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Comment by blooalien | Hacker News Reader

So will Facebook (and several others) if you take no steps of your own to block them. It's an escalating war of cat and mouse. You'll block them, they'll find a new way around it, you'll block them some more, they'll find another way. Eventually the only answer will be to shut down the Internet because it's become just too broken to use anymore.

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The simpler answer is to just ban it. The law doesn't need to be technically detailed or envision every single technological adaptation: it just needs to be sufficient for a judge to be able to recognise it when a prosecutor describes it and a defence lawyer attempts to pull the wool over their eyes. It needs to be focused on outcomes.

Once banned, Google and Facebook will submit. They will attempt to lobby against the reforms, eventually saying "it will prevent legitimate business: it represents a small fraction of our revenue, but we are selflessly lobbying on their behalf to ask you to implement this technically specific law to reign us in". Ignore them. You don't listen to the hitman when they comment on homicide laws.

And ensure that the penalties amount to a ban. The US congress and courts can and do terminate human lives. Whatever penalty they propose on abstract legal entities is not too harsh; even if they completely dismantled Google and destroyed all of their economic value, it is nothing compared to the things we do to natural living breathing humans in response to criminal behavior.

Profitable companies will submit to a law that aims to control their behavior.

> law doesn't need to be technically detailed or envision every single technological adaptation: it just needs to be sufficient for a judge to be able to recognise it when a prosecutor describes it and a defence lawyer attempts to pull the wool over their eyes

This is a terrible philosophy for legislating. It undermines the rule of law, i.e. that you should ex ante be able to determine if what you're doing is legal or not.

What you're describing is rule making. Congress regularly does this, in passing a law that requires such and such agency propose (or even implement) rules that achieve this or that within so many days.

This is fundamental to the rule of law. Judges and juries apply the law to the facts. Civilians can ask the government to review their plans in advance and make a ruling.

We don't say murder laws are bad because there's no way to know in advance if "bashing someone's head in with a pipe who dies a month later" counts as murder.

Every important criminal law includes the idea of intent. Killing someone with a car because you sneezed is very different from intentionally running them over in the eyes of the law.

> criminal law includes the idea of intent

Yes, but intent alone isn't sufficient. We need a precise, side-effect light definition of the kinds of activities we want to ban and by whom. To date, I haven't seen that.

Passing a law which bans "surveillance-based advertising" with little more specificity is a recipe for disaster.

I'm all for big game hunting but taking down Google would be a gutpunch to every Gmail user ever

Gmail can still exist without Google in its current form, or without Google entirely. It is likely one of those services that does not require surveillance to remain profitable, and competitors would be falling over themselves to claim the data and domain names if Google claimed otherwise. Losing integration to other Google services would likely win more hearts than gutpunch users.

I think this is one of the big misinformation being propagated. That somehow you would not be able to get GMail or other services if Google is not allowed to collect information. The reality is that Google did just fine before they did surveillance-based ads and they can do just fine when they stop doing them as well. There are other ad systems and Google can do just fine using normal ads.

That being said, there are great alternatives to GMail that you can use, both free and paid. FastMail, Proton Mail, Tutanote and Vivaldi.net mail are just a few options you might want to try out.

What was Google's business model before they sold ads?

Google started as a search engine. Their results were accurate and there were no ads. Gradually they started doing ads on search results, related to the search itself. This was better than what many of the competitors at the time were doing, which was for paid searches to be at the top.

Gradually Google became more and more an ad company. In 2007 they bought DoubleClick that was one of the leading ad companies on the Internet. This was part of them moving towards providing ads not only on search results, but on sites as well. At the time most ads were site or context sensitive.

So Google has been making money off ads for a long time. More or less from the beginning. The big change, however, was the move to surveillance-based ads, where the ads depends not on the site or page you are viewing, but on the person viewing the ad. That is where it went all wrong.

Sure, Google started as a Search Engine, but it's monetization strategy has always been to serve ads. According to Wikipedia it first released Google AdWords in 2000. It became a public company in 2004.

can't they just advertise based on what's in the email rather than keeping a profile on you? Not a lot of people want to see google go away, we just want them to stop being asses and get broken up.

I do think reading your mail for ads is another level of surveillance-based advertising. It is also quite personal.

I think banning it is the wrong approach. Data ownership should be regulated that personal info belongs to the person it is about. Companies need to pay for it if they want to store it over a certain time period. They also have to face large fines when they leak personal info.

Imagine how quickly companies would only save minimal personalized data.

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