatively, you can send all the traffic destined to
| google, into dev-null instead:
| U=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert\
| /googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt for i in $(wget -qO -
| $U); do ip route add unreach $i done
|
| ...but you'd be surprised how many of seemingly unrelated places
| on the Internet would break without google.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Yeah, their captcha is everywhere for starters. Obviously a lot
| of other deps too.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| How come there isn't a single open source captcha solution?
| easrng wrote:
| There are plenty of open source "type the letters"
| captchas, there are also open source PoW "captchas" like
| https://github.com/FriendlyCaptcha (that one might only be
| partially open, not sure)
| leodriesch wrote:
| I'd say captchas are reliant on not being open about their
| detection methods, otherwise they would be easier to game.
|
| AFAIK the image selection is only part of determining
| you're a human, the other part is tracking your mouse
| movement and so to see if you're real.
| [deleted]
| nano9 wrote:
| I've noticed hcaptcha being used more widely.
| jer0me wrote:
| I believe that hCaptcha pays the site administrator, so
| for a Cloudflare or Discord it could be a sizable chunk
| of cash. Maybe not to them, but it's something.
| eatbots wrote:
| No: enterprise customers like that pay hCaptcha.
| https://www.hcaptcha.com/enterprise
| 4m1rk wrote:
| And Google fonts?
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Blocking google fonts creates weirdness but doesn't really
| break much.
| kornhole wrote:
| A common explanation I get from people with poor digital hygiene
| is that they do not see how it is affecting them. Making the
| imperceptible perceptible is a great concept for more
| innovations.
|
| I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the
| DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much
| for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool
| of all the data that shows impacts of their data leakage and puts
| it in a video format they can consume. It sounds like a lot of
| work to build.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >they do not see how it is affecting them
|
| I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular
| Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on
| AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem
| to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the
| many free services I value greatly running.
|
| Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're
| collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad, as the
| logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data about your
| browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill in the
| logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot more
| persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making fancy
| graphs.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Same here when it comes to how it affects me personally, but
| I can see how it affects society as a whole (or how it could
| affect kids) so easily.
|
| Most people don't have an understanding about how their
| browsing is a part of a positive feedback loop that pushes
| them into echo chambers on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc.
| It's a consequence of relying on advertising as a revenue
| generator for these services. Teaching your kids about how
| their data is being used for this purpose is important.
| Sending them raw DNS logs to do that is definitely not going
| to be effective though.
| kylevedder wrote:
| It's valid to point out to children that platforms have an
| incentive to suck them in and keep them on there, but this
| has nothing to do with ads.
|
| Netflix is a paid subscription service that does not show
| you ads, yet they have just as strong of an incentive to
| keep you on their platform as much as possible so you don't
| go to a competitor. This is simply the nature of online
| services -- a better online service keeps you on there
| longer, and in a world of significant online competition,
| everyone is trying to suck you in.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The same is true of all media really, including books
| (e.g. the various tactics used by the authors of novels
| to keep the reader turning the next page). It's just that
| online media is more potent and compelling to most people
| so the effect is more noticeable.
| kornhole wrote:
| The visualization is useful for those who already understand
| how it harms them and society. If someone likes to be watched
| and controlled, this type of visualization is not of much
| value.
| kylevedder wrote:
| "if you know you know" isn't an argument. This is just
| empty rhetoric -- dogmatically asserting that _tracking
| ads_ damage society and that I 'm being controlled by it is
| a pretty strong claim, and a claim that requires evidence
| to support it.
|
| If this is the typical quality of your privacy
| argumentation then it should be no surprise that your
| children don't buy your arguments.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You're not going to win this "fight" on HN, I've been
| here for years. People here are convinced that every
| piece of data being collected is a moral evil.
|
| They'll vaguely wave at things like DNS logs or server IP
| logs, and always assume that everything is always feeding
| huge tracking machines at big companies. They'll mix up
| tracking used for logs with tracking used for ads with
| tracking used to improve the product. There's no real
| understanding of what cohort sizes or signals are needed
| to make tracking meaningful. It's a mess.
|
| IMO it's good to be sensitive about the data we send and
| hold tech companies accountable for how much data they
| take. I've also worked on big tech teams that collect
| data. But the arguments here are always so black-and-
| white that they don't make any meaningful point.
| kylevedder wrote:
| The target audience for my comments are the hundreds of
| people reading and not commenting. If you're casually
| reading the comments, without a foil of reasonability, I
| think it's easy to get sucked into implicitly accepting
| the premises of the zealots frothing at the mouth in the
| comments. You're right that I don't imagine I'm going to
| change the mind of the zealots.
| bryan_w wrote:
| Indeed, as a wise man once said, "the haters are going to
| hate".
| woopwoop wrote:
| I, for one, appreciate the points you are making here,
| and the doggedness with which you are making them. I
| basically feel the same way, but I don't usually comment
| on these discussions because of the general shrillness of
| the discussion.
| yosito wrote:
| > tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of
| life at all
|
| Like a frog boiling in hot water, just because you don't
| perceive it, doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. The business
| model of ad-based services is that they sell the ability to
| manipulate real world behavior to the highest bidder. That
| manipulation ranges from innocuous ads for products you don't
| need, to political ideas and misinformation. There's a chance
| that you're self aware, self disciplined and very observant
| and manage to avoid this manipulation. But given the fact
| that it works extremely well at scale, it's more likely that
| you're just not noticing how you're being manipulated.
| kylevedder wrote:
| This a bit orthogonal so I put it in a separate comment, but
| let me be even more aggressive and do a bit of offense:
|
| I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments
| over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost
| always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having
| this information, rather than having any _material_
| justification for why it 's harmful.
|
| But attacking ads and ad tracking, the revenue model of the
| free web, _is materially harmful_. Imagine how much worse the
| world would be if Google search weren 't free -- even a
| nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of
| the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's
| collective knowledge (not to mention how much worse the user
| experience would be to quickly Google something). Humanity
| collectively would be very non trivially worse off.
|
| Seriously, what other business model besides tracked ads can
| generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, let alone
| power growth, at companies providing free services like
| Google Search, Maps, etc, that don't have such grossly
| negative externalities like severely curtailing human
| development and don't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of
| people who are prima facie annoyed by a company using the
| interactions with their free service to make money?
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| A significant quantity of the ad space is pernicious: The
| ads seeking to be displayed are explicitly intending to
| manipulate the viewer to change their cognitive orientation
| to the benefit of the buyer, with anywhere from callous
| disregard to outright contempt for the viewer's outcomes.
|
| Big tech has significantly aided in the delivery of these
| harmful messages, and seeks to use personalized information
| to find the channels, times, and context that are _most_
| effective at undermining the will and agency of the
| viewers.
|
| Are there models where an information / recommendation
| broker could justifiably collect what would otherwise be
| concerning amounts of personal information? Potentially, if
| it were using that information to compute and facilitate
| the maximal individually beneficial outcomes of each
| individual user, but that's not what's happening here.
| Right now, we're building a system that would happily have
| people die painfully and preventably at 40 after living
| miserable lives because the economic returns of that model
| maximize the returns on advertisers / delivery networks.
| dogman144 wrote:
| > rather than having any material justification for why
| it's harmful
|
| Material - During the bombings in Austin, Google provided a
| blanket location/data dump to the police of everyone with
| Google accs within x-miles of the event. That data,
| regardless of linked to the bombing in the end, is kept by
| Austin PD and likely the FBI, forever. You have given the
| police a warrantless log of citizens basically based on
| "well they use Google and live in Austin."
|
| If you don't see the glaring material issues, that explains
| a lot about why Google is Google.
| kylevedder wrote:
| The police asked for stuff and the company complied and
| now you're upset that the government has it, but somehow
| it's actually Google's fault? Pass laws so your
| government can't do things you don't like.
|
| >If you don't see the glaring material issues, that
| explains a lot about why Google is Google.
|
| I don't work at Google anymore. Feel free to click on my
| profile to see what I'm up to these days.
| mola wrote:
| The attitude that if the government is using the data
| collected by tech companies to bypass constitutional
| limitation, then it's a problem with government and not big
| tech, is rather reductionist. This is a tangled system and
| you cannot completely separate the issues as you so simply
| claim. Big tech colluded with government, and got nice
| advantages for their participation with the surveillance
| system. The citizen/consumer is massively under represented
| and underpowered to make changes to the system once it's in
| place.
|
| Not to mention the completely immoral act of gathering very
| private information without consent. I bet that most ppl
| twenty years ago, if asked if they would consent to giving
| an exact timeline of their activities to third parties in
| exchange to free entertainment would probably not readily
| agree. Big tech lied to consumers until it normalized the
| new surveillance status que, that's immoral and wrong, even
| if it's extremely profitable.
|
| Your individualistic perspective, where you dismiss any
| harms if they do not relate to you personally, is very
| short sighted. Authoritarianism can creep up on you, first
| it targets the weekest, and before you know it, it could be
| you. Surveillance tech is a tool for authoritarianism,
| apart from it's inherent immorality because of how it was
| hidden from the consumer, it is corrupting democracies and
| gives them a very authoritarian tint.
|
| Could it be that you can not understand the harms because
| you actively took part in creating this reality? I know
| it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody
| likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and
| to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very
| powerful blinders.
| kylevedder wrote:
| I wholesale reject the following:
|
| 1) Big tech colluded with government, and got nice
| advantages for their participation with the surveillance
| system -- they're getting raked over the coals at dog and
| pony show anti trust hearings.
|
| 2) completely immoral act of gathering very private
| information without consent -- you literally gave these
| websites this information, and there's legal privacy
| policies that no one reads describing how it's used. If
| you don't want them to have your info, _simply don 't
| give it to them_.
|
| 3) Authoritarianism can creep up on you -- ok and? The
| fact that Google's ad auctions are more efficient isn't
| going to cause authoritarianism.
|
| 4) Could it be that you can not understand the harms
| because you actively took part in creating this reality?
| -- lmao no
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 1) The antitrust hearings are literally dog and pony
| shows. Nothing has come of them, except slightly
| increased lobbying spending by Google and Amazon.
|
| 2) Other people give it to them, not just you. I tried
| for years to keep my face off Facebook, and finally made
| a page to take control of my "shadow profile" because
| people kept putting it there. Companies often give it to
| them too, through data brokers.
|
| 3) Google's ad auction technology will make authoritarian
| government much more efficient, the same way IBM's census
| technology did in the 1930's and 1940's.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Upton Sinclair would be proud. Try using a smartphone
| today, which is becoming more and more required, without
| giving up PII.
|
| - Our school district requires our kids to do business
| with Google, there is no way around around it without
| significant pain. They don't have another option.
|
| - Last week my attempt at buying concert tickets was
| refused because I would not disclose my phone number and
| Ticketmaster no longer allows other options. A small
| thing but they add up.
|
| - More and more restaurants won't accept cash.
|
| - DMV is selling our information, ADP is selling our
| paycheck information.
|
| The idea that we have "every choice in the matter" is
| already silly and getting falser by the day.
| fsflover wrote:
| > If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't
| give it to them.
|
| Did you hear about Facebook's shadow profiles?
| cogman10 wrote:
| So let me bring up some of the exceptions I can think of.
|
| Recently, a woman got an abortion and part of what the
| prosecution used against her was data collected from
| facebook.
|
| With google's tracking, is it not unlikely that a
| government body could subpoena them for search histories?
| (which, they do already) to look for questions like "has
| this individual asked about abortions recently?"
|
| Perhaps you view that as moral, but what about other things
| a totalitarian government might want to control? What about
| China trying to find the identities of people protesting
| them? Is it not unlikely that they might have search
| history data betraying that they are a protestor or likely
| protestor?
|
| But then there is the question of why they even need that
| data in the first place. You argue "how else would they
| make money?" and I'd argue "well, ads?". The reason, the
| real reason, google collects this data isn't because they
| have to, it's because it's more profitable if ads are
| better targeted and more customized per individual. Google
| would certainly take a profit hit if they stopped the data
| tracking, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still be one
| of the biggest and best places to advertise on the
| internet. They'd simply be less profitable.
| filoleg wrote:
| > Recently, a woman got an abortion and part of what the
| prosecution used against her was data collected from
| Facebook
|
| Two crucial details you omitted:
|
| 1. Facebook didn't just hand over the data. It was a
| court order. At no point had the data just randomly got
| collected in some dragnet. They got a targeted precise
| warrant from the court to obtain specific messages of a
| specific person. Unless you got a court warrant against
| you, I don't see a reason to worry about here. None of
| this is related to "data collection".
|
| 2. It was unencrypted messages where the defendant was
| conspiring with another person to perform an abortion
| past 23 weeks (aka 5mo+, which is illegal almost
| everywhere in the world), and then conceal the crime by
| burning (in a literal fire) the physical evidence. Mind
| you, abortions are totally legal up to 22 weeks in
| Nebraska. Meanwhile, EU has only 2 countries with limits
| up to 24 weeks, with the rest being 20 weeks or less[0].
|
| Tldr: if you send an unencrypted message to your crime
| co-conspirator (where you are discussing specific details
| of your actual plan to commit a crime), and then get
| caught via other methods, don't be surprised when the
| court sends a legal order to obtain your unencrypted
| messages as evidence.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It is a lot easier to get a court order for something
| than you probably think. Dragnet versions of court orders
| also exist, such as geofence warrants. Also, that data is
| often sold packaged up and sold to third parties via data
| brokers. The FBI has been known to buy data from data
| brokers instead of getting it by court order.
| filoleg wrote:
| Sure, those things might happen. None of those things
| happened in that Nebraska case though, so using it to as
| a specific example to support your claim feels a bit off.
|
| Especially considering the fact that the original comment
| omitted some pretty crucial details that end up painting
| the overall situation in a very different light.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| What happened in the Nebraska case was more subtly bad:
| if the government had to subpoena HER for her location
| data on that day, there would likely be no criminal
| conviction at all. The 5th amendment would be a valid
| excuse to avoid giving out the data. However, they only
| had to subpoena Facebook, whose data is not covered by
| 5th amendment protections, and who would like to maintain
| a friendly relationship with governments.
|
| EDIT: This is generally called the principal-agent
| problem, and there are lots of rules around agent
| behavior when it traditionally applies (eg attorney-
| client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality).
|
| Also, you should note that there are lots of crimes, and
| you probably commit a lot of them. If you have ever used
| someone else's WiFi without permission, that's one. If
| you carried a screwdriver or a sharpie into a store,
| that's a separate crime. The list goes on and on.
| eurleif wrote:
| The fifth amendment provides a right not to testify
| against yourself. It has little to do with documents,
| whether they are in your possession or someone else's.
| The fourth amendment is the one that applies there. If
| her phone were recording location data locally (or if she
| were keeping a paper diary of her location, for that
| matter), the government could have obtained that
| information with a search warrant, and it would have been
| perfectly admissible.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| What you're saying is true only if the data is
| unencrypted or not password-protected. If the data is
| encrypted, the government would have to crack it (which
| is not usually possible with decent encryption and
| anything short of the NSA breathing down your neck). They
| could not just ask you for the password.
| eurleif wrote:
| The case law on compelled decryption is less clear-cut
| than you're describing. (Possible exceptions include:
| biometric, as opposed to password/passcode, encryption;
| and the government being able to prove that the defendant
| knows the password.) Moreover, even when the government
| can't obtain the decryption key from the defendant,
| cracking the encryption is not the only possibility. They
| could also seize the device while it is running, with the
| decryption key and/or decrypted data already in memory.
| That was done in the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, for
| example.
| kylevedder wrote:
| At an object level, "not having XYZ actions occur from
| the government" is a problem with the government, not any
| tech company. You almost certainly live in a western
| style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify
| the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving);
| it's absurd to complain about _tech companies_ when you
| 're actually upset with the government. This does _doubly
| so_ when the primary threat to the ads tracking business
| model in the West is _government legislation produced by
| elected representatives_.
|
| At a meta level, this is just a list of grievances.
| You've not suggested a workable alternative business
| model that, on balance, provides more net good. It's
| possible that all your complaints about tracking ads are
| legitimate and _it 's still the best business model for
| providing the sort of massively positive societal value
| Google search provides_.
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| I'm a trillionaire who can hire maybe 10,001 minimum wage
| workers to follow you and the top 10,000 earners in the
| US around anywhere you go and record every single thing
| you do from a safe distance in public spaces (including
| stores, malls, church etc, looking in through your
| windows from the street). I'm not doing anything illegal,
| but you probably think it's creepy. How can I explain to
| you that it's not?
|
| Earlier you said, tracking pays for free services you use
| but doesn't have a net negative effect on your life. How
| can you tell? And if you can tell, what's the problem
| with being informed of how often you're being tracked?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > is a problem with the government, not any tech company.
| You almost certainly live in a western style democracy,
| and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government
| behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving)
|
| Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has
| "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" as one
| of their issues. I mean, come on. This is a niche issue
| that has little public awareness. To suggest "Oh, you
| just need to vote better" is simply laughable. I (and I'm
| guessing most people) don't live in a government where
| you can simply vote in new laws or regulations, we vote
| for candidates and whether or not those candidates care
| about privacy rights is a crap shoot. Most people don't
| have a cursory understanding of how data tracking works.
|
| This is a google problem. They don't have regulations
| pushing them to track their users in a way that makes
| their data easily accessible and consumable by government
| agencies. There aren't regulations out there forcing it.
| This is made evident by Apple's run ins with the FBI
| because their encryption wasn't crackable.
|
| And frankly, while this is an issue, there are so many
| other issues I care about politically that a candidate
| running on the "limit google tracking" platform wouldn't
| have enough to win my vote. It's important, but so are so
| many other issues of the day.
|
| > You've not suggested a workable alternative business
| model that, on balance, provides more net good.
|
| More net good? Or more profit for google? These are not
| the same things.
|
| I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model,
| ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular
| throughout the internet right up until google took things
| over with doubleclick.
|
| Again, this is not a business model that will be as
| profitable, but you are conflating "good" with "profit".
|
| And as a counter example, duck duck go appears to be
| doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like
| crazy.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that
| has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies"
|
| Again, your list of complaints revolved about the
| government getting their hands on all this data and using
| it for purposes you don't like. If you're upset about
| that, there's plenty of people interested in civil
| rights.
|
| But if digital privacy is such a niche issue, how come
| Europe and the United States have GDPR?
|
| >This is a Google issue... ...the FBI...
|
| Again, you're upset with the behavior of the FBI, not
| Google. Vote for people who restrict the FBI's ability to
| request this data instead of getting mad at the existence
| of tracking ad data.
|
| >I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model,
| ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular
| throughout the internet right up until google took things
| over with doubleclick.
|
| And the fact that Google captures information about what
| sites you've been to in order to make ad auctions more
| efficient is so odious to you that you want to move
| everyone back in time to a demonstratively less efficient
| business model which hurts ad buyers (other businesses)
| at least as much as it does Google? You must know your
| proposed business model isn't nearly as good, but you've
| yet to articulate what exactly we're getting for it that
| makes the cost worth it.
|
| >duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they
| aren't tracking users like crazy.
|
| DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're
| not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like
| making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search
| algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse
| (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially
| optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get
| a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby
| imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google
| is aggressively innovating on this front and still
| struggling.)
| ephbit wrote:
| > If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality
| would stagnate and then get worse ...
|
| You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly still
| get good results from google.
|
| There are dozens if not hundreds of discussions here in
| HN where people complain about exactly the opposite.
|
| Google search results have become worse and worse in
| recent years, mostly except for search queries that
| involve finding buyable products anyway.
|
| Many other searches where the goal is to simply find a
| text containing the search terms in a common context
| (simple retrieval of information) have become
| consistently worse, is my impression. The results for
| these searches are typically littered with non sense
| sites that contain ads for related products and random
| collections of key words.
| wizofaus wrote:
| > You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly
| still get good results from google
|
| Add me to that list. Google results are invariably
| superior every time I've tried out alternatives. I wish
| it weren't so, as there's still a lot of room for
| improvement with Google but they have such a monopoly
| they're unlikely to invest heavily in further advances if
| there's any risk it reduces their ad revenue.
|
| Do you have some specific examples where an alternative
| web search returned better results than Google?
| skummetmaelk wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're
| not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like
| making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search
| algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse
| (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially
| optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get
| a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby
| imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google
| is aggressively innovating on this front and still
| struggling.)
|
| If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be
| way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam
| sites with vapid auto content.
|
| Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at
| this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money
| compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to
| remove the doping to see how he really fares against the
| others.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be
| way less SEO
|
| This is just nonsense. If there were no ads,
| hyperoptimized SEO would only be _more_ important because
| it 's the only way for you as a web admin to surface your
| content in people's searches.
| skummetmaelk wrote:
| Okay, and that's going to benefit blogspam and auto
| generated content how exactly? That's the SEO that people
| complain about. Not being able to search for reviews for
| products because the results are all spammy "BEST VACUUM
| IN 2022" type results. Googling tech support questions
| leads you to auto generated mirror sites that only exist
| to scam you into viewing ads. etc. etc.
|
| Anyway, you conveniently ignored the rest of the post.
| scubbo wrote:
| I've never seen such a concise and well-articulated
| statement of this position. Thank you for presenting it!
| I instinctively disagree with it, but I can't actually
| provide a coherent and convincing counter-argument, which
| is probably a sign that I need to think more on it. Thank
| you for that prompt.
|
| The best counter-argument I can think of is:
|
| > the claim that only Google (or, "only organizations
| large enough to require ads as revenue support") can
| provide these services is false - Open Source solutions
| (like OpenStreetMap, etc.) provide "good-enough" value.
| That is, the drop in value from "premium shiny BigTech
| solution" to "less-fully-featured Open Source privacy-
| respecting solution" is smaller than the gain in value
| from the associated privacy-aesthetics.
|
| That's a subjective statement that applies on a case-by-
| case basis (is Google Maps more socially valuable than
| Google Drive?), and won't be true for everyone - perhaps,
| not many people.
|
| EDIT: for a more fully-described alternative business
| model - https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-
| model/
| kylevedder wrote:
| A lot of AV companies bootstrapped their maps off of
| OpenStreetMaps -- it's great anything is free, but they
| kind of suck. The "cost" of a company using info about me
| to run more efficient ad auctions is _totally_ worth the
| benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date
| business info with stuff like hours and direct links to
| their website /contact info.
| scubbo wrote:
| > The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more
| efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of
| having highly accurate maps with up to date business info
| with stuff like hours and direct links to their
| website/contact info.
|
| This is a perfect example of the "subjective statement
| that applies on a case-by-case basis" that I was
| referring to.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The problem with your argument is that the same
| mechanisms that are used by government for broad-reaching
| surveillance are also used for legitimate government
| purposes. These are things like subpoenas and warrants,
| which are impossible to eliminate completely while
| keeping a functional court system.
|
| You could try to argue that we should make sure that
| these are narrow in scope (that's already the rule
| despite the current practice), but that doesn't eliminate
| the problem completely: someone can already subpoena
| Amazon for "recordings taken in kylevedder's house
| between 4/22/2022 and 6/22/2022" related to an
| investigation, and they will get them. Even if you are
| not the target of the investigation, but they have reason
| to believe that the target may have visited you during
| that time period. Such a subpoena has not been tried in
| civil court yet, but it will likely be allowed. In an
| alternative world where tech companies don't track you,
| these subpoenas wouldn't work.
|
| Google, Amazon, and other data collectors have a
| principal-agent problem with respect to data about you:
| while you would likely fight a subpoena for your location
| data tooth and nail, they don't care so much. They will
| often give up the data, and they won't even tell you they
| did.
|
| The alternative business models are ad support without
| tracking and subscriptions. Google makes most of its
| money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking,
| like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads
| for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV."
| Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they
| try to produce fully personalized results for you.
| WolframAlpha is a search engine on a subscription model.
| Micro-subscriptions are already a thing (albeit
| invented/normalized after Google was invented), and it
| would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google
| subscription into your cable plan the way they do for
| entertainment products.
|
| As far as this being bad for people, allowing companies
| to track you invasively is a little like not buying
| insurance. You won't care most of the time, but you may
| care a lot. Lots of people don't buy insurance, even
| though they should, because they severely underestimate
| tail risk. This kind of cognitive distortion is
| traditionally addressed with laws: social security,
| healthcare mandates (or single-payer healthcare), and car
| insurance mandates in some states all operate on this
| rationale. So should privacy legislation.
| scubbo wrote:
| Putting this in a sibling comment because it's tangential
| to my more-relevant response about an alternative
| business model.
|
| ---
|
| The claim that citizens of western-style democracies have
| mechanisms to modify government behaviour is technically
| true, but meaningless. The average Western citizen has
| more chance of becoming an Astronaut or solving a
| Millenium problem than they do of effecting real
| govenmental change without access to extraordinary social
| capital or Super-PAC-level donations. Especially given
| that most western-style democracies' mechanisms consist
| of "pick which of these two broad bundles of choices you
| want to support" (as cogman10 pointed out, "the candidate
| who is opposed to data-tracking" does not really exist as
| a viable option; and even if they did, they would need to
| have a broad platform of popular positions, not just that
| one) - so if the option you want is not offered, you not
| only need to change voting behaviour to support it, you
| first need to create that option out of whole cloth.
| kylevedder wrote:
| And you think that complaining about _tech companies_ ,
| companies owned by share holders who have no particular
| obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders,
| is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you
| want?
|
| Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual
| threat to tracking ads as a business is _governmental
| legislation_ , something which we've already seen occur
| with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US.
| It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth
| to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those
| bills though, so I _wholesale_ reject the argument that
| privacy is a niche complaint and you 're powerless to
| create change in the government.
| scubbo wrote:
| > And you think that complaining about tech
| companies[...] is a more rational strategy to achieve the
| outcomes you want?
|
| No, I don't. I was pointing out that your claim that
| individuals can effect political change is broadly
| incorrect. That doesn't imply that the alternative
| (direct petitioning of companies) is effective.
|
| Attempting political change probably _is_ a more rational
| strategy than petitioning tech companies. As an
| individual, neither seems powerful.
|
| > Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual
| threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental
| legislation
|
| No disagreement here!
|
| > I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche
| complaint and you're powerless to create change in the
| government.
|
| To be clear, these are two separate claims. Privacy might
| or might not be a niche complaint - I feel that it is
| (given how little my non-technical friends care about
| it), but I'm purely working off anecdata, and I concede
| that GDPR (and the slew of other Privacy regulations
| following in its wake) are datapoints that contradict me.
| The other claim - that individuals are powerless to
| effect political change - remains undisproven to me. In
| particular, I reject the position that _individual_
| privacy advocates were responsible for GDPR. It's large
| groups like the EFF (as a sibling commenter pointed out)
| that cause governments to take notice, not individuals.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I disagree vehemently as someone involved in transit and
| housing activism. The cause did, does, and probably will
| continue to feel hopeless. There are days I walk out of
| talking with others about issues or days where a Mayor
| walks back a commitment that punch you in the gut. But
| through organization and by looking back over the last 5
| years of activism in my community/area, I can _see_ the
| real work that 's been done. (It helps that our work
| results in infrastructure changes, of course.)
|
| As far as a candidate, trust me there are hungry junior
| political candidates all the time that are happy to take
| campaign donations and meet their constituents demands.
| The quickest way to become a popular, well-funded
| candidate is to represent a wealthy, grassroots cause
| with no representation. If you're concerned about this,
| contribute to the EFF, and maybe even consider joining
| them! Don't put your anger into online zealotry if you
| live in a democratic country, use that energy to petition
| the government for change.
| scubbo wrote:
| > If you're concerned about this, contribute to the EFF
|
| Doesn't this just prove my point? No individual can make
| a difference - only large organizations can.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The EFF is hardly a "large organization". But yes, some
| amount of organization is necessary for political change.
| Fundamentally, an individual in a democracy pays into a
| system and cannot change the entire system at their
| behest.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Are you sure the desire not to be imprisoned or killed
| isn't aesthetic?
| kylevedder wrote:
| So truuuuu, tech companies are imprisoning people or
| killing them, not governments.
| kradeelav wrote:
| Putting aside the business model side of it (I can't speak
| for that), I agree with you about pro-privacy arguments
| tend to be annoyingly insufficient on the material
| justification ... when I can think of plenty.
|
| Put simply, it enables massive power inequalities that
| threaten to be permanent, if they aren't already. Several
| living examples:
|
| * Black advocates have already raised attention to pre-
| emptive tracking mixed with AI to "anticipate" crimes
| committed by "at risk" individuals (read, racial profiling)
| when this goes against everything that the Constitution
| stands for re: presuming innocence.
|
| * The recent controversies with Roe that another sibling
| comment is a textbook example about how information mined
| from menstrual apps or location services can be used to
| criminalize women seeking an abortion.
|
| * On a similar tangent, there was a case early on in
| adtech's history when a young woman who was pregnant and
| hiding it from the people she lived with got found out
| because ads about baby supplies were shown to them (after
| she had searched up the items). People's living situations
| can be volatile and this could have been fatal for her if
| they were sufficiently abusive enough.
|
| * Health/Medical apps tend to be especially obscene with
| tracking - collecting data on the most medically vulnerable
| (eg disabled people) and letting that data be resold often
| times means locking them to a sub-standard life because
| jobs and insurance can and will discriminate in obvious and
| subtle ways if they know about certain medical conditions,
| if they can get away with it.
|
| This is only the tip of the iceberg.
| dmitriid wrote:
| You can have ads without tracking. I don't think anyone is
| against ads per se. People are against pervasive continuous
| tracking and wholesale sale of data to anyone.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >wholesale sale of data to anyone
|
| You know Google doesn't do this, right? Besides being
| against their own terms of service (and outright
| illegal), they're economically incentivized _not to_ ;
| they _use_ the data to make their ad auctions more
| efficient, an edge they would lose if they sold the raw
| data.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| the data goes to the govt
| fsflover wrote:
| Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the
| government too powerful and not accountable. If only
| activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it
| will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have
| privacy to protect them. It's sort of like freedom of
| speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for
| everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
| drcongo wrote:
| Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn't
| pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you
| once googled a symptom, or your flight prices because your
| search history reveals your disposable income? Or even, taken
| to extremes, it could even preclude your from even getting
| health insurance because it can prove knowledge of a pre-
| existing condition.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _Do you know for sure that surveillance capitalism isn 't
| pushing up the prices of your health insurance because you
| once googled a symptom_
|
| Yes, I do, at least for the very large majority of
| Americans who get their health insurance through their
| employer. As problematic as that relationship may be, it
| does set up a wall such that (a) the cost to me,
| personally, is completely standardized; and (b) there's a
| large gap between my individual online identity and my
| identity as an employee within my organization.
|
| Further, health insurance is just about the most heavily-
| regulated industry in the universe. Aside from the trivial
| assertion that it's absurd to refer to this industry as
| "capitalism" because it's so far from a free market, the
| fact is that the insurance companies are watched very
| closely, and I think it's improbable that they could have a
| setup like this without anyone having learned about it.
|
| Finally, again for the majority who are covered through
| their employer, most of these policies are self-insured.
| That is, it's the employer themselves who pays the charges,
| and they're also paying the insurance company to
| _administer_ the program, but not to shoulder any risks.
| The more the insurance company has to spend on that
| administration, the less likely they 're going to be hired.
| To make such a trade-off there would need to be a pretty
| clear demonstration to the employer that more money is
| being saved in medical payments than is being spent on that
| additional administration - and again, that's consistent
| with my argument in the prior paragraph.
| water-your-self wrote:
| > tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of
| life at all but it keeps the many free services I value
| greatly running.
|
| Your data is not worthless, and generally I consider data
| harvesting harmful because of the nation-state subpoenas it
| enables.
|
| If I attend a protest for abortion rights, and my geo data is
| bound to that event and then I seek an abortion in another
| state, ive now created a wonderful fingerprint that may soon
| lead to my incaerceration.
|
| (For americans) But the united states is not even the worst
| perpetrator. Imagine your least favorite government demanding
| google gives them a list of anyone that might be a political
| dissident based on audio they have collected.
|
| Data is a liability.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > keeps the many free services I value greatly running.
|
| You don't need continuous pervasive tracking without people's
| consent to run ads and keep the free service running.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Visual or audio representations of the amount of data
| they're collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad,
| as the logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data
| about your browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill
| in the logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot
| more persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making
| fancy graphs.
|
| But that just means the novel representations are a step
| forward, just not the whole solution.
|
| Making the invisible visible creates a situation where people
| can start asking questions about that thing, instead of
| ignoring or being ignorant of it.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >But that just means the novel representations are a step
| forward, just not the whole solution.
|
| No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot
| of data is sound. The part that's missing is _why is this
| bad_.
|
| No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in
| their own argue _why_ this data collection is bad. This
| argument as to _why_ is what 's missing, and until nominal
| privacy advocates start putting together coherent arguments
| as to _why_ it 's bad (and, importantly, _why these costs
| do not merit the benefits_ ), they're not making forward
| progress.
| krono wrote:
| This form of data collection and use has broken a status
| quo that has existed as long as life itself. Shouldn't it
| more conventionally be the ones in favour of this change
| to provide evidence of its benefits rather than the other
| way around?
| kylevedder wrote:
| They already did. People vote with their feet and
| attention, and people continue to flock to free services
| powered by targeted ads, systematically out competing
| services that had other models. If you don't like these
| services, don't use them; they don't have subpoena power.
| However, you might find the other options to be lacking,
| because they have inferior business models that do not
| allow them to compete on product quality.
| krono wrote:
| Not all cards were on the table back then when. The
| general public and perhaps even Google and such
| themselves didn't really know what they were getting into
| or where this was headed - at least not today's scale,
| ubiquitousness, or invasiveness. Hence I would argue that
| this contract or trade of sorts was not a conscious
| choice.
|
| By the way, for what its worth, I really do appreciate
| all the time and effort you are spending on this
| discussion and the defence of your stance in it.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| you can go learn about state surveillance more generally
| to answer that instead of handwaving it away as 'seems
| worth it to me'
| kylevedder wrote:
| Google making ad auctions more efficient and "state
| surveillance" aren't the same thing. Did you legitimately
| not know this or are you being intellectually dishonest
| in your argumentation?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Google making ad auctions more efficient becomes state
| surveillance the instant a subpoena arrives at their
| door. You might believe you are safe from a subpoena
| because you haven't done anything wrong, but you would be
| wrong about that:
|
| * Things like geofence warrants are used to surveil
| people who are merely within a given radius of a crime.
|
| * Subpoenas don't have to be for criminal cases, they can
| also be civil or investigatory (eg congressional
| subpoenas).
|
| * Things you don't think are wrong are often crimes.
| Abortion clinic visits in Texas are the most obvious
| example. Other examples are things like using someone
| else's WiFi without permission, using a fake name online,
| or carrying around things like screwdrivers (which are a
| burglary tool) or permanent markers (which are used for
| vandalism). Estimates suggest that the average American
| breaks 3-5 federal laws per day.
|
| A couple of examples:
|
| Alexa recordings were used in a criminal court:
| https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-
| ech...
|
| Amazon received 2000 subpoenas: https://www.theregister.c
| om/2018/01/08/subpoenahappy_us_gove...
| sedeki wrote:
| Thank you for this concise information. This is
| disturbing to me.
| dogman144 wrote:
| This is a snapshot of the cognitive dissonance that causes
| AdWords to keep growing despite the people building it being
| smart folks.
|
| It doesn't affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine.
|
| There isn't a missing logical leap in the middle. The
| tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| How is it anti-democratic? I'm on board with a ton of
| criticisms of surveillance capitalism, but "anti-
| democratic" isn't one I understand.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It extends its tendrils into government services where
| corporate authoritarianism subverts democratic ideals.
| The ill-conceived attempt to force face id for IRS
| services via a third party is but one example.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| What's the quickest way to bend folks to your will? Apply
| pressure at their weak points. How would one find them?
|
| Anyone who shares information (even inadvertently) with a
| third-party, that info becomes government property. More
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557745
|
| Watch "The United States of Secrets" on Kanopy and
| sometimes PBS.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >There isn't a missing logical leap in the middle. The
| tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.
|
| If you can't mount a coherent argument that doesn't assume
| the conclusion, you should consider the possibility that
| the conclusion simply isn't true.
| dogman144 wrote:
| There is a massive corpus of research on this that I
| think you're unaware of. Start with the Snowden leaks and
| work your way back.
|
| Since I can't reply to below, the general approach of "I
| don't know about this so it must not exist and I won't
| research" is very backward if you're in a PhD program.
|
| I get what you're getting at. Google just builds the
| technology, the rest is up to the users.
|
| That said, re: Snowden, IC piggybacked off Google cookies
| and direct taps into Google infra (PRISM). Email, chat,
| videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, logins, all
| tracked.
|
| The classic approach from tech until recently is what I
| said above - we just build it! That didn't work well for
| the cigarette companies.
|
| In other words, it is difficult to convince people that
| they are doing wrong/causing wrong when their research
| and pay is dependent on not believing they are.
| kylevedder wrote:
| The Snowden leaks were about _NSA_ data collection. Last
| I checked the NSA was not a tracking ads powered big tech
| company.
|
| Also I hope you realize pointing me to an entire
| metaverse of memes is not an argument. If this corpus is
| so massive it should be easy to concretely point to
| several very specific examples, not hand wave at _the
| entirety of one of the largest national security leaks in
| American history_.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| For the obtuse, NSA's primary sources are big-tech, among
| others. There's an information-superhighway from one to
| the other. But you must have known that already, right?
|
| Information is power. Lot of examples from history, say
| WWII, holocaust and Japanese internment from IBM census
| data. Stasi, Red scare, blacklisting, Alan Turing coming
| and going.
|
| More recently, IRS targeting the tea-party, facial
| recognition, DEA parallel construction, data brokers,
| data breaches, Chinese persecution, social credit.
|
| Yes, Snowden outlined in his writing what was
| specifically immoral and undemocratic, such as x-key-
| score sourced largely from google and friends. Educate
| yourself.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This reminds me of the Slashdot days where commenters
| would have a hard time distinguishing between the RIAA,
| the MPAA, and the Government (TM). They were roughly
| convinced that the 3 just formed this nebulous malicious
| entity.
| dogman144 wrote:
| I've worked for the govt and no they aren't a nebulous
| blob of power with tech.
|
| What they are though is an entity that has a set of
| directives supported by access to the data tech provided
| in conjunction with either not understanding tech or
| really getting it.
|
| The tech company approach of staying willfully ignorant
| or positions like ITT with "we just build it!" has caused
| a lot of damage in the hands of the govt users it's
| delivered to.
|
| I don't think it's possible to in good faith ignore this
| dynamic or pretend it doesn't exist and tech products'
| role in it. This is actually the first time I've run into
| it like this where both the dynamic and the impact is
| just totally denied.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > I've worked for the govt and no they aren't a nebulous
| blob of power with tech.
|
| Yes and I've worked for tech companies that use tracking
| in their products, though not (my products) for ads, so I
| know what a tech company can and cannot do.
|
| > The tech company approach of staying willfully ignorant
| or positions like ITT with "we just build it!" has caused
| a lot of damage in the hands of the govt users it's
| delivered to.
|
| This isn't what anyone in this thread is saying at all,
| this is a strawman. There are _material_ concerns about
| collecting too much data. Everything from leaked
| credentials allowing attackers to access personal data to
| accidents in targeting systems allowing individual level
| targeting.
|
| But unless you have proof that there are internal systems
| in tech companies that build up surveillance platforms
| and that the government is given access to these
| surveillance platforms, both of which need proof, then
| this nebulous concern of "all data gathering is EVIL" is
| just FUD. The fact of the matter is, individual
| surveillance isn't useful for most tech companies. Cohort
| or product level information is required to make
| decisions. Moreover, storing surveillance data is
| _extremely_ expensive. The amount of drive space and the
| systems necessary to facilitate this kind of per-human
| level surveillance requires large engineering teams and
| systems. Have you ever created a data warehouse? Imagine
| that but for this supposed surveillance machine.
|
| > I don't think it's possible to in good faith ignore
| this dynamic or pretend it doesn't exist and tech
| products' role in it. This is actually the first time
| I've run into it like this where both the dynamic and the
| impact is just totally denied.
|
| Yes everyone on HN and Twitter are convinced that data
| gathered by tech companies is all evil and that evil
| billionaires are twirling their mustaches as they enslave
| entire nations. This is clear. And there are clear risks
| to data gathering, cogent concerns about social media
| addiction, and definite monopoly concerns over the
| networks and moats that social media creates. But to have
| a coherent conversation on this, we need to move away
| from "all data gathering is EVIL" to understanding what
| kinds of data gathering is necessary and useful, and
| offering individuals rights over their data. TikTok was
| able to create its own network from scratch which is at
| least a small counterpoint to the idea that the
| incumbents are impossible to unseat due to their network
| advantages.
|
| GDPR is a great step in the right direction and I'm
| hopeful for even more potent legislation to come out. But
| the sort of fearmongering that happens in these online
| spaces over data gathering makes it impossible to have a
| reasoned conversation.
|
| And if you think tech companies are terrible entities
| abusing your data, then what are the telecoms doing?
| Telecoms in every country control the flow of information
| in every direction. The metadata available at a telecom
| down to an individual subscriber far dwarfs what is
| available at most tech companies. Moreover the PRISM
| scandal _actually_ happened because of telecom companies.
| So why the ire at tech companies?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You're only seeing things from the Google bubble where the
| data they collect is kept only for themselves and law
| enforcement/nation states. There's a whole ecosystem of
| unscrupulous trackers selling your personal details
| indiscriminately to anyone who wants it. It all goes into
| profiles that most definitely have an impact on you in real
| life. No amount of goodwill for supporting free services is
| enough to permit this activity to operate without your
| knowledge or consent.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >It all goes into profiles that most definitely have an
| impact on you in real life
|
| Such as?
|
| I might add the initial discussion was about Google
| tracking ads but I'm curious to hear what you have to say
| about these down market trackers.
| asf988f6728g wrote:
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA
|
| John Oliver is informative here, though some of his jokes
| fall flat on this one. It's just not a funny subject I
| suppose.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| "Free services" are not free. They are ad-subsidized, and
| thus anticompetitive. They are affecting your life by messing
| up the competitive market economy. The fact that you value
| them greatly means you should pay for them, which you are -
| with your limited attention span. Its an insidious price to
| pay.
|
| You may accept this bargain, but most of us hate it, and are
| not being offered a competitive market alternative to this
| version of reality.
| kylevedder wrote:
| How are ad funded websites "anti competitive"? Start by
| defining "anti competitive", as I suspect you're using a
| non standard definition.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I see 2 problems with ad-funded services:
|
| 1) nobody can compete with free.
|
| 2) the service and the advertising are tied together,
| with the amount of money being earned by said advertising
| is private.
|
| The second point can be addressed without necessarily
| banning advertising, but having the advertising separate
| from the services - you have some kind of ad platform/etc
| that by itself is neutral and you can browse it (and
| look/click at ads) to earn money, which you can then
| choose to spend on anything, including other services.
| This means services still have to compete on price, even
| though that price remains "free" to the end-user as
| they're using the advertising platform to earn money to
| then spend it on services.
| kylevedder wrote:
| >nobody can compete with free
|
| Yes you can, just make yours also free and put up ads
| like DuckDuckGo.
|
| >the amount of money being earned by said advertising is
| private.
|
| Google is a publicly traded company with a legal
| obligation to disclose financial data to their
| shareholders as a matter of public record. You can go
| read their quarterly earnings reports stretching back
| years.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| They are using their ad business (wherein they have an
| effective monopoly on search engine advertising) to
| subsidize their other businesses. That is a fairly
| standard definition for predatory pricing in the US.
| kylevedder wrote:
| Their other businesses being what search or maps? Those
| are ads properties. You could setup competitors that also
| serve ads.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Thats not how antitrust laws work.
| kylevedder wrote:
| You're asserting that's not how they work, but you're
| also asserting they're illegally subsidizing their search
| and maps business with... the revenue they generate from
| selling ads space on their search and maps businesses.
|
| I'll leave it as an exercise to the lurkers to decide who
| is probably right.
| [deleted]
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > you're also asserting they're illegally subsidizing
| their search and maps business with... the revenue they
| generate from selling ads space on their search and maps
| businesses.
|
| Yes, that is how these things tend to work! Seriously,
| read some books on antitrust, you have no idea what you
| are talking about. Tim Wu is a good starting point.
| Jensson wrote:
| A majority of Googles revenue comes from running ads on
| their own sites. Their third party ad network is a small
| part of their revenue, so the correct direction is to say
| that Google is subsidising its third party ad network via
| their first party ad business.
|
| The effect of antitrust would then be that Google
| separates the ad service for its own services and third
| party services, which would force their third party ad
| service to become more expensive since it can no longer
| rely so heavily on the draw of all the Google properties.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps
| business with... [their ads business]
|
| I suspect this is what what @arrosenberg is getting at.
| If the Search (and maps) business is considered separate
| from the ads business (Search runs at a massive loss) and
| it's provided for free because they can subsidize it with
| the revenue from their ad business, then it's an anti-
| competetive advantage they have from a monopolistic
| position that their advertising business has.
|
| Anyway, personally I have no clue how that "works" in
| practice, but that seems to be the perspective.
| rolisz wrote:
| And Google Photos, which initially included unlimited
| compressed photo storage, killed off competitors and then
| changed it to 15 GB.
| alcover wrote:
| Holly.. you made me understand why vertical anti-trust is
| a thing. (I'm slow..).
|
| A single company, google, gives a photo-service for free,
| while making enormous bread through ads. On its own the
| free service would be dead on arrival but now it's
| sustained by the ads branch of the company, making it
| unbeatable. Then pure-photo-service competitors die and
| you get a monopoly.
| y42 wrote:
| With financing through ads comes a dependency of the content
| provider aka publisher. And this leads to a lower quality.
| Its about getting attention, not about quality content. It
| does affect you, you just dont see it, I dare to say.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Most adults' eyes glaze over when looking at access logs, so I
| couldn't imagine kids being interested. (Maybe your kids are
| grown, but the visual from first read didn't come across that
| way).
|
| Charts and graphs are the only way people not interested in
| data can even remotely become interested. If it's good enough
| for FPOTUS, then it should be a compelling enough reason to
| complete your idea.
| kornhole wrote:
| Good idea. I should start first with just graphs. Later we
| could video or gamify it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just seeing the data also might be an eye roll for people
| that just like the free stuff. It is very difficult to get
| someone not already converted to the religion of 'tracking
| === bad'. Even showing how it can legitimately be used
| seems so tinfoil hat level of crazy, that normal people
| want to get away from you as quickly as possible.
|
| The greatest trick the devil ever pulled used to be
| convincing the world the devil doesn't exists. Now, his
| greatest trick is to convince the world that it's okay that
| he exists and all of his schemeing done by his minions are
| perfectly fine
| jareklupinski wrote:
| I'm picturing an Invaders clone, where your ship blasts
| threat actors onto blacklists :)
| somat wrote:
| any body remember the spinning cube of doom? it was a
| visualization for your packet sniffer. you could use it to
| characterize attacks. perhaps we need something like that but
| for outbound data.
|
| found it.
|
| https://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/nersc-news/nersc-cen...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pgE6WiNvkA&t=107s
| surfpel wrote:
| Maybe you could log the same things that trackers do and creep
| them out by it somehow. Kids especially have a harder time
| truly comprehending things that don't come with some emotional
| weight.
| nom wrote:
| Maybe you could make a game out of it. The one with the least
| amount of request each (or whatever metric works) gets rewarded
| in some way and give them a dashboard to check progress.
|
| Not sure what negative side effects that could cause though,
| but i see some positives like using less social media, or
| learning how to cheat the system in clever ways.
| eru wrote:
| > Not sure what negative side effects that could cause
| though, [...]
|
| Sneakily use the other kid's device to browse?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Would've probably piqued more interest if it were a browser plug-
| in.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This would make a great plugin, and could be expanded to other
| companies: Your computer makes a noise when it tells Google
| what you're doing. It makes another noise when it tells
| Facebook what you're doing.
| tclancy wrote:
| How would it work with every other app sending data though?
| bilekas wrote:
| It would probably burst your eardrums also!
|
| I prefer it how it is, very simple and effective, also I can
| actually gauge how much brave vs chrome etc. Obviously browser
| in my case will be heavier on google calls. But interesting to
| remember I have google drive floating around which I havent
| used in years.
| abledon wrote:
| needs a youtube link of demo in readme
| ColinWright wrote:
| https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544
| soheil wrote:
| This is absolutely epic and terrifying. Just moving my mouse
| makes it play the noise. It's not too dissimilar to a Geiger
| counter, it's most radioactive when you do a google search!
| kleer001 wrote:
| Ok. What does it sound like on Firefox or Safari or Brave or
| anything other than Chrome (a Google product)?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Pretty much the same. (There's a Firefox video in the same
| Twitter thread mentioned earlier)
| jmiskovic wrote:
| I got it running now and it's incredible how much of my
| interaction is being immediately reported. Having taken some
| steps before to block analytics, it's still going off like Geiger
| counter in the Zone.
|
| I always find it amazing when speaker is utilized to 'visualize'
| occasional events.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Did anyone get it working on MacOS? I couldn't find the audio
| library in homebrew and gave up.
| viraptor wrote:
| You can reference it the same way espeak does
| https://github.com/danielbair/homebrew-tap/blob/0550bfcd3b11...
| (tap that repo, then install)
| weystrom wrote:
| sudo tcpdump -i en0 -n -l dst host 8.8.8.8 $(for a in $(curl -s
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert/googerteller/main/
| goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | while read;
| do tput bel; done
|
| Link to read the list (remember to read what you curl | bash):
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert/googerteller/ma...
| djhworld wrote:
| other option is to clone the repo but pipe the output to the
| terminal bell instead - probably not as good as the OPs
| solution but has a similar effect :) sudo
| tcpdump -n -l dst net 192.0.2.1/32 $(for a in $(cat goog-
| prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | xargs -I {} bash
| -c "tput bel"
|
| EDIT: it's definitely not as good as the OPs solution as the
| bells sometimes get skipped when there are lots of packets.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| So this is why when I google for information about [x], a day or
| so later Google News starts showing me bad news involving [x]?
| soheil wrote:
| On OSX you can install this to get audio:
| https://github.com/espeak-ng/pcaudiolib
| su2 wrote:
| Cool idea!
|
| I replaced the "teller" program part also with shell script, so
| that one would give you the clicking without the need to compile:
| sudo tcpdump -n -l dst host 8.8.8.8 $(for a in $(curl -s https://
| raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert/googerteller/main/goog-
| prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | while read; do
| paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/dialog-
| information.oga; done
|
| Quite enlightening to have that running while browsing...
| handity wrote:
| I consider myself very privacy conscious, bordering on the
| paranoid. I use FOSS as much as possible, avoid FAANG, and remove
| surveillance from my life wherever I can.
|
| This tool shocked me. It exposes in a visceral way just how
| prevalent Google is, and does a better job getting that idea
| across than every video, article, post or comment I've consumed
| on the topic.
| kleer001 wrote:
| As a counter point (and you're not wrong, this is just my
| take)...
|
| I consider myself privacy and security and convenience
| conscious, not at all paranoid yet as I don't expect I have
| aroused the interest of a State power (touch wood). I use what
| most people use and prefer less friction over philosophically
| and/or ethically pure services. This tool made me shrug. Sure,
| yea, that's not an unexpected frequency, I guess. I haven't
| personally seen any disaster come from data shared to be sold
| or used for advertising. Mostly all I get advertized are things
| I've already bought (rolls eyes) or things I've said out loud
| (scowls). The hit rate for something I've been "told" to buy is
| like 0.001% The last hit was Dan Ariely's IRRATIONAL Game.
| Pretty cool, no? https://irrationalgame.com/
| [deleted]
| MarcScott wrote:
| Video and audio here -
| https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544
| sippeangelo wrote:
| I was hoping it would sound more like a Geiger counter!
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| Perhaps I missed it but a video (with audio, presumably) of this
| working would be helpful.
| brookritz wrote:
| https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544
| InCityDreams wrote:
| ...non twitter user.. .
| throwaway2016a wrote:
| Exactly what I was looking for, thank you!
| tehsauce wrote:
| Any videos of this in action?
| jonas-w wrote:
| It's very silent for me.
|
| I tried going on google and then bam geiger counter mode
| activated. But i seem to have blocked enough to not have it go
| off every second.
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