Hacker News Reader

The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get $XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC <<< $XYZ. Why? because the profile that all these corporation built on you seems to suggest you have the character profile of a 19 year old.

Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not let someone build that database in the first place.

It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a Mac instead of a PC. The road to creepy data mess is not that far.

> Is there a way you could prevent this?

Yes, regulations on insurance pricing factors and on use of personal data.

True. However, I can easily guard my data than to effect politics and regulations all over the world. Why not both?

Yeah, who needs freedom anyway?

Your solution is worse than the problem.

How is regulation to protect people from being taken advantage of by malicious data-mining practices "worse" than the actual practice of maliciously mining data to rip people off?

Limiting freedom is bad unless you have a very good reason to do so.

Does it make sense to ask "Why is fascism bad?". At a philosophical level it makes sense to ask this, but most of us would agree that freedom is desirable, because it allows people to develop their life project and be happy, while allowing other people to be happy (or at least try to be). Fascism is the totally opposite of freedom, therefore most of agree that fascism is bad.

Is there a good reason to undermine freedom in this case? I don't think so.

Some people may find that giving up their privacy for convenience is worth it, others, like me, would think the opposite, but we individually make the decision to use or not use Google, Facebook, etc. "Being taken advantage" is subjective.

Even if it was generally considered to be "malicious" and "being taken advantage of", you're arbitrarily twisting the rules of the game, to favor one group of people (the "users") and impair others (those that create the service). You may say: Yeah, but those being impaired already have millions of dollars and those being "protected" are good people. So, you decide who is "good people" and whose freedom doesn't matter? Should millionaires have less rights than poor people? Laws should correct for the amount of money/power people have, is that fair? I don't think so.

It is not clear to me that just because a company can gather and use personal data that they should be free to do so. Even if they should be so free, it is not clear to me that they should be free to use any personal data in whatever way they want.

> Limiting freedom is bad unless you have a very good reason to do so.

The argument that they should be free to do so because otherwise we are otherwise limiting freedom is not convicing. Consider, for a moment, whether we have a right to privacy. Restricting person A from violating the rights of person B is generally not considered a limit on the freedom of person A. For instance, we generally do not talk about laws against theft limiting the freedom of a person to take whatever they want. If we do not have a right to privacy, then preserving privacy may still be a "very good reason" to limit such freedom.

> Some people may find that giving up their privacy for convenience is worth it, others, like me, would think the opposite, but we individually make the decision to use or not use Google, Facebook, etc. "Being taken advantage" is subjective.

Most people do not realize they are giving their privacy away or if they do, do not realize the extent of it. Privacy policies are intentionally obfuscated (and these public policies only exist because of regulation). People have expectations of how their data will be handled and PR departments do their best to suggest that their expectations align with reality, but theose expecations are never aligned with reality.

Even if this is how it actually worked, it would only work that way until it no longer works that way. Eventually you may find yourself uninsurable if you refuse to install a tracking device in your vehicle.

I feel like insurance companies are already doing this in a more transparent way:

https://www.joinroot.com/

If you want the lower rate, you let them track you with the app. If you don't, you call up Geico or whatever and let them decide based on your age and zip code.

Chrome Sync has nothing to do with this.

I disagree. I think this is indeed a known exchange of your privacy for value, but when people not using the app also find their life insurance rates going up it'll be a different story.

I also think all of us are terrible at determining the value of our privacy and it's an asset we don't miss until it's gone. It's for that reason that I think the sale of privacy is something we can't leave up to unregulated industry because not all parties have good information on the goods they are exchanging.

You missed the part where the algorithm is written and improperly maintained by underpayed and underqualified developers and routinely spits out wrong answers.

Information about what you're willing to pay isn't sufficient to lead to you paying a higher price, like in your example. There has to be no competition in the given market (probably not the case in your particular example-- car insurance).

This is the exact opposite of what economics would predict. If you have a greater risk than your friend, then you will pay more because your expected risk is higher. In perfect competition, your rate would be equal to your expected return (that is, the premiums would match the expected payout).

So, if an insurer can identify that you have a greater risk than your friend, in perfect competition you would pay a higher rate. No insurer with perfect knowledge of risk would allow you to pay less than that, because they’re expected return would be negative.

I was assuming they were concerned about you being charged more than the cost of providing the insurance. If the supposed dystopia is indeed merely the reality where everyone gets charged the cost of providing the service I have to ask how exactly you think things work right now.

Competition and free market is not always the best solution to all the problems. In this case, what if all insurance companies are allowed to build such profiles? They all rely on that creepy data hoarder that built the shitty profile on you.

In that case the companies will compete to give you competitive yet higher than others quotes to YOU(as they can see).

What competition? Oh, you mean those companies on the second page of the search results?

Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern from that of how much information they have about you, let's take it one at a time!

> Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern

It's not about "lack of ability to advertise", it's about someone being able to heavily manipulate the perceived availability of competition (which is much more important than the real availability of competition). And that someone is the same someone that helps the companies manipulate the price (hint: it's Google).

This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience".

It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like?

It's ultimately your choice to determine how much of your information you are willing to give up for the sake of convenience but you should think a little more about what the future could look like and start putting in some safeguards to protect yourself in the future.

> It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https?

I think that's a totally different issue and I think it's harmful to this discussion to bring such an issue in.

The case of http vs https is not one of user security vs user convenience; it's user security vs sysadmin convenience.

There's a different tradeoff with giving user's more security which is less convenient for you to maintain, and you typically should do this (this is stuff like https, supporting 2fa, etc).

The better comparison is sharing data with third parties to provide users conveniences. This is a comparison between user's data security and user's convenience. That's the tradeoff being discussed.

Bringing in unrelated things like http vs https will only serve to muddy the waters and damage your point.

Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a widespread default. As it stands, there are other browsers that offer better privacy for those who care about such things.

The NSA revelations shown that governments are doing mass surveillance for real and it is not just a nonsense conspiracy. Right now maybe only ver few might get affected by this. But if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.

> if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.

Alternatively if the people not in power have a revolution and murder all of us working in finance... well shucks I guess that could be something I'd regret.

Waving around arbitrary threats doesn't help if the people you're preaching to view them as low likelihood.

Privacy is related to security. The ability for anyone with a little technical knowledge to gain large amounts of data about you is a big security risk for individuals and society.

Every feature you've listed works without forced log-in. Taking away the choice to share everything about one's life with an ad company is what people are angry about.

There is no forced login. You can still use Chrome without logging in to anything. You can also disable Chrome Sync even if Chrome is logged in after logging in to gmail, so “forced” is the wrong term.

You can't use Google Chrome without logging into the browser itself if you use any Google service.

False. Incognito windows. You can also disable the login state sync as many have pointed out.

By disable do you mean use the temporary flag that is already removed in Chrome Canary?

Incognito windows are not a realistic alternative, because that adds more limitations.

From what I've read, the main objection to this isn't the linking of the accounts for people who want it, it's that there's no way to opt out for people who want to use Google services on the web but don't want to log into the browser itself at all. I don't think there's any reason that they couldn't make it so that logging into Chrome automatically logs you into your Google account on the web as well without doing the reverse as well. To me, this feels like an even worse version of the "opt-in by default" issue; to opt out, you also have to opt out of logging into any Google accounts at all while in Chrome, which is a huge ask even for privacy-minded people who don't want to log into the browser itself.

> or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't.

I think in a post-Snowden world that is a pretty bold assumption.

You get that cool stuff because you are signed into your Google Account on your laptop and on your phone. The controversy is over the new behavior of being signed into your Chrome browser by default. Do you really want by default to have your browsing history sent to Google?

The thing is that you opted into the services you gave examples of, you aren't opting into the Chrome sign-in, it's forced upon you.

No one had a problem with Facebook collecting tons of meta data, until one day, it mattered. One more link in the chain that ties users down, everyone is complacent while slowly becoming a product.

Well, kinda. Now the choice is made at what browser you use.

How long before Google forces you to have a Google Account to even search? I think we all know it's probably going that direction eventually.

I think that's backwards. Google without Search has very little to most of the Internet, and Google knows it. Search is the basis of Google's Ad money, and they won't do anything to restrict that.

Other search engines are good enough to work if a user's unhappy, and Google hopes that users never have a reason to notice that.

If Google can do what Amazon is doing with product searches in a "one click" purchase model the trade will pay off in forcing people to sign in. A huge huge portion of Google income is from direct purchases, which is why Amazon is arguably its biggest competitor, not Bing. At the very least searches are much less relevant if you aren't signed in, and that gap is only going to continue to grow imo.

Also, even those of us who care about privacy are not all outraged about this. I have been using Chrome Sync (with a clientside encryption passphrase) for years. It always surprised me that there were separate login states for gmail and the browser. This change saves me a step, and reduces user confusion too.

Users who already sign into Chrome are not affected by this issue. But for people who do not already sign in, we have now been force-logged in without consent. That is the problem everyone is outraged about.

But that logged in to Chrome does nothing unless you additionally consent to Sync, so why do you care?

Exactly. This just streamlines the login process and cuts the number of times users enter their password in half.

I use and appreciate those conveniences too, without having ever signed in to Chrome or using Chrome Sync.

Many privacy-conscious people make all the same tradeoffs that everyone else does; like you, they've decided that what they're giving up is worth what they're getting in return. The problem with this change is that for many people there is no benefit and they were not asked, so they feel they are having something forcefully taken away from them without getting anything in return.

"Because the experience is so nice."

If the experience is "so nice" why are so many people outraged? The data suggests this is a terrible experience to look up and suddenly see you've been auto-logged into a browser without your consent. Terrible UX.

> why are so many people outraged?

Whenever you think that many people are outraged and someone else claims that it's not the case, the logical conclusion is that you or both of you are in bubbles.

Is it possible that you, a hacker news poster, are in a bubble whereby you've heard the opinion of tech-savy people, but not the opinion of the average mom who doesn't even realize the auto-login is the reason her android phone is now suggesting browser history from her desktop?

I agree it's worth acknowledging that it is the tech crowd that is concerned, and that's exactly what we should expect. This was a stealth-release feature that doesn't really explain itself and has no clear way to disable. It seems completely reasonable that it is tech experts who are the ones to first notice this problem, and rightly criticize it.

I agree that it is worth acknowledging that it the tech crowd as well.

But then, who should you be listening to about whether to vaccinate your kid? Jenny McCarthy on social media or a bunch of people who each had to spend several years of effort to be called a doctor? Obviously, go with the better user experience.

I think this is my favorite quote for discussions that start out like yours:

“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. – Edward Snowden”

Maybe I'm foolish, but I have this hope that a shift from the "make money off of mining your data" business model to something else, perhaps like crypto/tokens enable, might just enable the convenience you speak of, without forcing me to sell my information because everyone else didn't care to value their data.

The point is that it is forced and you have to opt out, rather than opt in.

100% agree with you. This is one of the main reasons why I switched to Chrome. I can understand that some people value their privacy, but for those cases why don't just use a browser like Firefox.

I'm pretty sure most people switched to Chrome because it was a better browser, not because they wanted Google to have more information about their browsing habits. Note that all the examples you're agreeing with are about logged-in experiences with Google products and have nothing to do with being signed in to Chrome.

Can you give one example of a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser? All of your examples would work without that.

Having the same settings/history/bookmarks/extensions shared between my main laptop, my cheapo 10" notebook I use when in on the beach or in a plane etc ..., and my phone.

Being able, in three clicks, to re-open on my computer a tab I closed on my phone a couple hours ago.

For me that's it.

That doesn't benefit from the Google account synergy like the other examples. You get that if you log in to Firefox.

Uhhh, yeah, but the question wasn't "what is something Chrome offers you that you can't replace", it's "what do you get by getting logged in that you enjoy". I'm sure competitors offer the same sort of thing.

All of that works without forced log-in.

forced log-in is not the question/scenario I was answering to, parent asked "a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser".

So I'm not sure why you answer that to my message.