Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

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"Facebook Inc. faces a massive uphill task to win back the general public's trust, results from two separate opinion polls, reported on by Reuters, have shown.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday, just 41 percent of Americans now trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information. In contrast, of the 2,237 respondents to the poll, which ran from Wednesday through Friday, 66 percent, 62 percent and 60 percent, respectively, believe that Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp. will do a better job of respecting their privacy.

A separate survey released the same day by Germany's largest-selling Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, delivered a much more damaging assessment, revealing that 60 percent of Germans believe that Facebook and other social networks have a negative impact on democracy."

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analyt...

Zuck: They "trust me"

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Not to sound condescending but as a German I can tell you that american social networks never enjoyed much trust by us anyways regarding handling of our data.

Part of that resentment might be caused by anti-american-bias, anti-capitalist-bias, German romanticism and many more but most importantly remembrance of the GDR's Stasi.

Those 60% you mention sound absolutely reasonable even without the cambridge analytica scandal. I know several people who never registered with facebook or whatsapp and are reluctant to do be pushed into it even by close friends and family.

Anti-capitalism? Anti-americanism? Please.

How many people in Germany use American-made software and services? How many use Windows, macOS or Android? Amazon? Netflix? Uber? Snapchat? Instagram?

I see many Europeans talking about "anti-americanism" yet a lot of them consume their products and culture en masse.

Using it yes, but often without letting the product get away without some snark. But, as my sentence structure tried to clarify: anti-capitalism and -americanism might play a role here and there but only a minor one.

Happy to see that the greater public understands what Facebook really is.

But we still have work to do regarding Google. They are even worse IMO. For those two, you are the product.

Amazon and Microsoft don't have business selling your data (or at least it is not central), you are not the product.

Microsoft: https://advertising.microsoft.com/home

Amazon: https://advertising.amazon.ca/

... You are the product.

With respect to the Amazon link you provided, did you watch the video?

Amazon explicitly states that the ads provided are targeted based upon user action. So if you go to Amazon searching for music, they may show an ad on the side of the page that provides a discount offer for a specific band or artist.

As far as I know, Amazon doesn't sell user data to anyone, even for advertising.

Just because they don't sell access to the information doesn't mean they're not being evil. That company is likely the worst in terms of user tracking out of all the companies mentioned in these comments.

After all, this is a company that tracks not only what books you read, but how far you've read it, how much time you spent reading every page and how many times you went back to previous pages.

This is also the company who has microphones placed in people's houses, happily installed by the users themselves.

Given the fact that so many people people trust them with so many things, and their desire to be a provider of every single service, they certainly are a much bigger privacy invader than even Google or Facebook.

At least it is not central to their business.

In other words, the company is not rotten to it's core.

They're rapidly heading down the path, at the very least.

Microsoft has been giving away their operating system for free in exchange for mining your personal data. Everyone who uses Windows 10 can expect to have everything on screen scraped, all their keystrokes logged, and all their files transferred to Microsoft for analysis.

What do you suppose their reason is for taking all this data?

> They're rapidly heading down the path, at the very least.

Who is? Amazon? Not likely. Though I haven't worked there for several years now, I would be flabbergasted to discover that Bezos would approve an initiative that involved selling user data to advertisers.

I can't speak to Microsoft. I am not a user of Microsoft's products, nor any of its subsidiaries' products, and they are not mining any data from me.

Who is? Amazon?

No, I was talking about Microsoft only. Sorry if that was unclear.

What exactly is that supposed to prove?

Not a fan of any of the two companies but I believe you're being unfair.

At least Microsoft[0] does not sell your personal information or build it's business around renting access to your personal information. There is a big difference between sharing data with advertisers and sharing data with company-controlled subsidiaries and vendors.

Amazon is a little more permissive [1] but again, it does not sell your data.

Both of them ask for your consent before sharing the data. So for example, if your friend/contact shares his data, the third party does not see your data (as opposed to what Facebook did).

Posts such as yours reek of whataboutism (same as the Obama campaign narrative) and do more harm than good. The two companies have not built their business around personal data. The personal data in this case is a side-effect of selling an actual product/service which brings in the cash.

If you mentioned Google, then that's a different thing. I find it interesting nobody is bringing up this book: https://www.amazon.com/When-Google-Wikileaks-Julian-Assange/...

[0] https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

At least Microsoft[0] does not sell your personal information or build it's business around renting access to your personal information. There is a big difference between sharing data with advertisers and sharing data with company-controlled subsidiaries and vendors.

"We tell you about things we think you’ll like. For example, we may send you email to remind you about items left in your online shopping cart. We also display advertising in some services, and we’d prefer to show you ads you find interesting."

https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/windows10privacy

Microsoft mines your behavioural patterns and activities on Windows, Bing etc and sells this information to advertisers.

> But we still have work to do regarding Google

Slay one beast at a time, otherwise your thin your army and are defeated.

Have a gander at Windows 10 privacy settings, most/all of them on by default for every new install.

Bullshit.

Google doesn't have a social graph of 2.2 billion people, with all their posts and likes.

And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away. If you don't trust Facebook, there are no real alternatives.

Yes, there are issues with Google. But they're not in the same universe as Facebook.

To suggest otherwise is false equivalence.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I figure that Google has way more personal and in-depth information on me. Maybe I like a few political posts and share some recipes on Facebook. But people search their deepest, darkest questions on Google while logged in to their Google account. Every email I have sent and received is on Google. Google tracks my location 24 hours a day. Google stores my work documents. Google knows every video I've watched on YouTube. Google has every photo that my phone takes.

But they do a better job of keeping that information private, whereas Facebook provided the actual data to their partners and advertisers.

Not for long !

https://marketingland.com/google-publishers-user-data-insigh...

>Among the announcements was the launch of a new effort to share user data with publishers and introduce more machine learning into Google’s publisher products.

https://doubleclick-publishers.googleblog.com/2017/10/buildi...

It specifically says "aggregated and anonymized" data, not personal data. Even then, I imagine with the Facebook backlash, this will be heavily scrutinized.

Did FB really give out personal data? In any case, do we even have an understanding of what is meant by anonymized data (when applied to specific datasets) anyway? I sometimes wonder if any of these firms could call it anonymized by changing the name on the profile to somebody's initials.

Yep, they really gave out the data. One example is "instant personalization" where Facebook partners would get full copies of Facebook user data including images, likes, friends, etc.

It was turned on by default without user notification.

https://www.privacytrust.com/guidance/facebook_instant_perso...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-instant-personalizatio...

Ah, I was thinking about the Cambrige analytica story, and specifically handing over data which we have no control over.

But you're right to point out they used to have 'share by default' on some data.

I have considered moving to another email provider, but the fact is that maybe half of my emails will be sent to Google addresses. So they will still get my information. I have an Outlook account at work and the search is crap in comparison to Googles - which is another reason tying me to Google for the time being.

Check out Fastmail. A year ago I switched from Gmail, and slowly people started using my new email (I had gmail forward all other mail to the new mailbox). Now I hardly get any through Gmail.

The search is pretty good and the UI is nice. Maybe you'll prefer Gmail, but it's worth a try at least.

The point is that you have choices with Google that you don't have with Facebook.

You don't have to use Gmail.

You don't have to store work documents in Drive.

You don't have to log in to watch YouTube.

You don't have to use Google Photos.

But for social networking, what choice do people have when no other service has even 5% of Facebook's social graph?

As much as someone can ditch Gmail for a POP3 account at some other email provider, someone can just as easily not use Facebook and communicate with people through email, SMS, iMessage, etc.

I do have to store my email and work documents on Google as it's the platform my employer uses.

> And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away

I really really really really want to like DuckDuckGo, but it simply doesn't work compared with Big G.

I switched my default search engine to DDG once again last week, and after a frustrating week of rarely finding what i want, had to switch back go Google.

Last night was the final straw. I was trying to find out the delivery area for a particular newspaper. All DDG gave me was irrelevant ads, links to the newspaper's home page, outdated links to newspaper pages that are 404 now, and links to Wikipedia and other articles about the city.

Same search query on Google gave me as the first result a link to a page at the newspaper where I could put in a ZIP code to see if delivery was available.

I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.

I find DDG gets me what I need the majority of the time. Where it fails, I just throw in a !g or another bang to go where I need to get more results.

I agree, it would almost be nice if you could allow Duck Duck Go to track some of your searches. Google knows I am after the web framework when I type Django. Duck Duck Go doesn't.

To be fair, time spent watching Django unchained again is time well spent.

I haven't watched it, but usually those searches are done at work.

> I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.

I've been doing this for years as well, and I'm much too lazy to do the !g trick. If you rely on google search daily to help get complex tasks done, DDG just doesn't cut it as far as I'm concerned.

For searches for the latest movie trailer or whatever? Sure it works great, but for me simple queries like this make up a tiny percentage of what I use Google Search for. It's easy to take for-granted now that we are so used to it how incredibly good Google's search results are.

I'd love to move to DDG, I really would, everything else about them appeals greatly to me, but every time I read an article by someone saying the made the jump I can't help but wonder what they actually use it for that makes it work for them.

I use their feedback button often to report issues like this. I want to see them be successful.

> And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away.

Quick reminder that if you're using Chrome, Bing and DuckDuckGo do not protect your search history. If you're using Chrome and have web history turned on (you probably do), Google parses your browser history to get your search queries from sites like Amazon, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

It's not as simple as just choosing to move to a different product. Google makes every effort to cross-contaminate their products with each other, precisely so they don't lose any of that information. It's very difficult to give up just part of Google's ecosystem.

Google is way worse, you have other options in social media and many, many people are moving to other platforms.

Google on the other hand is everywhere, both on your side and on the servers you visit. They probably track less proportionally, but you give them far more data than facebook, no doubt.

For me it's the opposite. There are decent replacements for all of Google's services. I can do this on my own and it's my choice.

With Facebook there simply isn't a replacement that has all my family and friends. There's no way I'll convince them to use something else.

I don't with autocomplete I sometimes start typing, decide I don't want it recorded and open Duck Duck Go. Google has my thoughts as I type.

Yes but now Facebook and similar social sites are a digital slot machine so users are addicted. They probably don't care about their image as much as when they were growing.

Sadly, I think the only way to replace a digital drug is going to be with a less evil digital drug. It's quite hard to break those habits.

Not the only way, but the easiest, laziest way. Which is the same approach that got us all into this fix in the first place. As the world turns...

It's all well and good that people now realize the privacy issues with social media, but the question is do we do something about it or do we just get used to it? Social media is here to stay, people are hooked.

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