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Comment by notriddle | Hacker News Reader

> Who is being paid in this "auction"? What percentage of customers of search know precisely what they are paying? The latter I'm putting at "so close to zero as makes no difference" which makes "price competitive" outcome a little on the absurd side.

Honestly, most of the people I've talked with know about Google's business model. They give answers ranging around here abouts:

* I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide.

* DuckDuckGo are probably a honeypot; they gather as much or more information as Google, and lie about it.

* Even if I switch search engine, they'll probably get all my info some other way anyhow, and I don't have the skill or time to try to find everything that could be leaking information.

* Google supplies a better search engine, so it's worth it.

* Using DuckDuckGo as my search engine, when I'm using Android as my OS, seems like a waste of time, and I'm not buying a new phone.

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"I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide."

Can I offer a variation of this one? I care about privacy. I wouldn't want a human to be looking over my searches. That said, if they're just using the data to serve me relevant ads and it's all either automated or aggregated so that I'm never personally identified, then I'm cool with it at the personal level.

I say "at the personal level" because I think there's still a practical problem when it comes to politics. It seems too easy to sway elections using it. Not even necessarily by shaping the results in any way. Simply by being able to identify the groups of users who will vote a particular way in particular electoral divisions, and then seeking to lift their voting rate above the average. (eg. by prompting/reminding them to vote)

Most people and I mean upwards of 98% (even the tech savvy ones) don't care much about privacy as much as the HN bubble seems to(or pretends to).

It's also hard to argue against it. In the end, Google uses all that data to make more money with ads. And having relevant ads for your taste isn't necessarily bad for many.

The amount of data collection is truly bad for people living in totalitarian regimes or have sensitive jobs but that's not the majority of friends for most of us. For the rest, the lack of privacy has no negative impact on their life and is unlikely to have in the near future, so there's no reason to change.

Wanting change to benefit all of us is what we try (and fail) with preventing climate warming.

I understand your point but from my perspective I care a lot. Things do not stop there; it's the nature of companies to take more and more for entirely rational reasons (money), but those reasons eat deeper into the boundary between them and you.

If one allows them the thin end of the wedge, one will get the rest, slowly, and slowly accept it a la boiling frog, rationalising it all the way (maybe not you specifically, but many will. Why? It's the easiest thing to do).

You've already mentioned the problem of politics, in effect you've just acknowledged the rest of the wedge will appear. There will be other reasons.

There is another problem, beyond the initial ads-based business. This information gathered about you, albeit anonymously, is correlated. This helps train models about groups of people, in order to derive value from group information. It can then be sold to insurances, banks, etc.

Derived information may look like: "Clojure programmers buy a new computer every 3 years on average" "Women in medium socio-economic groups tend to have kids at 31 years old"

But maybe I'm a programmer that cares about waste, and use the hell out of my computers, until it is completely unusable, making them last way longer. Maybe I'm a woman with trouble getting pregnant, and I won't have kids until much later.

Nevertheless, insurances and banks will use that information against me.

This information grouping you take part of, is de-humanizing. Humans are infinitely complex, ever-evolving creatures and categorizing us is profitable business. I do not want to be treated through the lens of the probability of a group I belong to, no matter how small the box.

The smaller the box, the more invasive it feels. But even general (codified in law) categorisations such as gender already feel discriminating in our modern society.

Banning discrimination based on correlatory truths has its own costs as well. There is no simple solution to this.

DuckDuckGo is nothing but an annoyance for me, but only when I set it as my standard search engine. Because 90% of my searches are practical, currency conversions, calculations that I could’ve done in a calculator but didn’t, maps locations, directions, public transportation times, and, opening hours. DDG is absolutely terrible at this in my country. Google isn’t, and that’s why it’s probably going to remain my standard search engine for some time to come.

What annoys me about google though, isn’t the personalised advertising, it’s the personalised results. Google obviously knows I play Blood Bowl and collect various things for it, but as a result, my first two google page results are nothing but advertisements. Even if I was actually searching for information. A couple of years ago I don’t think I had ever clicked beyond page 1 on google, these days I find myself turning to direct forum searches. Searches on DDG or even directly on HN, FB or Reddit because all google wants to do is link me to sale sites.

> What annoys me about google though, isn’t the personalised advertising, it’s the personalised results.

That's true. It's almost subconscious for me now go incognito prior to searching or visiting a website if it's something I'm aware that I'm only temporarily interested in, in order to avoid it becoming part of my profile.

I don't think personalisation is a completely bad idea, but I would like to have some way to interface with it.

1. "Google, what are the things you think I'm into?"

2. "Google, I'm actually not interested in _____."

3. "Google, you should know that I'm into _____."

The thing is that DDG does not give people the privacy they want.

Some people do not want privacy. They are on every social media network sharing everything about their life anyway.

Some people do want privacy but are not tin-foil hat about it. These people get their expectations of privacy met by other means, not being on every social network being one of them. Then there are the practical measures of running ad-blockers and other browser tools to prevent tracking. These tools are generally unobtrusive even if lifting the ad-blocker for a page is a daily occurrence.

People in this category get the privacy concessions they want and are probably okay with Google knowing what it does. They are not going to go full tin-foil hat with some Tor onion browser on the end of a VPN. Using DDG takes you into this territory. Everyone knows their search results are just different, not the standard Google fayre. The secret sauce is just this claim to privacy that people are able to get enough of with other means, such as running ad-blockers.

With the limited offering that DDG is there has to be an overlap between those who are obsessed about privacy (tin-foil hat and probably 'preppers'...) and the DDG user base. They need to get out more and add to the internets.

I would like to see a search engine that offers people the option to raise their HTML game by using the semantic elements for content structure that Google and Bing ignore. Content matters but so does HTML. This could be easy to game with people getting rid of div style HTML to replace it with articles, headers, sections, navs, asides and footers, with inline elements such as dfn and abbr, but I would be quite happy if the web was written that way. Even better if there was a search engine that worked with it.

Everything you say there underlines and reinfoces the point that the percentage of customers who know precisely what they are paying is so close to zero as makes no difference.

That's a problem for a market.

Another read of the situation is that the transaction does not cost these folks anything they value. You may want them to value it (whatever you think "it" is, I'm not sure) but they don't.

>the transaction does not cost these folks anything they value.

Absolutely and you can say that about literally everyone who gets caught by a confidence trickster and some do.

It really hasn't worked out for too many indigenous cultures where that was used as the precise justfication, for example. Usuary is another one you can defend that way and people do. It's not so commonly held anymore by those not profiting from it.

When there is a tradeoff between what is good fo soceity at large being the people who live in it and what is good for for a big company's market dominance the latter is meant to come absolutely last and be tolerated if it doesn't infringe anything much else of value to the people. I can't see that as being the case here. No doubt Zuckerberg disagrees because he's convinced anything good for him and his company is pefection for society by the definition that he wants to do it.

Nobody understands what they are paying. Nobody understands their liability. Google et al all desperately hide it and have done a bait and switch to make it happen.

There is _NO_ informed consent to the contract and the contract is invalid.

Well said

>Absolutely and you can say that about literally everyone who gets caught by a confidence trickster and some do.

No, you cannot. Because with a confidence trickster there is usually an element of regret afterwards. The folks we are talking about have generally been using Google for years and years. If the other shoe is going to drop it's sure taking its time.

For me, I cannot put a value to the transaction. I have done enough searches that can embarrass me, label me, or hurt me. Maybe some were illegal; I probably am on a lot of lists. Political searches are enough to alienate a lot of people. How do you estimate how my searches affect my income for the coming years?

Privacy and ads are an unequal marketplace where the consumer lacks information. And looking at VPN incidents, perhaps it is fundamentally unequal. A consumer can never verify if information freely given is stored or abused.

> For me, I cannot put a value to the transaction. I have done enough searches that can embarrass me, label me, or hurt me. Maybe some were illegal; I probably am on a lot of lists. Political searches are enough to alienate a lot of people. How do you estimate how my searches affect my income for the coming years?

Probably zero, because absent a search warrant they aren't ever revealed to anyone but you.

> Probably zero, because absent a search warrant they aren't ever revealed to anyone but you.

Are you unaware of parallel construction or do you think it poses no real danger?

I think it poses minimal danger to the vast, vast majority of people. For people who are doing crime, though, probably it's best not to use search while logged in or from their own IP.

The first value is definetly not zero, enough companties profit from selling ads. The second, I'd like to remind you of the Target pregnancy story (possible hoax) or, more real, the Ashley Madison leaks.

"* I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide."

Do you have things you would rather not explain? Do you want to be someone great? What about someone who stands up to these companies? If so, do you want to be doxxed, deepfaked, and your psychological weaknesses probed by your enemies, who can purchase your information from an unscrupulous Google employee? Do you want rich kids to be able to get your information, like someone did to an Instagram account via a facebook employee?

I agree that Google is a better search engine.

> * DuckDuckGo are probably a honeypot; they gather as much or more information as Google, and lie about it.

You should suggest https://searx.me to such people.

> * I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

> * Even if I switch search engine, they'll probably get all my info some other way anyhow

Even if you make it just harder to them, it's a big deal on such scales, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_in_depth

> * Using DuckDuckGo as my search engine, when I'm using Android as my OS, seems like a waste of time, and I'm not buying a new phone.

Same as above.

> * I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide.

I find that those people change their attitude immediately when responded with "OK, if you have nothing to hide give me your Facebook/LinkedIn/Instagram/email username and password." All of a sudden, they do have something to hide.

Because with password you could impersonate them. If you asked them for their profile infos most are probably willing to give those. There are few people who are really careful about what they share on social media. So that argument doesn't really count.

Yea. A better analogy is asking for receipts, payment card history, search history, etc. All things that tech giants know about you that isn't publically available for anyone to see.

Fair point, although impersonating them was the last thing on my mind.

> I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide.

Everyone latching on to this and providing counter-arguments in the HN comments section misses the point.

Most of the HN crowd realizes that this is a fallacy. You don’t need to prove your point here.

It doesn’t change the fact that (outside of HN) it is a very commonly held belief.

"I don't care about privacy; I have nothing to hide."

Funny, most people don't even share information about their salary or their bank balance with their friends.

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