> How we will get out of this, I have no idea...
How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?
> How we will get out of this, I have no idea...
How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?
I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with.
I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so.
It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it.
If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?
> ... it doesn't matter if you made it or not.
I do block FB, Google and a bunch of others at the IP level. There are fallbacks, but I do end up leaking when they stand up new IP blocks, and the smaller surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with.
I also pee in their datasets sometimes, but that's a more experimental/entertainment activity. And I'm playing with some other ideas not ready for prime time.
> how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?
Regulation. That's what you do with antisocial behavior, negative externalities and worse. The transnational nature of the net adds complications and freeholds, but the big boys absolutely could be brought to heel, if people wanted to. Politically, the winds seem to be blowing in the other direction in the US, and the GDPR has been argued to death here.
But that's how the situation improves. (It will never be "fixed", absent an event that destroys the ability to run networks.)
I use a combination of CookieBro and Umatrix on Firefox for this. Cookies are only allowed for sites I actively want to log into. For sites that require cookies to function, periodic auto-deletion via CookieBro handles those.
Tools - I use Charles Proxy and perl with WWW::Mechanize (substitute your recreational language of choice). Sometimes JMeter is helpful, but that's kind of a rathole if you haven't had reason to subject yourself to it before.
I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.
> Did nobody stop to think ...?
There were the mildly provocative arguments about facebook users being "the product". Like cattle. Many just assumed they were not susceptible to ads or strong enough not to be manipulated. Folks were thinking about this on an individual basis, assuming that yes, some dumbasses would get sucked in by Farmville but that they themselves were impervious.
Turns out it doesn't matter what any one individual thinks. Facebook is all about scale and knowledge. They're selling enormous social power to whoever forks over the money. It doesn't matter to facebook if the real customer is selling soap or authoritarian government.
I think only now are we getting wise to the full implications of Facebook and the like.
The privacy concerns were pretty much hidden from the public the entire time.
Polite advertising combined with targeting is also potentially very problematic. Passive targeting (people who are interested in X do Y so I will advertise X near Y) seems fine, but it in this day and age it intersects with tracking... which brings us back around the circle.
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."
I wrote a tweet series critiquing this:
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
As someone who for years often pointed out the bargain, I am not sympathetic to your position. Almost everyone I know who knew the price did pay it. Often, it was not merely the lack of knowledge, but actively putting their fingers to their ears to drown out inconvenient voices like mine.
The doomsayers were prescient, and to say they weren't there isn't just unfair, it's actively hostile towards societal growth and detecting this as it happens again. The first step to growth is accepting fault, otherwise there's nothing to fix.
That's why people used gmail and it's why people still use gmail and why even the people arguing in this thread that google are evil are all still using gmail! (I'm generalising but I'm betting most do)
When it comes down to it, despite what people say they care more about getting good services at no cost to themselves than they do about their privacy.
While I used spamassassin (not simple), my friend used Thunderbird which did a good enough job.
>That's why people used gmail and it's why people still use gmail and why even the people arguing in this thread that google are evil are all still using gmail!
In the early Gmail days, I didn't know anyone who used Gmail for anti-spam use. It was all about:
1. Space (1GB)
2. Nice interface was a distant second.
Most average people I know did not care about spam during those days. I mean, they cared and complained a lot about it, but getting anyone to change their provider (or software) to handle spam better was an exercise in futility.
Keep in mind - this is during the days when IE 6.0 reigned supreme and had something like 90% of the browser share. Almost no one I knew was willing to change browsers, despite IE not having tabs, not having banner ad blocking or any other extension, and causing all kinds of Windows issues. If they're unwilling to change browsers, I can assure you they're unwilling to change email providers so easily. What tipped things in Gmail's favor was the extra space, when 50MB was advertised as large).
>When it comes down to it, despite what people say they care more about getting good services at no cost to themselves than they do about their privacy.
Agreed there.
Err, what? SpamAssassin is a filtering system and framework, Thunderbird is a MUA. There were plugins to use ApamAssasin in Thunderbird, and there may have been some built in filtering in Thunderbird, but you'll have to do a lot better than just saying it was good to convince me it existed as anything other than a joke.
My job during the time Gmail launched and the years following was administering portions of an ISP, including mail servers and a separate set of SpamAssassin processing servers, as well as separate consulting work setting up SpamAssassin and a mail server for colocation customers.
I also used Thunderbird off and on for a number of years during this same period (when it wasn't Thunderbird, it was Mutt). No MUA without something like SpamAssasin (or some paid for service or package) was even passable during this time period, to my recollection.
> In the early Gmail days, I didn't know anyone who used Gmail for anti-spam use. It was all about:
Believe me, they did. People noticed it. ISPs noticed it. The ISP I worked for thought about shifting over all email for our customers to hosted Gmail, because the spam solution was actually better than SpamAssassin usually could do and it would offload a lot of work. It didn't happen, but it was at least thrown around as a possibility.
> Most average people I know did not care about spam during those days.
My experience fielding support requests during this time period points towards the opposite conclusion. People cared a lot more, it was much more of a problem then. Google trends backs this up.[1] It was bad enough that legislation about spam was being passed during this period, such as the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.[2]
I think perhaps you've forgotten just how bad it was, or were lucky enough to have an address that wasn't very badly affected. You were running SpamAssassin, so you would likely have been one of the better protected (and you could tweak your own rules, which might have helped if you did so).
1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
I think my larger point, that Spam was a major problem of the time period, and that Google was seen as having very good spam detection, still stands.
Well, Goethes Faust got away pretty well, beeing gods favourite .. and a grammar exploit in the bargain.
(the bargain was, Mephistopheles serves him, until he says some specific words (Verweile doch, du bist so schön) ... and in the end Faust says, now I feel like I could say "Verweile doch..." Mephistopheles thinks thats it, summons his demons, to prepare for it. Faust dies, beeing old ... but since god was the all powerful judge and Faust his favourite, ... well that was enough to save his soul. And the demons had to go away accomplishing nothing)
So any lessons for the real world? I don't see any...
edit: maybe to give more context: Faust made the deal, because he was not content, mainly about the limitations about understanding the world, but also in general. And the words of the bargain mean something like, now I am content. So Mephistos part was to make him content, or even too full of this world. But it is somewhat complicated, beeing Goethe.. but worth a read, at least in german. Don't know, if the translations are good enough, because much of the greatness of the book, is the powerful language and verses, which at least I could never translate adequately.
Nay we are but men!
This is what's scary. The ugly part is just starting, because we haven't even gotten to the point where their AI systems have super-human intelligence and can use all of your "whole-life/everything you've ever done" data against you.
How bad is this going to be in 20 years? And does anyone really think Google and Facebook will "self-regulate" sufficiently on this, without extreme outside pressure?
Sure, DDG is not quite there, but for most of my queries it's just fine.
Having "deleted" my Facebook account some four years ago was a real liberator, though.
"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex."
I use DDG because I like its !bang searches and I genuinely prefer its Instant Answers and page layout over Google's.
Is the web too big for a new search engine company to compete with its own crawler? Or are Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu the only search engine companies big enough to crawl the web effectively?
> Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.
While DDG does use Bing (and others), the DDG searchers are getting the same results because Bing can't track and tailor your results.
Many also like DDG's bang[2] which easily lets you direct your search elsewhere. For example if you search for "example" and don't like the results, then "example !g" sends it to Google. I like it for slightly more obscure stuff - eg "example !homedepot" does what you'd expect. For us python folk, it is nice to do "example !py2" or "example !py3" depending on the codebase.
That said DDG often does get reasonable results. And if you don't like them, just add in !g to see what google gets. (Conceptually I like to give DDG first crack at a search, and then fallback to google if DDG didn't do well.) What I have noticed is google's results are getting worse, as sites are getting better at gaming google.
I agree it may not be easy. But we desperately need more tech-savvy politicians in these technological times.