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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

> Google will send you a router to intercept your entire household's internet traffic on all devices with a browser ()

Yes, shocking that requesting a router that will report "the sites you visit, device IP address, cookies, and diagnostic data" for market research will take a look at my household's internet traffic...

It's just Nielsen but from Google (Nielsen these days literally works by putting a microphone in your house and collecting all your internet activity). The novelty of this story doesn't have anything to do with these things, just the iOS app.

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Exactly. The parent comment completely misses what the real issue in this story and the Facebook story is. It was never really about the research app itself, but rather about how they used Enterprise keys for non-enterprise use cases. The app itself is entirely legitimate, extremely clear in what it does, opt-in and completely separate from the rest of the ecosystem.

Anyone on HN understands the implications of this. But does your average user? I doubt it. They just know they can install a little box and get paid. Digital privacy means nothing to far too many people

I'd argue that the average person probably understands the actual implications better than the typical HN user.

What? How can you make that argument? The average person has absolutely no clue of the various ways websites are tracking them already, let alone the potential amount of data Google would be getting by aggregating all this through their router.

I don't think so. For instance, people I spoke with on reddit who installed the FB app thought that due to SSL, all their communications would be encrypted, and FB would only see who they were talking to, not what. Of course, the entire point of the root cert is to break SSL.

> Cookies

Yessir, how could there be a problem here? And all those third-parties consented to their communication intercepted and stored by, well, another third-party?

No, this is some CFAA federal crime trojan stuff.

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