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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, what makes Google so "deeply unethical?"

They're an advertising company that gets most of its profits by collecting personal information about people and trying to manipulate them into buying things.

Sounds pretty unethical to me.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is:

They're an advertisement company that profits from showing you the most relevant data and things that you will like.

It's all about perspective. You can take anything and spin it to be nefarious if you try hard enough.

If google's personalization efforts actually created the filter bubble that I want, more more and less less, it'd be a fair trade.

But they don't, so it isn't.

Are billboards or radio stations or television channels unethical to you? Because they are also trying to "manipulate" you into buying things.

Advertising is not inherently unethical. I want people to buy my product so I need to raise awareness of it, encourage people that it is the best, make them feel like they need it.

I would even go so far as to say that Google's default anonymized model makes this far better. My preferences can be used to serve more meaningful ads to me which makes everyone happier. Eg, I was searching for tent reviews online. Saw an ad for a tent from a brand I had never heard of. Looked up their reviews and bought that tent.

Unfortunately, they are a lot of bad actors in this space. Google is actively trying to weed them out. They are deeply incentivized to rid the internet of them because it means less ad blockers and less spam and more money for them.

Any website you visit or app you use is going to collect some personal information about you. How many times have you questioned why you need to turn over your email to a stopwatch app. At least with Google's default-anonymized model, you are opting in to a fairly sweet deal. You volunteer things you are interested in so that Google can serve you better ads and keep the internet free (in the dollar sense) and the information you provide is not reversible back to you.

Doesn't sound too unethical to me especially because it is all one big opt-in.

> Are billboards or radio stations or television channels unethical to you? Because they are also trying to "manipulate" you into buying things.

For the most part, yes. Most of the products people are trying to sell you are bad for you, wasteful, and generally corrosive to the fabric of society, because most of us just don't need it.

You don't need potato chips, soft drinks, plastic shoes, a new game app, furniture, a new car, a new movie, makeup, a new credit card, a new mobile phone, a new tv/internet/mobile plan, or over the counter drugs. If you did, you'd just go and find it. Advertisers push you to buy the things you don't need, and similar to taking medicine you don't need, this can hurt you. It hurts your health, it hurts your wallet, and it pushes unreasonable expectations on you by convincing society to expect them.

Advertising and marketing are not always bad for you. But for the most part, they are. Irregardless, we live in a consumer society. If we didn't constantly buy cheap shit, our economy would probably tank, and China wouldn't be the new biggest global power. It's kind of ironic that some day we will be making tennis shoes for them, whereupon money spent on advertising in the US will actually lower.

the difference between a billboard and google is that ppl are aware that a billboard is advertisement. i don't think that ppl really understand what they are agreeing to when they get a pixel, chromebook, or even just gmail. and this way, google can put up those micro billboards that we often do not consciously perceive but that still influence our actions. and the google billboards that we do perceive, for them, very few ppl understand why they are so powerful at showing us personally just the right stuff.

If nothing else, the difference between those and Google is at least one of scale and power. With great power comes great responsibility, but Google does not really appear like its sense of responsibility has grown in proportion to its power.

How do you feel about jurisdictions which ban (or severely limit) outdoor advertising like billboards?

IMO advertising systems that have this intimate of knowledge about you are immoral because they undermine a consumer's agency well beyond traditional demographic-level or local advertising.

Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they like, your address, your preferred colors and letters... It's possible that they figured out you just broke up with your SO and use shopping as a coping skill, so it was time to pull out the big guns. Google probably doesn't even understand exactly why they served that to you. And that's a problem.

> Doesn't sound too unethical to me especially because it is all one big opt-in.

Google serves me ads and tracks my behavior even if I never use a Google product. And there's no way for a user to decide whether or not they're okay with this on the web at large (unless you install an ad blocker). That doesn't sound opt-in to me.

> Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they like, your address, your preferred colors and letters... It's possible that they figured out you just broke up with your SO and use shopping as a coping skill, so it was time to pull out the big guns. Google probably doesn't even understand exactly why they served that to you. And that's a problem.

These things are not true. Your point is true, but google doesn't do things like look at your specific address, preferred colors, etc. You can't be mad at them when you don't really know what they do, and embellish what actually happens.

> Google serves me ads and tracks my behavior even if I never use a Google product

You can opt out of all behavior based advertiser very easily: http://optout.networkadvertising.org and http://optout.aboutads.info/#!/

> google doesn't do things like look at your specific address, preferred colors, etc

Who are you to say they don't try and figure out your favorite color based on all of their input data? If Google shared exactly how their secret sauce advertising algorithms work, they'd be out of business.

> You can opt out of all behavior based advertiser very easily: http://optout.networkadvertising.org and http://optout.aboutads.info/#!/

If these companies wanted to respect users' wishes in a frictionless way, they'd just look at my DNT header. This is bread and circus.

Is trying to derive a person’s preferences from tangentially-related data immoral, or does it only become immoral when it’s done in an attempt to sell a product?

Deriving preferences is not inherently bad. It's immoral to undermine people's will for profit. This is the same reason the gambling industry is immoral, and making manipulative free-to-play mobile games is immoral. You're basically hacking people's subconscious for your own gain at their loss.

DNT headers broke when microsoft decided to enable it by default, so they became meaningless.

Well I feel like it’s kind of easy to guess what they mean. I’m sure it’s related to spying and data hoarding and tracking and privacy issues and their incentives are highly misaligned and encourage unethical anti consumer behavior.

Their incentive is to make money by providing goods or services to customers, which is the same as every business. Go buy something from the department store, give them your phone number when they ask for it, and tell me you don't receive spam calls afterward.

Given all that Google knows about you, i'd say they're actually quite polite in how invasive they are. I'd much rather them have this data than 99% of the other companies out there.

It sounds like you basically just hate businesses that collect data. I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are a ton of them.

... like having images and info on most of the restaurants in my town because the app bothers to ask and some people are happy to answer?

I think there's a disconnect here.

As far as centralized companies go Google is one of the better ones. It's unfortunate that so much power accrues to only a few entities. But slamming Google is like slamming a side effect of a bigger problem: many markets are naturally winner takes all and vertical integration confers enormous benefits.

I don't see much of a way around this but many feel stronger regulations to protect consumer data should be enacted to safeguard us against bad private actors. Saying "I'll use something else" isn't always a viable solution.

As far as centralized companies go Google is one of the better ones.

Gonna have to ask you to define your terms here, pal.

Sorry. I meant to express that Google represents a company that has been successful at centralizing a lot of data, wealth, and engineering ability. Others include Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

> many markets are naturally winner takes all

I don't think this is true. "Winner takes all" is a predatory behavior and it is only possible with enormous concentration of wealth. Otherwise markets become full of small players and fair competition.

Some markets do. There are many examples of markets that don't -- enough that there's a recognized term for it ("Natural Monopoly").

I would argue that the level of knowledge, talent, and engineering and scientific resources required to do what Google does forms a pretty effective natural barrier to a bunch of small players being able to compete.

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