Hacker News Reader

You should be worried for these reasons:

1) Google (and other SV giants) share data with the NSA.

https://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance...

2) The NSA in turn shares information with law-enforcement agencies. ICREACH contains information on the private communications millions of American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

https://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-made-its-own-google-to-help-shar...

3) The DEA (and possibly other agencies) uses this information to target Americans, and then lies about the origins of the information in a process called "parallel construction."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod/exclusive-u-s-dir...

It's not difficult to see the potential for abuse in a shadowy process that surveils the private communications of Americans, applies unknown selectors and data mining algorithms, and then reports the results to law enforcement.

And then there's this...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Speaking of spooky stuff and google, this article still takes the cake.

EDIT: for completeness sake, there has been a follow up:

https://wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Google-and-the-NSA-Who-s.html

I just spent the last few minutes skimming through that article but, if there was a bombshell (or even 'spooky') allegation in there, I didn't find it. Maybe this is more a comment on the quality of the writing than the merits, but if anyone out there could explain what is actually being claimed here, that would be really helpful.

Spooky being google intertwining with the institutions that are supposed to defend your rights, and defend them from google, if necessary. But how is any govt able to do that if google is such a huge factor in making their interests heard.

> I feel like they are good stewards of my data (encrypting even internal traffic...)

I hate it when people use this as an argument against "Google invading privacy", it's an argument that doesn't make any sense at all; Encrypting your data in transit prevents outsiders from reading your data, obviously it doesn't prevent Google itself from accessing your data.

This article is about how Google (and FB, etc.) invades everyone's privacy (even non-customers).

> To me, the cost of being google's product, is outweighed by what they provide me with

This can also be achieved without invading your privacy. Google should at least let people CHOOSE whether they want to use their products at the cost of privacy. Currently you cannot choose, your data is simply collected, even when browsing websites totally unrelated to Google, where people are absolutely unaware of Google tracking them.

PS. This guy is awesome, he has had success fighting against Facebook, for privacy (in Europe):

https://twitter.com/maxschrems/status/957236189853085696

https://noyb.eu/

> Google should at least let people CHOOSE whether they want to use their products at the cost of privacy.

Why should they let us do that? No other company is doing that. It's a tacit agreement between providers of free-to-use services and the people who choose to use them: the more personal data you give, the more you receive. If a company has a very good offering or is currently trending, they can even demand your phone number, credit card number (of course you can cancel the service anytime, but they will have a strong verification of your real name then) or even your passport/driver's license. We all came to accept that as a given, nobody questions these practices any longer. It's as if people collectively just stopped giving a damn about their privacy.

I have worked for companies that use g-suite. This is a paid product targeted towards businesses that tracks end users.

My concern about Google is not so much now, but maybe 20 years from now when they're desperate for revenue. Something akin to Yahoo's position in the last few years, except Yahoo didn't know almost everything about half the planet.

Yes, this is the sticking point that frustrates me so much. Fine, trust Google now, I think you're giving alot up, but whatever. But, you cannot predict tomorrow or the day after that.

The need for exponential growth will force all big players into making more money and doing shadier things more and more. I am especially concerned about Google and Facebook since they haven't figured any way for making for making money other than selling ads. Apple and MS at least have products they sell.

I think we really should start making it difficult for companies to grow beyond a certain size. I think they are a big net minus for the whole economy.

Companies that grow beyond a certain size become laden with inertia and overhead. Smaller companies can come along and disrupt them. Facebook did this to MySpace. Someone will do it to Facebook, eventually.

Eventually someone will disrupt them. But there will be a long time span before that where they can compensate for their lack of innovation by buying out possible competition with a lot of money.

There's also the possibility that they just don't get disrupted. The entire computer industry is less than 100 years old. Who knows if the next 100 years will be anything like the last 70.

Of course, there might be a long history of larger companies getting disrupted by smaller companies outside of the tech industry, which would be much more compelling evidence than MySpace losing to Facebook, IBM losing the PC market to Microsoft, Microsoft losing mobile phones to Apple/Google, etc.

I am not willing to make a bet as to whether or not we will still be talking about Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook 25, 50, or 100 years from now.

I wonder how things would have worked with Microsoft if they hadn't got into trouble with governments in the US and Europe in 2000. There may be no Apple today and the internet may be their network.

Even if they eventually fail or are disrupted, their massive and ever expanding troves of data aren't going to go away. Somebody else is going to take possession of the valuable data. If nothing else, then govt will acquire them for intel.

It's looking more and more unlikely every day. The Facebooks and Googles have such massive reach that they'll just buy whatever competitor threatens them. They and others have been doing it for years.

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

I would prefer if there was a way to do this with taxation or similar. So from a certain size on it would be more expensive to do business. I think this would be more gradual than a hard split.

Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly.

I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

I don't know how much money in ad revenue I earn google, but I'd probably happily pay it for a more transparent, less sketchy, and more commonly-aligned product. (This would also give me recourse for all the times the google services I rely on go down....)

2016 had $90B revenues and 1.5B 30d active users (for YouTube) so $60 per year would be a good guess.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Googler but I just got these numbers from public statements. No way I'm well paid enough to be able to see more detailed numbers. :-D )

gSuite is exactly that: $5/month/user for the basic package, and does exactly what the grandparent wants.

sure, it's nice to be outside of adverts... but using gSuite always feels like pretending I'm not being farmed out to the gov't

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

"Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly."

Are you criticizing Google or companies in general? Because your criticism applies to any company in the world.

> I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

Get a corporate gSuite account, they have been around for quite a while.

It doesn't apply to all companies.

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

> has very strong incentives to maintain your privacy

> their incentives aren't really aligned with yours

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can opt out of Google ad targeting and general tracking for free

https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/privacy

I'm not sure if you really can. Yes, I know you can opt out of the more open parts of it, like the web history they show you, but I'm skeptical that they aren't still doing stuff behind the scenes.

> I prefer companies whose products and services I pay for directly.

Then pay for it, stop using free services.

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

AFAIK it doesn't use any info from the services you pay for to target you.

But remember, ads on websites aren't a form of paying for Google's services, but for the website content.

Do you read Ars Technica? Instead of seeing the ads you just subscribe to them. Read news online freely? Stop and pay for a few newspapers and only read them.

People knowingly choose free services that come with the tradeoff of ad targeting. That's how those services are paid. Using those services is your choice.

> I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

You do have the ability to pay for some of them (G Suite aka Google Apps for Business), but even then you might not get what you want, since 99% of their users like you are still products. I'm reminded of this quote from Josh Marshall:

> One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm)

I'm pretty sure this doesn't let you opt-out of ad targeting for search nor does it prevent them from using your maps and other data in their b2b offerings.

Exactly my point, actually.

Yahoo / Bing, Microsoft and others are just as bad. Don't get me wrong, Google and FB need to change their ways, but they aren't alone.

For example, Yahoo was caught helping the US government spy on consumers, whether they were suspect or not: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-yahoo-em...

What's more, Yahoo is now owned by Verizon, a company known for anti-consumer practices.

We should all make some easy changes:

- Use DuckDuckGo to get Yahoo /Bing search results in privacy

- Use StartPage.com to get Google search results in privacy

- Use a privacy-friendly email service

- Either quit FB or use it only as a billboard

- Get a Linux distro and avoid Windows OS when possible

- Try LibreOffice. It rivals Office!

etc.

I agree with you.

- Use uBlock Origin when browsing the interwebs

- Use GoAccess instead of Google Analytics

- Use the incognito/private tab

> I feel like I'm in the minority, but I'm mostly ok with Google. I feel like they are good stewards of my data (encrypting even internal traffic, severe restrictions on who can get access to my data, doing useful things with that data).

Even if they aren't doing anything reprehensible now, can you guarantee that they won't in future?

> I feel like they are good stewards of my data (encrypting even internal traffic, severe restrictions on who can get access to my data, doing useful things with that data)

The more info someone has on you (your preferences, habits, how price sensitive you are to certain products, ...), the more disadvantaged you are negotiating with them.

Facebook's "X years ago today, you posted this ..." has been amazing. I don't usually re-share it but it really brightens my morning or day to see photos of my kids when they were 4-5 years younger, and marvel at how much they've grown.

I mean, I'd still think about that even without FB showing me things, but I would not have managed to build a "here's a flashback!" photo-reminder system. In an age when we take SO MANY PHOTOS (and don't even bother curating them because we don't have time for it), it's nice to have that too.

Facebook's "X years ago today, you posted this ..." has been amazing

I can see your point but it isn't relevant to the article, and also, it is a matter of perspective. I managed to permanently disable it, after it kept popping up photos of my then-recently deceased spouse. Not something I was ready to deal with, and after switching it off, FB helpfully turned it back on for me. I eventually managed to disable it permanently, but if there is one thing I hate it is for some software to treat my instructions as suggestions.

Is there a way to disable that feature out of interest?

> I mean, I'd still think about that even without FB showing me things, but I would not have managed to build a "here's a flashback!" photo-reminder system.

You wouldn't have had to if you used macOS with the Photos app. Every once in a while it notifies me about a flashback, and if I click on the notification it takes me to a flashback slideshow in the Photos app.

I don't use iCloud for my photos, so I suspect this is implemented locally without having to give my data to Apple.

Maybe similar systems exist with other environments (linux, Windows, etc).

That's great for you. But do you not agree that every user should be properly educated on what Google does with her data without having to read through pages of legalese, and then she should also be able to give her consent for that tracking and data collection?

I'm not sure that suing Google and Facebook is the right way to educate people about data collection on the Internet.

I don't want all my eggs in one basket. I don't mind using search and email, but I disable all the analytics and tracking. Basically, if I'm on a Google site, that's fine; if I'm elsewhere on the web, it's not. Similarly for Firefox on Android, to the extent I'm able.

I block everything to do with Facebook every which way on my primary browser.

Google and Facebook have no choice but to reveal your data to governments that ask for it. While the companies themselves might protect your data, simply giving that data to a third party renders it readable by the government. Any protections provided by the constitution (4th amendment) at that point are null and void. So by definition, Google and Facebook cannot be good stewards of your data while complying with American law. Neither can any other third party. Period.

> I think their biggest sins are just being big.

yes, in fact they have become almost absolute monopolists (together with FB and a couple of others).

this is really bad.. if google decides not to show you something _it effectively does not exist_

i _really_ hope they still have the mantra of not being evil, but the temptation is trillions of dollars big :)

if they abuse your information, e.g. use it as fore knowledge, and act on it quicker than you can, they can do that in subtle ways without you even realising it.

so many ways to benefit from all this data.. who can monitor / control this?

I am the same. Use Google services and have several Google homes and use Google DNS Google WiFi, Nest, Gmail, Photos, Pixel, etc.

I prefer my data be at one place as much as possible instead scattered.

Easisest place to do that is with Google as they have the most comprehensive services.

Didn't they only encrypt internal traffic after the Snowdon revelation?

They started encrypting before the leaks happened.

I don't remember things happening this way. I remember PRISM announced, then the conversation about all of the internal HTTPS

Evidently somebody disagrees with me about how that all went down, but doesn't have the time to correct me.

Specifically, they had point-to-point fiber links between their datacenters that theoretically couldn't be intercepted, so they didn't believe they needed to encrypt data transiting between datacenters.

The NSA proved them wrong on that belief, and they started implementing encryption on those connections.

severe restrictions on who can get access to my data

Are you sure about this, or are you limiting "who" to people you already know and/or regularly interact with?