Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

How do you know? That's the problem with closed source software, and software that runs in someone else's computer. You have no idea what it does. You aren't in control. Someone else is deciding what code runs on your computer. That's a problem.

View on HN

Cue discussion of how with open source you don't really know either, since nobody can read and find out all the backdoors in the source of the whole system.

Big companies can't hide this stuff forever, you can eventually figure out, it is just better business-wise for them to just state they read your emails for ads, it can cost them a lot if they don't, plus most people don't really care.

A few weeks ago a friend and I were talking exclusively through WhatsApp about a trip to London(in Portuguese with our very unusual jargon), I didn't do any search for anything related it was all within our conversation, a couple days later Facebook had a post on my timeline saying: "heading to London? Check what your friends did there".

I don't remember reading anywhere that WhatsApp reads your conversations for ads, but it was clear to me that's where they got the information, it was spooky at first.

WhatsApp doesn't read your conversations for ads because it can't. Message content is end-to-end encrypted. You must have leaked your plans through some other medium inadvertently.

This is called retargeting and is even worse from a privacy perspective: now your data is going through multiple layers of ad buying tools, analytics, ad exchanges, aggregators, ad networks, etc.: http://2bd2y2367xnj3kpntjsifzmf-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting

That is actually an interesting argument, that they don't lie about this because if it ever came out they would be in deep shit.

Speaking of which, I had a similarly creepy moment just yesterday. I was watching an episode of the Simpsons, and wanted to Google the Bart blackboard gag in the intro because I didn't get it. Just I type the first word and it immediately suggested the rest. Very creepy because I wasn't watching through any Google service (on an Android phone though).

Even open source products still are running on largely closed systems. When has Intel ever let people see what's going on under the covers?

The late 1970's was probably the last time anybody truly understood 100% of what was going on in any system.

The bottom line is that you have to trust some people. I totally understand those that don't trust Google. I happen to trust them today.

- no ads based on scanning emails

- no scanning emails

Are different things

Except web-based (or "cloud" now I guess) services like gmail are not running on your computers (apart from the javascript, but you can see that so you should be happy).

In this case it is google's code running on google's computers.

> In this case it is google's code running on google's computers.

Which is mostly based on Free Software, starting with GNU/Linux. The Affero General Public License is intended to disallow this loophole of "it is only running on our servers, hence we are technically not distributing it, so we do not have to release the code": https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

How do you know they were ever reading your email to begin with? Maybe they were never reading your email and this is just a publicity stunt to backtrack on an unpopular decision that they never actually made.

This seems like a ridiculously paranoid worldview to have.

I'd argue it's extremely naive to not have that world-view. Especially given all the evidence of closed-source software doing things like this in the past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com