Somewhere along the line, we stopped caring about trying to manage our own information and handed it over to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook. Now we’re seeing the downsides of that tradeoff.
Adding a tag to bookmark: https://i.imgur.com/iVElOWb.png
Searching by tag: https://i.imgur.com/e3UmQDG.png
I don't use any bookmark management addons, so this is definitely default behaviour.
Imagine if that hadn't happened! I think we would have amazing tools for managing our information locally, in a highly automated and intuitive way.
The seeds of these possibilities are everywhere. Search, of course, but also things like tagging and even automatic tagging with with machine learning models. Imagine if Chrome had the same tools for organizing bookmarks as Gmail has for tagging email, plus all of the power of recommendation engines under the user's control.
No, instead Google keeps bookmarks extremely underpowered because they'd rather have people search for everything all the time in order to drive traffic to their ads.
I know because I was there trying to learn programming, or anything, from the web of 1996-2000 and it was a freaking pain, a garbage dump of poor content filled with banner ads and popups and searching on AltaVista and Yahoo! was completely futile. The only useful content I found was not on the web, but in FTP directories. And learning was all you could (barely) do.
People were doing bookmarks because it was rare to find something good, so remembering stuff that wasn't crap was worthwhile.
People tend to glorify the old days. That's because memory starts playing tricks on us.
But quickly web designers decided that the conventions were boring or ugly, and changed the default color schemes and removed underlines and borders. The web as a whole began moving towards CSS and JavaScript and more full-fledged web applications.
Putting the disappearance of purple links on cloud companies and Facebook and Google is rather preposterous.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...
YouTube watch data is used to personalize recommendations, and browsing data is used to personalize ads: https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect.
Disclaimer: I work at Google.
https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols
The location history setting toggles whether data for My Timeline is kept.
Or the algorithm knows I like David Bowie so recommends me "Changes". The most boring possible recommendation it can give to a David Bowie fan.
I really wish it had a setting to up the daring of the recommendation. It seems designed to just never recommend something that I would really hate but in doing so it never recommends me anything all that interesting.
I too really like this data, specifically location history. It's come in extremely handy for a number of reasons, whether finding a restaurant I really liked but forgot the name of, finding exact dates and times when I was in certain places (which is handy to know if said place had a COVID-19 outbreak, for example).
I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged.
Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy.
When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.
I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it?
I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life (that mystery box company). Maybe if everything advertised to me was that interesting (to me), it would be a net win for everyone?
Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong.
HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.
Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on.
All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).
I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.
Practically every commercial interaction (and most social interactions) are "manipulation" of some sort. At the moment we're trying to manipulate each other into adopting the other person's perspective. I don't understand what you find insidious about sales pitches; I'm sure they've been with us almost as long as prostitution.
Because of the impact of advertising on everyone's lives and the society at large.
An incomplete list of issues: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.
> It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.
> https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
You should be allowed to make trade offs between privacy and convenience where it’s available, but it should be transparent exactly what tradeoff you’re making.
sounds like a feature (for them) to me. why bother showing your users new videos when they're perfectly content watching the same old videos over and over again? Better than not showing anything and them leaving your site because there's no more relevant/new videos.
Edit: Turns out it doesn't actually provide a location history visualization like GMaps does - it only shows "significant locations" - but to my knowledge there's no technical reason it couldn't do so
You don't have to send any data to a central server at all.
I believe we should have control over our own data, and it looks like Google is giving us that.
So I'm glad we can choose to enable/disable this ourselves.
You wouldn't be in the minority if you thought of it this way.
There is no trade off because you can have both! It's just that Google doesn't offer this.
One thing I've noticed is that Google must obviously do a lot of filtering and correction to the data, because my data is nowhere as clean as I've seen on Gmaps, and I haven't found a way to replicate that in any way. My data is totally sufficient for whenever I've needed it, but it's not perfect. The most I'll do is filter out data that is ridiculously out of bounds from what the data directly before and after say, but I wish there were a better solution (and if there is, I haven't found it yet).
I think one big problem with Google collecting all this data is that you don't own it. You can't choose to use this location data to solve your problems in a way that you'd prefer. Instead, you have to hope that Google has covered your needs for the data and if not, tough luck, you're stuck doing a lot of manual work.
If you want to go the extra miles, I remember this talk of Ilya Zverev "Hundred thousand rides a day"[1] seen at FOSDEM 2019.
[1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_gpxtraces...
https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/
In general, I think "privacy as a right" is a better approach for society. If people want to opt out of privacy, they should have that ability, but that should be a choice.
That is not to say your device can’t keep a location history without sending it to someone’s server.
Want to remember your e.g. hotel room number, parking garage floor/zone, or bus stop? Snap. Backup your plane ticket? Snap it. Record the wiring before an upgrade? Snap. To input your dietary nutrition later? Food picture. Part/model number? That's a picture. See behind something? Etc, etc.
The fact you only think smartphone cameras are for "bathroom selfies" (?) says more about you than whomever you're trying to disparage, because you're obviously under-utilizing an extremely valuable tool in your pocket because you've put it into a tiny box and dismissed it.
When I go to a restaurant I don't like taking pictures of the food, or pictures of the restaurant. I like enjoying the food and the company I'm with - but maybe I'm regressive.
I don’t need to remember my hotel room number or parking garage zone or bus stop every day. Even when I do I don’t need a photo, sorry, got a pretty good memory, and a digital notebook too. Under-utilize, sure, whatever, it’s my fucking phone and I didn’t ask you to judge. The fact is me and a whole host of people I know who don’t snap photos frequently enough (yeah, been talking to quite some friends about how we’ve basically been spending a fair bit of money on cameras that we don’t use very much) won’t get “the same functionality” as you were claiming, so I hope you’re not on a design panel for something like this where people who don’t conform to your expected usage pattern just get a FU.
Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?
Storage is cheap. Having the image for some currently-undefined later use can be invaluable. Never using it later is cheaper than the opportunity cost of knowing it was there but now isn't.
I do! Although, that's because I don't take a lot of pictures, and I look at them even less, so they just accumulate. But it's rarely become a space issue (because I'm not taking many), so whatever. The act of taking the picture seals the memory, so I don't usually have to look.