A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities | Hacker News Reader

A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities

niemanlab.org

336 pointsjeremiahlee154 comments

I have a really hard time grokking their lead-in "Do you expect...?" What does that mean exactly? Or more importantly, what does it mean to the respondents?

> "Do you expect Google to collect data about a person’s locations when a person is not using a Google platform or app?"

I have a feeling many people read that as "Do you want Google...." Saying "Do you expect" feels like a cynical "Do you think Google will do something you don't want them to do but are helpless to prevent, because they are a huge, uncaring, profit-obsessed corporation?" in which case, all questions can be answered "Yes" regardless of topic because the underlying cause is the same to the respondent.

"Are you aware that Google does X" might be a less loaded way to ask these.

"expect" is a technical term, as in bug reports where you wrote Observed Behavior and Expected Behavior. It is confusing/misleading for survey respondents, though.

Something isn't a technical term for having a technical use-case. Expectations existed long before technology.

“I expect you to arrive at the airport 2 hours before departure.”

Doesn’t sound technical to me.

I think asking "are you aware" is a different question. Most non-tech people have barely done any research on this and probably have never even looked into it.

You're sharing information and asking questions about it at the same time. Sort of a cross-contamination IMO.

Such cross-contamination, when done maliciously, is called "push-polling" and is a known tactic for shaping political discourse by taking advantage of being possibly the first to mention a topic in a person's field-of-view to paint that topic in the worst possible light.

I don't think that's what's being done here, but it's interesting to note that what you're seeing is definitely an issue regarding polls in general.

Quite honestly, most things that receivers call "push polls" are not push polls. They are honest attempts to figure out which lines of attack will resonate better with the public at large. So you try several different attacks on a relatively small sample, see what makes people respond most strongly, and then scale up the attacks with paid media, speeches etc. Yes, most of these will have to inform people of the bad stuff you are going to be attacking over, but that's because if the general public was widely aware of the attack, you wouldn't need to mention it- or at least not to pay pollsters to figure out if it is a good attack.

The hallmarks of a push poll are that it makes no attempt to gauge your response level, and that it tries to call far more people than a statistical survey would need to do. The most famous case, in recent US history, would have to be "John McCain's illegitimate Black baby" (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411)

Interesting use of the word "honest". If there's any agenda being pushed during a survey at all, then it's not an honest survey, statistically speaking. An honest attempt to figure out a line of attack isn't an honest poll.

So, any "survey" that is trying to sway or push opinions at all is a push poll in my book, even if they're also collecting information & using the information collected. You're trying to draw the line at one extreme, all push and no poll, but I believe the term "push poll" has long been used by many people for surveys that do both.

Since you can't influence the thing you're sampling and get an accurate sample at the same time, don't you think the line actually needs to be at 100% poll and 0% push, rather than requiring 0% polling before you can call it a push poll?

It’s an “honest” survey because the authors are using it to extract the data they are looking for (the most effective trigger phrasing to use in speeches, etc). It’s working as designed to provide useful information to the authors.

A push poll doesn’t provide information to authors. They don’t care about the results.

> A push poll doesn’t provide information to authors. They don’t care about the results.

That's not necessarily true, there are polls in the middle, where the authors attempt to both push agenda, and also collect information on whether the push is working. I'm saying that any amount of pushing constitutes a push poll; the defining characteristic is not whether the authors care about the results, but whether they're attempting to influence the results.

Examples of what I'm talking about are even listed in the Wikipedia article on push polling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll

If a poll is really asking whether a certain line of negative attack is going to work better than another, and not attempting to influence the answer, not attempting to sway the respondent, then yes that would be an "honest" survey in some sense. However, there aren't actually many polls related to negative campaigns that do this, and it's also very difficult to do without influencing the respondent. Negative attack campaigns are rarely if ever interesting in doing careful neutral statistics. You'd have to be scientific about it and include controls as well as positive and neutral statements in addition to the negative ones.

So, I still don't buy the original claim that most polls on negative lines of attack aren't really push polls. They are push polls, but they might indeed be softer pushes than other more extreme push polls.

The difference, as so often, is scale. If you poll 500 people in a congressional district and ask them what their reaction to Candidate X's drinking problem is, that's an information gathering poll, not one intended to sway a significant number of voters. It might not be "scientific", but it is intended to gather information about broader voter sentiment to guide your campaign strategy lines, because even changing 500 voters minds isn't going to have much effect on the race. If you did asked the same questions, and even made the same decisions based on the data, but did it to 100,000 voters then it does start to look more like a hybrid or closer to the push-poll side of things.

You're talking about the attack, not the poll.

I disagree strongly that scale has anything to do with it whether you call a poll a push poll. Scale is irrelevant. Asking what you think about a candidate's drinking problem is a push intended to communicate the idea that the candidate has a drinking problem, without regard to context and without discussion. You're right that it's not scientific. You're wrong that it's neutral information gathering. It doesn't matter how many people you ask that question. You can ask the same question to a single person and it's still a push, or more commonly called, gossip or shade.

Your mistake here is assuming that a push poll needs to be influencing a "significant" number of voters. It does not. Again, the defining characteristic of a push poll is the push. Not the number of people surveyed, not whether the pollers are collecting results, not whether they're looking for an angle of attack versus attacking. If the poll is pushing an agenda, if it's trying to cast doubt on a candidate, or trying to "inform" them of something bad or good, then it's a push poll, and I think the WP page made this pretty clear.

Several small scale push polls done in search of or in preparation for a large scale attack are exactly the kind of poll that count as both push and poll. Your example is demonstrating exactly the case where the pollers care about the result, and they're pushing at the same time. The intent is to influence the voter, and also measure how influenced the voter was. That's more of less the definition of a push poll.

Well exemplified by Yes, Prime Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xC2bNpXdAo

I had a similar reaction as redwards510, but you bring up a good point. You could do an "are you aware" question first, then follow-up with "are you okay with" right after. Another alternative is "are you surprised to learn," but that's still a different question, as very knowledgeable people would not be surprised to learn it, but may not be okay with it.

Surveys are hard.

The point of the survey is to test whether or not people are aware of what google is doing with their data, not whether or not they're okay with it.

Transparency is at the center of the argument of the morality of surveillance. There is nothing inherently immoral about collecting data from a consenting party, but it's impossible to gain consent from consumers who don't even know that they're under surveillance.

If you are attempting to test peoples existing knowledge of a situation, you don't want to offer new information before you gauge their existing knowledge.

The point of the survey is to test whether or not people are aware of what google is doing with their data

But this is a difficult question as well. Speaking for myself, I cannot say that I am aware of what Google is doing with my data. I fully expect them to use my data for any and all purposes they can think of, and I'm not okay with any of that -- but I'm still not aware of what they're actually doing.

> The point of the survey is to test whether or not people are aware of what google is doing with their data, not whether or not they're okay with it.

I'm not sure that's true. From the article itself: "DCN surveyed a nationally representative sample to find out what people expect from Google — and, as with a similar study we conducted last year about Facebook, the results were unsettling." Since the notion of "expect" is baked into the purpose, I think some manner of "okay with it" is fundamental to the survey. (Because when people don't expect something, that's usually not okay.)

Why not reframe the question to true/false?

Rather than "Are you aware that Google does X?" (which implies that Google does x implicitly) to something like "True/False: Google does X"

I agree with this, but I also that "Do you expect" is a bad way to start the question. "Expect" can either mean what you think will happen, or what you think should happen. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if different respondents were answering different questions. I'd say "Do you think Google is currently..."

> I have a really hard time grokking their lead-in "Do you expect...?"

This is oriented to general to general users but as a G Suite customer you don't expect your business e-mails are used as input for machine learning since you are paying for the product.

We're sort of making up this whole online spaces thing as we go. Whether you love them or hate them, the decisions Google made are arbitrary and were done behind closed doors by a very small number of people.

Framing the question as "do you expect the online space to be like X" seems much more natural to me than "Google has already decided X", because the latter is likely to lead to far different answers. If we lead the question by defining it with the status quo, then naturally that's the default most people will want to agree with.

I don't think that enough people are aware of the fact that even when their data is anonymized and neither google nor its customers can extract an individual's identity, that that STILL represents serious problems.

We (the public) just don't have the vocabulary and historical experience to draw from that gives us enough perspective. There really was only one super high-profile instance of what this actually means with Cambridge Analytical and Facebook. Even that, however, is brushed off by many people.

There will have to be more examples of things going horribly wrong before people wise up and are able to understand and think through the implications of surveillance capitalism.

It's all just too abstract right now, I expect that will change in the not-too-distant future.

How did Cambridge Analytical impact people? People didn’t feel the pain so they do not care. Pain was felt in the Ashley Maddison leak — Google and Facebook has a lot more info than AM ever did, if it’s ever leaked it will be world ending for many.

Cambridge Analytica arguably had a major impact on the trajectory of the American political system. I’m sure you can come up with some people feeling real pain as a result if you think about it a little.

I think what the parent you are responding to is saying that there was no direct correlation between the action and the feeling of loss for most people. It is all abstract and there are plenty others to blame.

It's sort of an open secret that google's data is not nearly as anonymized as they would like you to believe. I'm only familiar with how advertising data works, and I can tell you that many of their large customers know exactly who they are targeting. It's not anonymous at all.

They are combining google tools and data along with their own in ways that often violate the TOS, but everyone does it anyway. I think some companies have backtracked on this in the past few months, but it is still quite widespread.

Google knows how the person is because there is a high probability that person is logged in to the Google account (which is why GDPR and such legislation do nothing but entrench these companies further).

Advertisers can't use this and don't have any way to extract identity. User ids have always been anonymous and are now completely removed from any data shared by Google's marketing software. The most an advertiser can do is target a list of users but there are limits on the minimum size and scope of these lists. It's incredibly hard to know a person's identity on the web unless they are logged into your service and it's only gotten harder.

OK, but what I am saying is that even if individual identities _remain_ anonymous, there's still a serious problem with the acquisition of aggregate information about a population.

Users are pumping out their data en-masse and entities are buying it from the surveillance capitalism "apparatus" provided by Google and the like.

That might be just fine if these entities are just companies that want to sell us soap and pop-tarts, but now we're seeing that there are other not-so-agreeable entities who want this data and are able to use in ways that the populace would find repulsive, including being incompatible with what they think is democracy.

In other words, the scary part of surveillance capitalism is that we "lose as a whole", not as individuals.

I’d go with “Does it surprise you...”

Doesn't ot still carry the information that they do it? If you ask "Do you expect.." this question is neutral and you do not know if they do it or not.

"Would you be surprised if"?

"Do you expect" is neutral except it has an additional normative meaning. "I expect you to do X" doesn't just mean "I predict that you will do X". It can also mean "This is the thing you're supposed to do", even if I predict that you'll fail to do it. This is common at least in American english.

"Do you expect Google to do X" doesn't explicitly state which sense it's intended, and that can result in people saying "no", meaning no in the former sense, despite thinking yes in the latter sense.

At that point the pollsters may as well conduct a public service announcement. "Be aware that Google tracks and stores basically everything that they can. By the way, did you know this?"

How big of an effect do you think this had? Most people didn't answer yes.

if every question begins "Are you aware..." then it sounds like Google is doing all those things, so people may start to change their answers because they don't want to appear they aren't knowledgeable. By saying "Do you expect..." it's possible that some of the things are things Google is doing and some aren't so you can't just change all your answers to yes to appear knowledgable.

How about "Do you think Google does X?"

I might answer “do you think Google does X” with ‘yes’ because I believe they do, and “do you expect Google to do X” with ‘no’ because I do not believe it would be right to do so.

“Expect of” is often used to connote a kind of standard setting.

I expect power multinational companies to behave ethically to the best of their ability. I believe they behave ethically only to the degree that it allows them the political leeway to behave without scrutiny.

Asking someone if they are aware of something introduces its own set of biases, eg observer bias. Do you expect is more neutral as the respondent is not "clued in" to the "right" answer through the question.

The cynicism you describe would only be felt if the respondent is aware that tracking is status quo, and thinks that it's problematic. In which case, you'd get the same answer.

There is behavior that I expect of a 14 year old, even if they seldom exhibit that behavior.

You could ask straight out, "Does Google do X?"

The other problem is that there is are only two choices. They left out "I don't know". This means people who don't know probably picked more or less at random.

you would need “I don't know” if you changed the questions to your format, but you don't need them with "do you expect" which should default to no.

I read "expect" in the sense of "Do you expect vehicle drivers to hit you, when you're crossing the road?" It's basically a question about what you believe is moral.

"Are you aware..." is totally different.

OK seriously, the other day at work we were talking about a coworker and one of my other coworkers said, oh you mean Sam Elliot because the first coworker looks like Sam Elliot from Roadhouse. Then there was a 15 minute discussion about the film Roadhouse. I went home and on my youtube recommended videos to watch was one about the movie Roadhouse. I only had my phone on my desk and my work desktop has no internet access. Is this just coincidence¿

Just yesterday i watched Running Man on my Plex Player running on my raspberry pi. Again I now have multiple Running Man videos in my youtube queue.

I hate it but feel so helpless about it. Maybe it is all coincidence and i am just that lucky and should buy a lottery ticket. Does anyone else have this stuff happen?

Are you suggesting your phone recorded you and your coworkers and then suggested ads based on that?

Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I find that.. improbable? Not out of the question, I guess, but still pretty improbable.

Maybe you could run some experiments and try and disprove the null hypothesis?

If Google were that smart, it would be pretty impressive. But I doubt we are.

It's been extensively tested and debunked by many, many people and yet it's a myth that continues to perpetuate HN. The idea that these big companies or Big Brother are streaming your phone microphone data 24/7 is a lot more romantic than "the public wifi network I'm connected to is riddled with analytics."

The idea that your phone's microphone isn't constantly parsing speech into text and then occasionally uploading certain keywords to whichever major advertising platform (FB, Google, Amazon, etc) has an active app on the phone doesn't seem so far fetched. We know Android and Apple phones are generally always listening for their keyword phrase (Siri, Hey Google, etc) for voice-based AI assistants and that their speech-to-text support is very robust. Uploading a text log is very data efficient and becomes even more efficient if it merely sends a positive for certain keywords it's told to listen for based on the individual's demographic profile and advertiser's interest in said demographics. I've had enough "coincidences" happen to believe this can be explained otherwise.

We know for a fact that some phones are secretly listening and uploading stuff.[1-4] It's done by spying apps. How do we know? Because there are tons of researchers reverse engineering stuff trying to find this stuff. These researchers are extremely hungry for a big find, for some big publicity. They're searching very hard to find a big player doing it, but none of the big players are doing it, so they only make small headlines with the small players they find.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/hundreds-of-apps-are-using-ult...

[2] http://christian.wressnegger.info/content/projects/sidechann...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20190309034942/https://recon.med...

Some coworkers and I were talking about the Kentucky Derby over lunch the other day, a random topic that nobody in the group really was previously interested in. Nobody searched it or typed it into anything. Later that day my coworkers were seeing ads for the Kentucky Derby. Anecdotal, yes, but very creepy.

Are you sure it’s not recency bias? Like when you learn a new word and hear it everywhere?

I use youtube for one esports channel, ever - I want the live streams when the events are on live. They can't figure this out. It never ever pops up when its live, I have to manually search for it. I wish I knew why exactly that was - either they know what I want to watch, but that I don't watch other things so they recommend other things in the hopes that I become a more regular user, or they flat out have no idea how to profile people except expressed interests from outside sources (which I think is the most likely option). It seems incredibly uncanny one moment and then dumb as a rock the next.

>(O)r they flat out have no idea how to profile people except expressed interests from outside sources

I think this is the closest to the truth if you meant that the way I'm interpreting it. YouTube seems to base its search algorithm around certain, broadly defined parameters that are chosen purely based on advertiser demand. If I watch one "meme compilation" sent to me by a friend, my entire recommended section will be meme compilations for weeks afterward. These videos grab eyeballs, particularly eyeballs in my demographic category as a general rule. However, if I search for car repair videos surrounding a specific model, I will never see anything relevant in my recommendations except for general "auto enthusiast" videos that target a very broad audience (broad in terms of the demographics of this hobby segment). It seems like YouTube is very focused on serving videos that please their advertisers and that their major advertisers are only interested in very generic target categorization.

I'd say this is best explained by the fact that producing a compelling video advertisement is several orders of magnitude more expensive/difficult/labor intensive than simply choosing a set of keywords for a "click here to buy" ad to show up in google search results. This means microtargeting is effectively impossible as it just doesn't make sense to spend $15k+ filming a professional quality video advertisement (plus cost per impression/click expenses) just to sell a hyper-niche product like a manufacturer-specific diagnostic tool. That said, I am a huge fan of two specific channels which seem to draw a large enough and unique enough audience to get hyper-niche ads for things like capital pipeline maintenance equipment so maybe YouTube just doesn't have the volume of audience analytics to make such ads work on anything but the most obvious signals in the data.

It's more plausible that someone who was on the same WiFi (or at the same location) was searching for Roadhouse.

Sounds plausible. No matter what they say, Google "stickies" some searches to IPs, even when you're not logged in and clear all cookies. This is one of the reasons I started using a VPN.

How does a VPN help? Unless you're switching IPs constantly, Google will still associate the information with you.

Your actual identity is irrelevant, it's the "virtual" identity they've built of you that's important.

If you use a VPN client on your computer/phone your searches won’t be associated with other searches coming from your office.

I think most VPNs use NAT, so many users share the same IP address. Otherwise the VPN would be mostly pointless.

Obviously Google knows who your coworkers are. Only one of them searching for Roadhouse (combined with some other matching critera) might be the reason you see it.

None of that sounds like coincidence to me. Google detected activity on some topics around you (I'm guessing your coworkers searched Roadhouse, and I know Plex has Analytics), and decided you might be interested too.

Somehow I feel better for my bad English pronunciation, because even when I purposely try, I am unable to make Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, or Cortana listen to what I am actually asking them about. This morning, for example, I tried to search “How to make pickles?” and ended up with “owls, too, may tickle” :-|

"Owls, Too, May Tickle" sounds like it could be the title of a childrens' book.

I have good pronunciation but a very deep voice and I am completely unable to make Google Assistant understand what I am saying. I think it just doesn't work for anyone who's outside of some idea of an "average" voice.

I'm guessing this is more because of google analytics being absolutely everywhere. If G knows your social graph and that your peers looked up movie X on website Y - that's enough to tweak your feed. Pure speculation.

That's the definition of big brother, I wish there would be at least a button to understand why we see certain things...

I do expect it and I feel dirty because of it. But I need my banking app and I like my OnePlus3 and its camera. I run Lineage and I tried running without play services but I also really like Office365, Teams especially. Also my Banking App needs play services for notifications and NFC based paying, and I don't want to just download some APK for that.

I know I can buy an iPhone but it costs about twice what my OP3 cost. I strongly feel like this is my own choice and should vote with my wallet, and I guess I did. I just feel dirty because of it.

The numbers don't make sense:

>Do you expect Google to collect data about a person’s activities on Google platforms?

>Do you expect Google to collect and merge data about a person’s search activities with activities on its other applications?

The second got 10% more "yes" responses than the first, but answering "yes" to the second question logically requires a "yes" to the first one.

The numbers make sense. People don't make sense. Humans are notoriously bad at conditional probability

People don't make sense. It's entirely possible for people to having logically conflicting assumptions without realizing those assumptions conflict. How people respond to questions is also influenced by how the question is asked, and even the order the questions are asked. Making good surveys are hard for that reason, as once you recognize logically inconsistent trends, you have to figure out if the result is due to the survey itself, or you truly revealed a quirk about how people think about the topic.

In this case it’s just poor survey question design.

I don’t understand your comment. Why do you think the two questions are related? As I read them, the first is just about collecting data on Google platforms (said data might be kept separated per each platform). The second question is about attempting to tie search data with other collected data.

Someone might for example expect Google to try to tie your search history to other places, but at the same time expect Google to simply not collect much data in a variety of other services / business products / whatever.

The second question getting more “yes” responses seems perfectly consistent to me, and answering yes to the second does not at all require answering yes to the first to maintain logical consistency.

The second question is readily interpreted as "Assuming Google is collecting data about a person's search activities and activities on its other applications do you expect ...". In regular english it doesn't make sense without that assumption, so the assumption becomes somewhat implicit.

There's a difference between "activities" and "search activities". People expect Google to track search data, but "activities" is so broad that many people may not understand Google is tracking nearly as much as they actually are.

Whether right or wrong, when I see "platform" the primary thing I think of is Android. Whereas "application" is more well defined.

Personally of course I am aware that Google is engaged in extremely aggressive tracking and data harvesting on both. But if I was an otherwise uninformed consumer I would not expect my operating system to be harvesting and exfiltrating private information about myself and my behaviors for Google's commercial gain. By contrast, that behavior is more expected of applications/apps. It's even indirectly demonstrated in app permissions, which users are in many cases required to allow.

Exactly. Main problem is that people treat a phone or computer as a tool that serves their needs and might not realize that in fact it serves someone's else needs. They cannot see the traffic their device sends to Google, they cannot examine Google's comprehensive databases. Data collection remains unnoticed, there are no icons and no warnings.

Opting out of data collection is inconvenient. When I need to log into Google or any other large company service, I have to do it in a private tab. When I want to run skype or slack, I have to create a separate OS account for them because major linux distributions don't have any protections preventing slack from reading my browser's history. Oh, and did you notice that Linux Slack app opens a browser to log in? I guess the reason for it might be that they want to store cookies in the browser and track the user across the Internet.

How long until this starts to seriously hurt big tech companies? It can't be too much longer now.

The dream is that the market will see this and can solve this problem without need of government intervention. Do you all think that this is feasible? Or do we need more legislation?

The biggest problem with expecting the market to solve privacy problems is that the way companies use your data is not visible to the user. Even when companies do disclose it, it's often buried in hard-to-understand text.

While the 1% or 2% of us who care may focus on it, it's extremely unlikely the general populace will really grasp the full ramifications of how these corporations operate. A company is far more likely to lose public support from it's tendency to axe beloved products with regularity than from it's privacy abuse, even though the former is not an inherent societal wrong.

Is it only 1% or 2% anymore? I feel like these past couple of election cycles have really alerted people to some of the issues we are talking about. But maybe It's just in my circles.

> It can't be too much longer now.

That's really unclear. Users' behavior regarding their own personal data and their claims of privacy expectations seem to deviate pretty significantly.

I once nearly sold a company loyalty card to a guy at a bookstore buying a forearm-length stack of books on "Privacy in the digital age." We got as far as the part where I was asking him for his address and date of birth before he politely declined.

I've heard the issue most pithily described as "People, when asked, will consistently give two answers: (a) they would like more of their personal information kept private, and (b) yes, they would be happy to fill out the deeply-detailed shopper demographic survey in the mall for a Snickers bar."

Does the free market care about how happy it's cows are? Do McDonald's products suffer when cows are unhappy? Does Camberage Analytics give a crap about what you like, does it affect their products?

Moo.

I'm sure as hell not a cow, so I don't really see your point.

The market would be a lot more concerned about the happiness of cows if cows had the independence and the personal rights to switch farms.

Consumers are not property and have free will. Equating them to cows shows an extremely serious lack of faith in humanity from you.

Which is good. It's sucks if i have to pay more for a burger because the cow have to be happy.

Currently it is tech companies who hurt people's privacy and anonimity. They definitely deserve "intervention".

Maybe, if we popularize the part about data export enough, people will come to realize the kind of things google tracks. I took one data dump last year and unsurprisingly, since I had an android device, Google knew a lot about me. In that order: Devices, Installs, Library (superset of all apps ever installed), Order history, Purchase history, then all my contacts, even the ones I starred on android, then every order I ever placed on anywhere and got a receipt in gmail (it also stored it separately as purchases) with price, ticket number, frequent flyer, merchant, and so on. I was expecting a bit of this so did not feel creeped out, but if more people see it, they will be horrified. Granted, this is when I stop google from recording the data whenever I can - search history, location history, and so on.

Edit: Anecdote wise, Google has a more accurate list of all the addresses I have ever lived at, than I do. They record the address of every physical delivery at whichever place I asked my shipment to be delivered. I have lived at 7-8 different homes (in three cities) in the past 6 years, and I dont have those addresses on hand either. But yeah, google might.

Consumers don't expect Google to track you yet are delighted when they search for "haircut" and then click on a link on their computer and then have that place show up on Google Maps on their phone as the recommended destination for driving directions.

How do they think that happened?!

I just got a "Your March In Review" email from "Google Maps Timeline." I wasn't surprised by it but I think for other people seeing it presenting you a map with every place your phone has ever been will be very eye opening.

They've been doing this for years for me. Did they just recently turn on location services by default or something?

Not sure I've never seen these emails before but I've had location services on for quite a long time-- the map shows at least 5 years of data.

Go to https://myactivity.google.com

Now understand that is only what Google is collecting when you're explicitly using their services. Any apps or sites that use GA or any other Google SDKs are also being collected and sent to Google and correlated back to your Google identity. I discovered this when I found that Google knew every restaurant I viewed on Seamless. Every Reddit post I saw.

Lol. And how do they expect Google to pay for their state of art free Email, Docs, Drive, YouTube Video storage ?

Almost every job today from a Starbucks Barista to Uber driver depends on Google doing its job well and collecting all the data it does. Ask people if they still support data collection from Google.

As a small business owner are you happy if Google stops collecting private data but you make 5% less revenue ? (Small businesses depend on Adsense and other technologies to seek customers).

I would not be surprised if one day there's a form of free housing just so they get to provide you with their services: Groceries, meals, deliveries, clothes, television shows etc etc.

Need to move to a different town? They have your point to point transportation covered. Also your closet was automatically transported in the background. Your nomad belongings waiting for you as soon as you arrive.

They can continue to use advertising to fund their services without being opaque about what exactly they're collecting and when. The two aren't mutually exclusive and keeping services free isn't a compelling argument for breaches of privacy.

Many people were surprised to find out Google was still tracking them even when location services were turned off, but only because they buried the option within the legal and TOS menu of their phone app instead of the separate privacy and location section[0]. These dark patterns are what surprise people.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-of...

Is your excuse for keeping the public in the dark really “but look at the shiny free stuff”?

> Almost every job today from a Starbucks Barista to Uber driver depends on Google doing its job well and collecting all the data it does.

This is a ludicrous statement. If Google shut down, all of these jobs would still exist.

Some of the results presented aren't what I'd call a significant majority, aside from the three in the middle of the article.

Edit: It seems the article title has been updated.

I expect to be able to use Google Products and only pay for them with cursory glances (no clicks) at ads beside search results targeted only by the keywords I searched for and a geographic guesstimate.

I’d say they crossed the “don’t be evil” line when they show me a sponsored link based on something than the current search.

If whatsapp could grow by asking users for one dollar, couldn't the same be achieved in the search engine space ? A dollar a month or a year to get my private bubble search ? Or are the costs to run a search engine too high and the ad industry is necessary to keep it afloat ?

1) WhatsApp didn't make too much revenue out of those 1 dollars. Most people never paid.

2) If you're willing to pay a dollar per month for search then you are much more valuable to advertisers than most people, so 1 dollar won't be enough.

> 1) WhatsApp didn't make too much revenue out of those 1 dollars. Most people never paid.

They made enough to be sustainable: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/04091...

> 2) If you're willing to pay a dollar per month for search then you are much more valuable to advertisers than most people, so 1 dollar won't be enough.

No. It seems as a Google user I am worth more to them when I am tied to advertisers https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/ or https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/heres-much-google-fa...

I don't get your point though. I want to be valuable to people building a search engine without adtech baked in, how much I am valuable right now to advertisers doesn't matter.

This is not because consumers are 'ignorant' or stupid but because of willful deception and complete lack of transparency from Google. What do Google engineers think when they design those deceptive 'improve user experience' dialogs, are they thinking consumers are 'stupid' or are they being extremely shady?

Android being designed to leak like a sieve and Google hoovering up your data without transparency is NOT the users fault, its Google and its engineers willfully engaging in unethical behavior in pursuit of profits. Its can't be that educated people do not know or understand privacy is a basic human right, and collecting and collating data is fundamentally shady and invasive behavior.

Once the public understand the full extent of the collection, collation and behavioral targeting in play and regulations start flowing these companies and the engineers who built these systems are going to be tainted.

I think they could have added one more twin question to all for clarification. Do you expect... and Do you want... (are pleased that, okay with)...

I think people expect them to take those kinds of liberties but would rather they did not take those liberties.

It seems that those who respond that they don't expect Google to track their activities are simply unaware of Google's business model of selling ad slots based on people's activities.

That’s a little unfair. The AdWords business model doesn’t require personalization. They could run straight keyword auctions. They don’t.

I recently overheard someone say "They already know everything about me anyway, so I decided I might as well sign up with them."

From my experience, the broad opinion on this seems that people just don't care. Sometimes I share with my colleagues what I learn about Google doing at times (and these colleagues are software engineers) and what I get are

1. It's free, why are you complaining 2. There's no choice 3. Google has the best products (this was referring to Google docs stuff)

May be you guys can let me know what you think about those answers.

It would be nice if Google did it like Canonical (they make Ubuntu), show what they send.

In fact I wonder, under the GDPR, is this not illegal? It's my data, I need to be able to see it and approve what they do with it.

Makes sense. People voted for trump too

How many of those consumers expect to keep using Google services for free?

Both senses of the word free work beautifully together. Free as in beer and free as in speech. We shouldn't put up with violations of our personal liberty for no-cost software.

Tech is such a young industry- we still have time to shape it into a place that can be free in both senses of the word. Just because shareholders demand it doesn't mean that consumers should accept immorality.

>We shouldn't put up with violations of our personal liberty for no-cost software

This is exactly what we've been torpedoing towards since Google Docs came out and people didn't have to pay for Acrobat Reader to see PDFs. Unfortunately from free services where the user is the product, and free apps with in-app purchases on mobile, the general public has been conditioned to never spend a dime, privacy be damned. We did it to ourselves.

Not only did we do it to ourselves, we're mostly enjoying and benefitting from it. The alternative (where all software is pay-to-play) actually shuts out the vast bulk of the world's population that doesn't have chips to play yet.

A lot of software, like Libre Office, neither track users, nor sells advertising space, nor charges users.

For important infrastructure pieces, like how businesses communicate with each other, we should strive for this level of privacy and availability.

Does Libre Office allow for simultaneous collaborative editing by multiple users and seamless passing of current version by passing a URL around? Does it require correct set up and maintenance of a Linux installation (which has gotten a lot simpler in the past 20-odd-years, but still requires more than its fair share of technical expertise), or can it be used by anyone with a web browser, regardless of operating system or installed software configuration (save, of course, the web browser)?

If not, it's definitely an option but I'd generally anticipate it'll lose out in userbase to the alternative that has those features.

I think most of us can agree that sometimes Google services are extremely practical. I just don't think that the practicality is an argument towards the morality of their business.

I wouldn't make this a morality based argument if we just had transparency. If they were perfectly transparent, their business model would be fine (in terms of morality at least). But I believe, personally, that they have the responsibility to better inform consumers exactly what data they're collecting and exactly where it's going.

If you are a well educated consumer who decides that they are comfortable with the level of surveillance in exchange for that product, than by all means. I just wish it wasn't impossible to be a well educated consumer in this field.

Privacy isn't a morality question for most users. If it were, we would expect to see more people up in arms about demographic surveys instead of willfully participating in them.

privacy isn't the morality question, being misleading about your privacy is the morality question.

Google is collecting surveillance data on it's consumers, that the majority of it's consumers don't even know is being collected.

At what point does it become Google's responsibility to make a reasonable effort to inform people about their surveillance practices? I'd say if polling shows that the majority of your consumers aren't aware of your surveillance practices, you aren't being honest.

> At what point does it become Google's responsibility

The last time we tried to push the responsibility onto individual organizations to inform the public of the basics of how the Internet works, we ended up with "This site uses cookies" dialogs popping up redundantly and annoyingly everywhere.

I think I'd rather see the money spent on a public education campaign, not unlike the US Health and Human Services videos of the 1950s. While hokey and hilarious by modern standards, they provided a real service in helping Americans reconcile with rapid advances in technology and hygiene (including now "common sense" ideas such as "Don't play in construction sites" and "Drinking and driving are dangerous").

so now I'm supposed to pay even more taxes so the government can pay to advertise to me to inform me of an american companies lack of ethics?

With exceptions on the level of sharing recipes or whatever, I find it hard to imagine collaborators using such an insecure platform. Sure, communications are encrypted, but Google has full access to documents.

How do IT security staff sign off on stuff like that?

Perhaps the security staff are convinced that either Google doesn't actually have access to it in any practically-concerning sense (https://www.quora.com/Can-Google-open-and-see-files-in-my-Go...), or the risks associated with that access are negligible?

I think you've hit on a very interesting point. The fact that IT security staff (with careers and reputations on the line) do sign off on companies using Google's platform for business applications that include passing sensitive data around might indicate that our assessment of the risk model is flawed?

Many of us are the people making those risk assessments. What information would these IT security staff have that we don't?

It's no secret that a lot of companies don't have great information security.

I think that the fact that people are signing off on it just emphasizes how little some people care about information security.

> What information would these IT security staff have that we don't?

The cost-benefit analysis of their individual industries and the risk tolerance of their companies.

I'm talking about actual information about what Google does with their data.

The cost-benefit analysis and risk tolerance doesn't tell us about how much Google secures their privacy, it tells us about how much the company cares about their privacy/security.

Google's entire privacy policy is laid out in (by the standards of other documents I've seen) very digestible language. https://policies.google.com/privacy#intro

Beyond that, it's a trust and a penalties-for-violating-policy exercise.

And I agree with you: you can probably tell volumes about how much a company cares about the risk factors based on who they trust. But I don't generally think companies are being ignorant placing their chips on Google---it's a big org with a lot to lose if something goes wrong. That gives it advantages over either smaller competitors or rolling one's own (factoring in that to match the security of a dedicated service's cloud offering while approaching the convenience of such an offering, you basically have to hire your own full-attack-surface-spectrum infosec team, and that's one more line item in a small company's budget).

Open source solves both of these problems. The way I see it, software that costs money is a problem, and software that compromises your freedom is a problem.

Sure Google can solve one of those problems, but we also shouldn't pat ourselves on the back unless we solve both problems.

I've seen this attitude a lot, and I don't really understand it. Software takes a ton of work to produce, and in many cases a significant degree of skill as well, and I don't really see an issue with wanting to be compensated for it. If charging money is bad, and advertising is bad, what are you supposed to do? Given that you're posting here, I'm assuming that you likely get paid to write software as well - do you think it's reasonable for everyone to expect that you produce software for free?

You're right, it's certainly more nuanced than 'money = bad' and 'advertising = bad'.

I still think that in the context of this discussion, open source does solve both the privacy problem and the accessibility problem. But you're right that there are problems, namely incentive, that open source does not solve.

Open source is not the only solution to those problems, and sometimes solving those problems (privacy and accessibility) just isn't practical. In those cases, I would just wish for more transparency.

Nitpick, can we say "the user's attention is the product" instead of "the user is the product". It is less descriptive and hyperbolic which reduces the speaker's credibility. It also minimizes the suffering of people that have (and unfortunately still are) sold as slaves (literal human products).

The user's attention isn't the sole product though. Personal information about the user is also a huge part of the product.

Saying it's just your attention doesn't accurately convey concerns about their data collection.

Android is not free, but it tries to collect as much data as possible, for example, WiFi access point identifiers tied to GPS location. Paying for a product doesn't stop you from being a product at the same time. Because this way the corporation would earn more that just from selling a product.

DDG Search is a free competitor to Google Search that doesn't track. It's not that Google either tracks their users or charges their users. In addition, there is a whole range of tracking activities and we should have open and informed discussions about if some of them should become illegal, or if companies require simpler disclosures about their privacy policy.

>DDG Search is a free competitor to Google Search that doesn't track

prove it please

This isn’t proof, but wouldn’t we hear some employee or partner leaks if it did? It’s hard to keep a really big secret while publicly proclaiming the opposite.

Exception would perhaps be a govt enforced one, with jail threats for those who leaked.

"We don't collect or share personal information. That's our privacy policy in a nutshell." https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

I can't prove that DDG doesn't track users, but their entire brand is based on very hardline privacy policy. If they are secretly tracking, and they are caught, their brand value will be reduced to near zero.

I doubt it. Firefox has had a few privacy scandals of their own, but as long as they are marginally better than Google, they'll keep having a fervent user base.

They record searches. They do not offer personalized ads that track users interest and sell ads.

Depending on what you are hiding. If you want to hide that anyone searched for a term, no. If you want to hide that you searched for a term, yes.

>They record searches

so they record the most important thing a search engine can get from users in order to make profit from ads, true respect for privacy indeed!

You ignored the rest of that post:

> If you want to hide that anyone searched for a term, no. If you want to hide that you searched for a term, yes.

Most would. There have been many search engines never a paid one. Many free email providers existed before and after gmail.

This doesn't matter, even if it were paid they'd still spy on you, because they can. The list of paid services that still do a ton of spying is neverending (Netflix, Uber, Spotify, I could list them all day).

I would be absolutely thrilled if, in exchange for not using Google services at all, Google would stop spying on me. That's not an option, though.

In which ways would they keep spying on you?

If you install privacy badger, block their IP addresses on your hosts file, don't use an Android phone(at least not a stock ROM), don't visit Google sites, etc. I don't think they would be able to gather much info about you.

For example, they would still have all e-mails sent from/to people using Gmail.

Unless you have a strict policy of "stop using Gmail, or I will stop corresponding with you electronically", Google is going to read large parts of your private correspondence anyway.

Google also buys real-world credit and debit card usage and correlates that with the other information they gather, for example.

I defend myself against Google as much as I can using the methods you cite (among others), but the reality is that it's impossible to avoid their spying entirely.

Add:

Don’t use credit cards (they buy the transaction data)

Don’t let your contacts with Gmail addresses email you

Don’t let your contacts with android or ios setup to sync contacts add you as a contact

Good points. I didn't know about the credit cards part.

I stand corrected.

And when Google installs free face recognition cameras in shops and malls, where are you going to buy things to avoid surveillance? I would prefer to be able to use online shops, taxi apps, smartphones, bank cards, but without spyware and unlimited data collection.

In which ways would they keep spying on you?

Other people have already brought up Android and GMail contacts. Here's some purely web-based examples:

- Google Analytics

- ajax.googleapis.com

- fonts.gstatic.com

- Google Maps (embedded on other sites)

- ReCaptcha

There's way too many sites that simply break if you null-route googleapis.com. Trust me, I've tried.

How many of those consumers expect to keep watching soap operas for free?

There are search engines that offer search without collecting user data. Advertising provides enough revenue to make this sustainable. I doubt that google will switch to this model of it's own volition of course.

Would google actually lose money on most of these services if they had to use non-tracking ads?

Free or paid doesn't mean anything. You buy Windows 10 or you buy an Android phone - and you get under surveillance. Actually, using a "free" linux distribution or a "free" pirated Windows might give you higher chance to stay under radar.

We are one big movie away from everyone knowing. Too bad it would be killed before reaching the masses.

It was called "The Circle," it came out in 2017, and it did $40.7 million at the box office on a budget of $18 million.

I was not aware. Sounds like it didn't reach critical mass

I'm looking for numbers on tickets sold but I don't know how to get them easily.

Honestly, part of the problem may be that audiences for movies self-select for what they want to see, and there may be an upper bound on how many people you can pull in for a psychological thriller. That seems to echo the issue with online privacy in general---the hard first step is getting people to care, at all.

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