Comment by danarmak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danarmak | Hacker News Reader

This is nonsensical:

> The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. > Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents. This link [Google Takeout] includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve taken on your phone, the businesses you’ve bought from, the products you’ve bought through Google …

Well duh, Google stores your gmail emails and Youtube videos and Drive documents and so on! This is the service they're providing you! Google Takeout doesn't give you a 5GB archive of advertising profile or covertly gathered info, it gives you a 5GB archive of the documents you deliberately uploaded to Google services - emails, docs, pics, videos, calendar appointments. The list of Android apps installed on your devices is there so that when you link a new device to your Google account, these apps will be automatically installed on it. And so on.

There's a single link on that list related to surveillance - namely, your Google Ads profile, which only shows very basic data, I'm sure they have vastly more complicated data stored on me.

There's enough genuine reasons to be upset with Google's surveillance, let's not promote this kind of silliness. Google knows which Google Groups you're subscribed to, really? 5GB could fill 3m Word docs - how many is that in Libraries of Congress?

This is typical. As a techie, you're triggered by technical detail because you understand the technical details of that example that is intended to illustrate the size of the data collected.

Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" in a story about a paraglider pilot who crash-landed and injured two more people. This is because paragliders don't jump but take off from hills etc.

Usually reporting on technical topics is very hard because you need to reach the non-technical audience so you will HAVE TO use illustrative examples and not exactly accurate descriptions so that can be absorbed by the non-technical readers. Unfortunately, this will put you in a position where can be called on by technical readers who are triggered by the "implementation details" of your story.

I do believe that calling out the 5GB illustrative example is missing the point of the article. It's just a way to portray size of the data collected on you, it doesn't have any meaning even if this data was 3Mb or 100Gb. For example, if it was 3Mb Google might have used it to convey how little data they collect on you as if the size that this data takes has any correlation about the impact, then why even bother with such an irrelevant point of the "article implementation"?

Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness? I don't think so, I'd prefer we hold a standard of being correct and put the onus of education on the readers. They can Google what they don't understand. We can educate the public better to not be afraid of technical details. I agree with danarmak, this piece like so many others is just a bunch of sensationalized details. You should know what you're signing up for, nobody should be surprised by anything in there.

>Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness

I think they don't have a choice but to do it this way. A typical news outlet will report on hundreds of topics a day and probably covering the entire spectrum of topics out there.

How likely it is that all of the readers will be well versed in all the areas of expertise that human race was able to achieve in the last few thousands of years of recorded history?

Also, these journalists[not necessarily this one but in general] are usually not experts on the topic that they write on and the better ones usually would consult with someone who is well versed on that topic. There's no way that the expert that the journalist is consulting with, will be able to educate the journalist, so he/she will dumb it down and then the reporter will dumb it down further and re-shape it in a form that the news outlet can sell it to its audience(right wing, left wing, alt-right, communist, highly educated ... whatever, they too are making a product for their customers).

In this case the author is not (yet? apparently he is hoping to do this kind of thing full-time) a professional journalist but someone who made a viral Twitter thread, which was picked up by the media and of which the article is a lightly edited version.

Some of us do not subscribe to the "ends justify the means" theory. And with that, I'd consider this example a form of failed journalism. Regardless of whether or not there is actually an underlying point, this particular piece of pseudo-journalism didn't capture it. I chuckled when I read the author's description of himself/herself: "... who does extensive research into spreading technical awareness ...". One might think with the extensive research they have done so far, some of that technical awareness should have had reached the author, themselves.

> Some of us do not subscribe to the "ends justify the means" theory

I don't think that this is the case here. To be an "end justifies means" the writer would have to give a false information on an information that is relevant to the core of the story. Does it really matter what's the size of some digital data? Would it be O.K. if Google collected 100Mb of data but totally unacceptable if that was 5Gb?

The size of the data is an irrelevant implementation detail of the story. Even assuming that this is all the data about you is silly in the first place but the articla is not about that - even if the title says so.

My point was exactly that the size is irrelevant - because the data being measured is irrelevant to the story.

> I do believe that calling out the 5GB illustrative example is missing the point of the article.

Please see my reply to bhauer's sibling comment, I think it applies here too. The problem isn't with the 5GB size or how they compare it to 3 million Word docs. The problem is with measuring the size of something completely irrelevant. The problem is with saying "Google collects data on you for advertising, they have data you wouldn't expect them to have" and then linking to data you explicitly, deliberately uploaded to Google yourself. The problem is with linking to Google Takeout and pretending it's something that it's not.

The difference between an incorrect description of a paraglider launch and a nonsensical comparison regarding the amount of data Google stores is that the latter is intentionally being presented as a proxy for the potential impact of that data.

To be able to interpret the article in a useful way, it is important to be aware that a single long, high-res youtube video could be 5.5 Gb and therefore that figure doesn't imply anything about what google knows about you. Of course, it would be easy for a non-expert to mischaracterize an aircraft accident in a way that matters to a layperson's understanding of why the accident happened and who is responsible.

The word "triggered" should really be reserved for military vets and those who have experienced traumatic events in their past that would cause severe distress, not as a synonym for "annoyed."

A veteran who relives the horrors of war when fireworks go off is not nearly in the same space as a developer who is annoyed that someone misused technical jargon.

> The word "triggered" should really be reserved for military vets

Certainly not. While many military personal certainly have faced mind-altering situations, they are far from the only ones who have ever suffered from traumatic events.

Children and Women are the subjects of the most twisted and abusive stories I've ever been able to fathom.

The full quote is:

> The word "triggered" should really be reserved for military vets AND those who have experienced traumatic events in their past that would cause severe distress

(emphasis mine)

You can't just cut a sentence in half and then try to form an argument against it. That's not fair.

I agree, I don't think it said that when I wrote my comment.

It likely did not, I edited a few times.

lmao. "You can't just cut a sentence in half and then try to form an argument against it. That's not fair." -- legit not fair

At least people misusing the word "triggered" provide a good signal that they're posting in bad faith. :)

Words shift in meaning over time. They're defined by the active usage, not the ideal usage. Resisting that change is like trying to fence in water, however righteous it feels.

As with most things, the choice is more difficult than either giving up and accepting a new, more lax definition, or "righteously" rejecting it. That process requires an application of judgment. In this case, my judgment says that it's an unnecessary cheapening of a psychological term, and that pointing out its origins might help people understand why.

Simply giving up on definitions means always ceding power.

It's not giving up so much as accepting that there's theater in chastising linguistic drift. Telling strangers they shouldn't use a newer, ironic form of a word is as hopeless as The Very Smart Guy raging at people over "literally" not being literal.

The entire world is participating in shaping English and we have no Académie Française equivalent. Sometimes the changes are unflattering.

That said, I do appreciate your points and see your intention with empathy about this word in particular.

I don't think that the fact that there _is_ theater renders the underlying struggle worthless, though. Words have meanings, and in the case of law, quite serious repercussions - eg. corporate personhood.

It's not so much "you shouldn't use that word in that manner because of some linguistic pedantry" but "you shouldn't use that word because the externalities of doing so have outsized effects on certain people," or for the self-centered and machiavellian, "you make yourself look bad when you use it such."

As you say, it is a matter of empathy. The N-word has been around for a while - it's still not acceptable for certain people to say it[0]. As for why, that's a matter of education, and it begins with pointing it out.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO15S3WC9pg

related: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Thank you for that!

When you start your article with, "I’m going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it", then include the user uploaded data in your proof, it's a bit disingenuous and reeks of FUD.

Exactly.

But that's the thing..the 5Gb data is mostly made of stuff you "uploaded" to Google, not stuff that was "collected"

Google has tons of data on you that isn't available in Takeout as well. (So does Facebook.) Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen.

> Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen.

Correct me if I am wrong but are you saying one of these two companies buys people's credit card transaction history and then compares people's ad history against the transaction history? If yes, that sounds really incredible.

Straight from the horse's mouth: https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal...

"And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."

IIRC, this was announced as part of a program that uses double-blinded crypto that allows google to perform matching against this data in aggregate (Set intersection knowledge), but not individually identity of what a given user purchased, at the same time preventing the merchants from learning the identities of individuals either.

According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X).

Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue.

Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp...

About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc

Yes, both Google and Facebook do exactly that.

Yes, this was in the news a few times.

Could you please provide some examples of data that Google has on you that isn't available in Takeout?

(I'm interpreting "has on you" as meaning "not anonymized.")

I provided an example in the comment already, and in a child comment, I've now linked to a Google source where they state the data they are getting. And of course, to connect the credit card data they are buying with the Google accounts they are showing ads to, they have to be able to associate a given credit card transaction with a given Google user account.

There's a ton of it. This should be beyond obvious. The purpose of Takeout is to let you retrieve all the data that you have uploaded to G. You can take this data and then, perhaps, move to a competitor or even good your search engine. None of this includes or precludes the sophisticated analytics and surveillance that G performs to enrich and value-add this data. That is proprietary secret sauce stuff.

This article is just dumb clickbait. It's too bad the conversation is now being driven by rank nonsense. G, Jolie Facebook, does not sell data or profiles of you to third parties. That is what people should be focused on as a first step, the buying and selling of data.

Which is why it would be reasonable to write an article about those things (with evidence). The article linked here is pointing to completely normal and desirable behavior and seems to hope readers won't notice.

Very much this. I downloaded my data from Facebook last week, and as you say, it's just stuff I have shared and not any of the tracking/profile stuff. Can't say I was surprised at all.

Right before deleting my account, I also downloaded my data. The most illuminating thing I discovered that there were several advertisers that 'had my contact info' that I had never dealt with in any way (as far as I know), including lots of political groups from all over the country, even though I made a point to never engage in or post anything even remotely political when I had an active account.

I wonder if they store more than that, heatmaps, and such

Indeed. They have lots more data about you that they don't consider to be your data. They think it is their data.

The Activity one is a bit scary though. How many Android users are aware that Android tracks their app use and whatnot in this fashion?

I think that's a point to take home. Users know that Google looks at their "location information". In their minds, it's to provide relevant weather info and whatnot. Seeing it aggregated in this way makes you realise that you actually are sending your entire life to Google servers.

Windows 10 do for Microsoft (sucking up and sending to M$ EVERY THING you do) what Android does for Google.

Apple is a bit better (less-worse) on this. They do log many things in the background, and hopefully stopped (as they promised) to upload everything on every sync you do.

Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care.

That's the problem, right here.

Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them.

In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to trading what's important to what's convenient.

I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.

> People just have different opinions.

Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces.

They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this way. Oh, and some people feel website x is secure because there is a green lock symbol in the URL bar. Some are more secure, because the green bar is a bit longer.

I know “how the technology works”, and I don’t care. If anything, I think I might benefit in the future from availability of all that behavioral data they gathered on me, because one day a sufficiently advanced AI might analyze it and provide some insight into my personality.

We just have to be careful thinking everyone is ignorant except us. Stating how some UI patterns are interpreted by some people doesn't mean anything. That some people are ignorant doesn't mean they all are. I'd like to think I'm not, and I don't see many of these "problems" as worthy of new legislation.

Except when all other measures have been exhausted, we shouldn't be so quick to run to the legal system clutching our ban hammer with our perceived state of righteousness.

Another problem I often see (not here, just saying in general) is how false equivalence is constantly brought up. Oh, so we should just let companies poison food or build insecure cars or whatever. I hope that with user data we can be more reasonable in how we legislate it and at least try to realize the unforeseen costs on the "good guys" vs the "bad guys".

If people are in a burning building and half of them keep putting the content of the bar into the flames saying it pretty and fire can't harm us anyway, it's a problem.

> Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?"

Some of this is genuine indifference to the problem, yes. But I think some of it is a lack of perspective.

After years of sweating tech privacy issues, it's very easy for me to say "oh, they track app usage, which means they track app opening times, which means they can probably tell when you go to bed every night based on the last time you open Twitter." Or construct a hundred other scary (and accurate) stories about how this sort of data can be used to build whole-life profiles of people.

Outside of tech, it's not so obvious. "They track which apps I open when, and said it's to help improve battery usage. What's the big deal?" And of course that's also true, this is useful data for innocent purposes like "predicting what you'll reopen next to expire that from memory last".

But my concern is that there's an enormous gulf between showing people what's been collected, and how it's used. This article makes a bit of an effort, but it's still far short of the sort of example narrative that actually catches people's attention.

Back during the Snowden stuff, there was a lot of talk about three-hop collection. And I think basically no one cared, because it's such an arcane description. But somebody made a tool (which, damn it all, I can no longer find) showing how location + call data at three hops could create a false-but-convincing narrative that someone was a terrorist. I showed that to a couple of family members, and suddenly they were way more concerned with the topic.

It's not easy, I think this is a losing battle and I'm not sure how to change that, but I think people do care when they have useful context to work with.

Agree mostly, but was surprised that the archive includes long-deleted emails and Drive files. Unless the author was mistake -- haven't tested myself.

Considering the author showed fundamental misunderstanding wrong right at the start, why would you assume they got the rest right?

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

I agree with you on the technical merit (or lack thereof) of illustrating the magnitude with colorful metaphors.

However, a counter point: I feel it is useful and helpful to our cause to have authors such as this creating those colorful metaphors. We have tried in vain to communicate to laypeople the importance of data safety, self-ownership of data, being mindful of one's privacy, and being suspicious of the data collected by third-parties. I believe laypeople remain disinterested because the way we raise these concerns is abstract.

In order to convince laypeople that control of one's data is important, those of us who are matter-of-fact on the matter will convey the facts and try to construct fairly mild-tempered plausible threat scenarios that are, frankly, unconvincing to the majority of people we are trying to convince.

For a good chunk of those we're trying to convince, vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat are what is necessary to tip the scale. The recent twitter thread that showed a map of Ireland with every point the user had been in the past several years was a poignant visual representation of our argument. It made the argument way better than repeatedly saying, "Google tracks your location, always!" When we've presented that abstract point previously, we've heard "I don't care, that's fine" as a response every time.

And then someone shows them this map and suddenly: "Whoa, that is creepy!" Yes!

I for one welcome a bit of colorful language, as long as we don't get totally carried away. I don't really dig the "Well, duh!" attitude if we convey that to the people we're trying to convince. We're trying to make laypeople value their own privacy and feel good doing so. Not judged for having been ignorant of or disinterested in our previous arguments. Be welcoming of this good favor in the fight for data privacy.

The problem isn't how they describe the size of the data. It's that the data whose size they describe is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make.

I didn't say "well duh, Google has at least 5GB on you, that's a small number really". I said "well duh, of course Google has your gmails and Drive docs" - and they are as small or large as you make them, their size is completely irrelevant.

I did snipe at the comparison to Word docs, not because it's a non-commensurable unit but because Word docs don't have a size - I can easily make a single Word doc 5GB large. But that was an aside quite irrelevant to my main point and maybe I should have omitted it.

> vibrant and (to our minds, exaggerated) illustrations of the magnitude of the threat

In this case, though, I don't think it's an illustration of the threat at all.

The location tracking map may be visceral enough to motivate people, and that's fine. Sometimes people need a strong visual to act on something they already knew.

But the "5.5Gb, millions of Word documents!" bit? That's an archive including your Google Drive files, of course it's comparable in size to the free storage Google provides. And perhaps more importantly, if your Takeout archive is only 10Mb, that doesn't even begin to imply Google lacks records on you.

Potent metaphors are great, and I certainly recognize the problem of techies saying "yeah, duh, obviously" without helping people really understand the consequences of a topic. But in the Takeout case it feels like responding to consumer indifference about real problems by sparking fear over a basically meaningless topic.

Thanks for the reality check. Poor journalistic integrity.

It's true but long ago I grabbed my takeout archive and was surprised by a few documents about my history of this and that (can't recall, probably gmaps routes I didn't know were stored)

You might be a bit too critical with the journalist, the example you provide is the final one after pointing all the not so "obvious to ordinary end user" data Google has about someone. Is it perfect, no. But its good that more mainstream media is discussing these things so people get a better understanding of this.

Maybe it will stop folks from uploading unencrypted data to cloud providers down the road and improve research that allows cloud providers to process encrypted data meaningfully without every being able to decrypt.

The 3m pages of word doc is odd, but its not uncommon to convert overall size to word doc pages in journalist speech (just map size to average word doc size), and then they disregarding data type. I have seen this in other places too.

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