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Comment by flatulent1 | Hacker News Reader

He seems honest, just not as comforting as some would like. The problem is reality has become kinda creepy.

Google certainly swallowed a lump of creepiness when they bought doubleclick, that company the state of Texas had sued for stalking. One of the former upper figures there was hired by homeland security. Wonder what skill that was for?

It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position.

I'm kind of liking the Apple iAds thing. If done right, it could basically do away with accessing third-party sites when displaying third-party content. The user demographic could be typed simply by the kind of app the ad is in, and just being an Apple customer probably puts him in a more sought-after group of spenders.

Hmmm. I just had an odd thought. For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...

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"It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position."

No I don't think that's the right question. I think Gruber really nailed it with this:

"Maybe the question isn't who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information."

Unless we presuppose that the answer to the question "is there anything that could be done to stop the mass accumulation of data in this way?" is "yes", then Gruber's question is moot. Why should we make that presupposition in the face of the march of progress in this area?

Of course we should make that presupposition - the US, EU, etc have the power to regulate it.

How? You're basically suggesting the old "country X will regulate what its citizens can or cannot do on the internet" idea, which fails because country X does not control the internet. Users will still leak information to sites that are not under the control of the US/EU/whoever, and those sites will accumulate these informational profiles.

The internet's not a free pass, countries regulate a lot of things for people and companies within them.

Is it feasible for Google, Facebook or anyone else mining data at massive scale to operate outside the US/EU/a couple other countries? I doubt it. The infrastructure wouldn't even handle their websites, which would be a moot point since they wouldn't find 5 digits of the manpower they need lying around in whatever little country.

You can opt out. Stop using Google's search engine. And if you're not comfortable with Microsoft or Yahoo, stop using search engines altogether. Use encyclopedias or libraries.

Ok, can we agree that the answer to Gruber's question is: "yes, obviously, someone needs to hold that information"?

No, at least not without you telling me why someone needs to hold on to the information. In what way is that obvious?

> For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...

The people that score the best on games are the ones not playing them.

And plenty of games are games of skill and not a good way to measure anything other than their reaction speed to visual stimuli.

Okay, let's try going wayyyy beyond that... think what you could do if you actually designed the game for the purpose of testing the user in ways that didn't affect the score.

There are several games with alternate storylines and choices that do not affect the score. Those choices often don't affect the storyline, either, because it's too much work.

When playing such games, I used to save, try various alternatives, and go with the one I liked best in retrospect. When I encountered a game that didn't allow for saving, I was quite bothered and worried about the game "calling home".

These days, I mostly wouldn't worry. A lot of kids slaughtered cities in fallout 2, or accepted quests from all sides so they could get in everywhere and steal the silverware. Few meaningful inferences could be made.

But the meaningless stuff, like red vs. yellow stimpacks? Doing market research with games? That might be worrisome, depending on your feelings about adwords.

Creepy.

The problem is reality has become kinda creepy.

Reality has always been creepy. Imagine living during the 13th century and the plague? Mega creepy.

The idea that reality is not creepy is a relatively recent invention (see Television, also Radio somewhat).

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