The Creepy Line: a documentary about Google, Facebook and user manipulation
thecreepyline.com
thecreepyline.com
There’s no techical reason why don’t, just business ethics.
That header is someone explicitly telling Google “I don’t want you to do this” _before_ collection happens and Google’s response is “we don’t give a shit what you want” and doing it anyway.
The current model where you have to register with Google or Facebook and then hunt down all the options to clear data just doesn’t cut it because they’re still using that data. They just clearing it after use or hiding that collection or use from you.
Facebook and Google could be looking at BATs as a way forward for targeted advertising without user tracking but they’re not in the “not creepy” business.
These companies are treating privacy legislation as they treat tax legislation. That is, they're using legal loop holes to be as legally creepy as they can without respecting the spirit of the law.
They could ask users to turn it off in the same way they bug people to install their software.
Alternatively they could work on business models that don’t rely on collecting massive amounts of personal data about people who don’t want them to do that. E.g. Basic Attention Tokens and others.
Since DNT was specifically raised, bringing up how Microsoft's hug of death killed it seemed pertinent.
The default behaviour for Google/Facebook should be not to track people that aren't logged in to their services.
That should go double for people who are not just neutral but explicitly telling them "really, don't track me" in a header.
There is no justification of "we're just improving services" for people who are telling you "I don't want to use your service and I don't want to help you improve your services."
To my mind, the DNT header is nice to have but almost breathtakingly naive. The real solutions lie in the direction of having the lack of tracking be enforced by the client, who (you hope) has a vested interest in their own privacy.
Yes, and to me it's also evidence of lack of morals in the companies, and of a need to regulate it. The way I see it, GDPR should consider DNT as explicit refusal to grant consent to tracking, with all legal consequences if ignored.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti...
It’s not even that, it’s browser fingerprinting and everything. There is no honest reason to track logged-out users, full stop. And they knew that too, at some meeting someone said “we need to track people who don’t want or expect us to track them” and everyone nodded and the geeks all said, “hey I’ve got an idea”
These are deliberate violations and the people working for Google/Facebook must know that.
They are deliberately working around attempts to stop them tracking people. They must know that.
They provide a way for a user to hold information about the ads they want to see.
They allow you to financially support websites that show useful ads without the need for user tracking by a third party outside of your browser.
They do a lot more than that too so I'd suggest having a look at the above link or Brendan Eich's new start up https://brave.com/
There's nothing proprietary about them though and Google could switch to this model in Chrome if they wanted ....if they wanted.
I don't know why you feel the need to equivocate. Cambridge Analytica had direct ties to the Trump campaign, and this film is malicious propaganda to gaslight the public.
I don't think that means the characterization is false, though. My friends working at Facebook and Google are very liberal and internal polling and their message boards have shown that to be overwhelmingly true for the wider organization as well.
> Come on - 2016 would've turned out very different if facebook was really suppressing conservative content at the scale this film is talking about.
It's possible that it happened and simply backfired. Conservatives aren't blind and turned out in greater numbers due to personal anecdata that they and the current events they were interested in were being squelched and misrepresented across social media. I personally recall Facebook's news sidebar feature had a clear pro-Democrat bias in the editorialized titles they wrote and presented above stories throughout 2016 (before they took it down).
This is exactly what happened, from what I can tell, with the one caveat that most of the bias likely came from the human staff they hired to editorialize and moderate. The attempt was noticed, and it backfired spectacularly. If you look at Facebook today, I think it's clear that they mostly don't do this anymore. Facebook's users naturally spend more time and effort sharing and interacting with conservative content than progressive content; thus, the top stories on Facebook are usually from large conservative media (esp. The Daily Wire).
(1) You can pause activity collection at https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
(2) You can delete activity here https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity
Also, does anyone know if Facebook offers interfaces like these?
I had a great car repair shop with awesome care for customer. Gave you special care and nice deals. Well, because of great reviews they grew very much, rebuilt the shop and hired a lot of staff. The culture that made them successful was forgotten, the CEO had no insight in the employees so the experience as a customer deteriorated, hence left.
Lesson: don’t grow so fast that you forget what built your company in the first place.
Examples: Google, Facebook, etc.
It's a black box for most of us. You might need to provide fake data to make it relearn. There were comments here and there about people liking various pages/posts not related to them, just to feed it with junk.
I don't even think it guarantees that new neural nets won't be trained on your 'deleted' data
That they are in essence keeping "the ghost" of a person is another thing.
https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
I guess one way to avoid shadow profiles would be to block FB scripts/cookies on pages you visit, so they won't track you.
i would argue it’s not even your data, but that’s for another time.
When you look at the tracking in google maps, the app asks me nearly every time whether I want to switch it on. Similar thing with the search preferences. Every time they update something in their search preferences you have to step through nested pages and flip a bunch of switches to go back to your previous setup.
That is the equivalent of a creepy guy working at a grocery store, stalking someone every month until they are confronted in painstakingly detail about what they should stop to do. And he is nice, because he stops (unless you forgot to tell him about a tiny thing that he will continue to do).
The thing is: you should not have to ask them to stop even once. This stuff should be opt in and not opt out
We all depend more and more on hw and sw build by more and more fewer subjects bigger and bigger to a point of being become "platforms of the world".
See only casual outbreaks "Whatsapp down", the polemica between a Brazilian judge and Facebook that lead to a temporary ban of WA and the consequent citizen reaction. See only what you can do without connectivity or without few big's clouds.
That's far more serious of mere "steering with aggregators" or mass profiling.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti...
Don’t know about Amazon but I think they use it for their own services only as they’re not advertising company. ---- EDIT: Brain fart, ignore
As a comparison, Twitter made $758M in revenue last quarter.
Based on this link [1] posted elsewhere in this thread, if it is true that Amazon funded this, that has the potential to backfire spectacularly.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti...
Javascript in one site can't just access another website's content. That's the Same Origin Policy. But what you can do is dynamically link to an image on another website. You can't access its content, but you can know if it loaded correctly. So if you find some image that is only accessible to a logged-in user (non logged-in gets a redirect for example) you can determine logged in status.
Another technique uses time measurements and non-image resources. Loading them as an image will fail anyway, but if there is a substantial time difference in the error response for logged-in vs not, it can be done that way too.
While I might not learn much, the documentary format is really good for older people to get a grasp on what FAANG might be doing.
The documentary is mostly right-wing conspiracy theories about how liberal tech companies are trying to undermine democracy and favor Hillary Clinton. Watch the trailer if you don't believe me. Or read this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti...
I both upvoted the video link and your comment. I like people with different opinions and worldviews.
Now I'll go watch the video.
> Taylor and the film’s writer Peter Schweizer say that they’re aware of issues affecting non-conservatives and simply wanted to focus on a single thread of the conversation. But that focus completely changes the argument. If conservatives are disproportionately suffering on Google and Facebook, an incident like Peterson getting locked out of Gmail looks like political warfare. If people across the social and political spectra are getting accounts suspended, YouTube videos demonetized, or stories de-ranked, it looks like bad service from a platform with a legitimately disconcerting amount of power.
> This distinction is probably obvious to many people. But The Creepy Line suggests that any seeming technical glitch or bad decision is a coordinated step in the master plan of Silicon Valley’s digital “kingmakers,” even when that’s far from the most obvious conclusion. It does things like insinuate that Google’s lack of a customer support hotline is inexplicable and suspicious, or claim that “very few people in the world have ever seen” an error page for google.com, so spotting one indicates that Google has cut off search access to punish a user for criticizing it. It glosses over the fact that these kingmakers didn’t even get their favored candidate into the White House, although Taylor argues that Google only put “roughly 10 percent effort” into its manipulation efforts because it was confident Clinton was already winning. “That won’t happen again,” he says.
edit: If this actually is funded by Amazon as someone speculated elsewhere in this thread, it's probably going to backfire spectacularly if this catches on.
It doesn't matter the actual reason massive, subtle opinion changes occur. Maybe it's the Russians. Maybe it's a liberal cabal. Maybe, as I suspect, most of SV doesn't know what the hell they're doing and are just faking it the best they can while they make bank. There is some effect occurring. Most reasonable commentators agree on that.
Once that's settled, then there are a bunch of follow-on questions: how large is it? How do we measure it? And so forth.
This video, assuming the worst slander you have is true, is an example of an answer to the following question: how are the existing political power structures perceiving this new effect?
That, in my mind, is as interesting as any of the rest of it. More so, actually, since the perception of damage is a much bigger thing in most cases than the damage itself.
This is going to get political, and in a hurry. I don't care which bunch of political assholes are carrying the flag towards fixing it, but I want to know how they perceive the problems involved and what they might do to fix things if given the chance. This is too important to choose up teams and play the usual stupid partisan games.
This is a case of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' going horribly wrong.
You are concerned that this piece is wrong/misleading.
Ok. Great. Another person wrong on the internet.
Now, from a meta level, can you accept that the public discussion about data harvesting, like everything else is going to be politicized? And would you rather understand and engage people of all political persuasions by following their arguments, or are you happy just being in teams?
I like understanding both sides, seeing where they are going. That way I can have reasonable conversations with them.
Innocuous has nothing to do with anything. In fact, I'd argue that it's not innocuous. It's important. That's why we need to understand it.
You realize, of course, that both sides look equally nutty to the other, right? I'm watching it rain and friends of both political parties spin up the most fantastical explanations for why it's raining. I find that fascinating. I also need to talk to them about coming the hell in out of the rain, so I choose to understand first, then be understood.
Nobody's trying to soft-pedal anything. There's no whitewashing here. The perception is the reality. That's the way humans work. The causal, pseudo-scientific part of things? Different conversation entirely. Stop mixing them up.
When you align yourself (presumably concerned about data harvesting) with people that think facebook/google are suppressing conservative speech, who is it that is just happy being in teams?
> You are concerned that this piece is wrong/misleading.
No, my concern is that by hitching the data harvesting wagon to the Tucker Carlson/Fox News clown show, you will be politicizing an issue that should be apolitical.
However, the criticisms regarding this film raised in other comments and linked articles appear to be valid. It concerns me that you have repeatedly dismissed these objections as "slander", even before watching the film according to your own words.
You don't have to agree with someone's politics to work together on common ground, of course. And a film with a message may be worth watching even or especially if it challenges your views. But the film's agenda cannot be concealed.
The Verge article, for example, made no bones about its political views but also raised factual concerns about the film. It is also a fact, as others have pointed out, that the writer and director of this film, M.A. Taylor, also worked on political films such as Hype: The Obama Effect (which detailed "various questions about Barack Obama's past") and co-directed Clinton Cash along with former Brietbart chairman Steve Bannon: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3379741/
This is how the world is today. We have strong opinions, and rarely do we care to actually update them. And it's not only because we are stubborn, but also because most of the public media doesn't add any valuable insights; it just picks one of several simple and well-known messages, and yells that message at us. So it's pretty clear what it's trying to say from just reading the title.
It's also rather hypocritical to display the trailer as a Youtube embed rather than a <video> tag. Google Analytics on the website as well? Of course there is!
I did upvote this at first but quickly unvoted after seeing JP in there. Yes, surveillance is creepy, but I'm not suddenly going to cheer for a climate change denying misogynistic speciesist because he's expressing a common-sense truth. Context does matter to some extend.
Something fishy is going on here.
An app that notifies you the services you're currently logged in to, and helping you log out immediately, would be a good idea.