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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't seem like a fair representation. The quote there isn't saying you should expect totally free services. It's saying you have the right to expect not to be tracked. Advertising up until 20 years ago relied entirely upon context and behavioral and engagement studies were conducted on an opt-in basis on Nielsen families and focus groups composed either of volunteers or people being compensated for participating in market research.

It is quite different to say you have a right to no advertisements on free services, which is not what this is saying, and to say you have a right to expect not to have your every digital action surveilled and studied 24/7 for the purposes of advertisers getting free research subjects who often don't realize they're being used as research subjects, which is what this is saying.

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> Tracking is becoming less effective, and the only recourse they have is stuffing even more ads everywhere to make up for the lost revenue from targeting. This is great, because you're not affected if you have uBlock Origin. If you don't, install it right now.

That's part of the context, and pretty much goes in the direction of "I just don't want any advertising at all". I can sympathise, but we need to find a way to pay for services.

I'll write them a check then.

The real reason these service's need to extract data from their users isn't that they can't make money any other way, but that predatory pricing has been allowed to kill on the non free competition.

This is actually what bothered me the most about the article.

If we all install add blockers, content producers can't make money.

I disagree. The shift would be towards content producers offering tiers of service and content, for instance a free tier to draw people in and a paid service with perks & more content.

A few companies do this already.

There could also be a change in the advertising model, for instance, online newspapers could sell and host ads on their own servers based on the news content of the article instead of by targeting users with tracking cookies. If you're reading an article about a chef you may be interested in cookware, after all.

There are other ways to make money producing content besides advertisements

I would be more supporting of turning off my ad-block if the average blog or news post didn't have 70% of the screen be ads, with 2 ad popups, a cookie banner, an auto-playing video, and a redirect to another ad page on first click.

Easy. VC money pays for it.

If you set up Gmail on your phone you’re not being advertised to at all when you check your mail. It seems hard to imagine any way providing that service for free would be worth their while if they couldn’t harvest the data.

> If you set up Gmail on your phone you’re not being advertised to at all when you check your mail.

Well, that's Google's choice, and Google's problem. The fact that they made this choice does not negate my right not to be tracked.

Anyway, if free email providers were impossible without universal tracking (they existed before the web got extensive tracking, so you are wrong), they shouldn't exist. If you want emails for all, and it's not economical, you can always have your government to intervene.

Well your claim is a lot more expansive, really, because you’re saying that I have no right to sign up for the service myself because you don’t like the business model. There are some things that are so harmful that that makes sense but I don’t agree that Gmail and Facebook being in that category.

There's a reason the constitution of my country grants me a right to privacy...

And before anybody claims that it only restricts the government (it doesn't, it tasks the government into guaranteeing it), we have enough evidence that this kind of business model will be exploited to create an all encompassing gatekeeper for our society's communication, and at this point those companies are really paragovernamental entities, what no country should allow to exist.

> I don’t agree that Gmail and Facebook being in that category.

In my opinion, Facebook is unequivocally harmful to society at large.

I don't think GMail is unequivocally harmful, although the fact that people can use gmail addresses that don't look like gmail addresses is a problem for those of us who really try to never send email to gmail addresses in order to keep our data out of Google's realm.

It's pretty simple - if its not profitable to run a service without spying on your users then it should simply not be run.

That's it!

OK, that’s how you feel, and your choice. What do you think about people who wouldn’t mind being spied on in exchange for free or cheaper services?

I’m personally with you, by the way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not the only valid position.

>OK, that’s how you feel, and your choice. What do you think about people who wouldn’t mind being spied on in exchange for free or cheaper services?

I'd feel like there's no universal God-given social contract that says they have a "right" to this, so I'd suggest we ban it anyways (just like they're free to suggest to allow it).

Couldn't you make the same argument about one's "right" to never be the subject of automated data collection?

Yes, haven't I already covered this angle by writing "just like they're free to suggest to allow it"?

You could make the same argument, and I would still argue to ban automated data collection.

That's how we make laws: we choose our sides of the argument, and (if we're lucky to live in a functional democracy) vote for it, or vote others that promote the same ideas.

It's not the only valid position, its just the only position that doesn't allow giant corporations to use their power to coerce people with no money to give up their agency.

They can probably find other ways.

> What do you think about people who wouldn’t mind being spied on in exchange for free or cheaper services?

I would really like to know how many people are actually like this, if they knew the full, total picture. There will be a lot, that's sure, but maybe not the overwhelming majority of uninformed people we have now.

By and large Snowden's revelations were met with a shrug. If that didn't bother people much, why would details about how Google makes money?

Should it be up to you to allow e.g. Google to systematically read incoming mail written by people with no relationship to Google whatsoever?

People who want to be spied on have the freedom to move to North Korea. I’d be ok with using tax dollars to help them. They’d still complain that people here have entitled attitudes about freedom, but they are free to choose a different way.

>People who want to be spied on have the freedom to move to North Korea.

Surely there's some middle ground between no digital tracking of users and North Korea?

What do you say about children who really want to work in mines, or people who want to sell themselves into slavery?

My grandfather sold himself into slavery for 2 years for a handful of sheep - I would say that we should fix the world so that such a thing never happens and it should never be allowed.

I disagree because I’d like to keep using the service.

I do see advertisements on the Gmail mobile app though. They're never in the primary view, but the automatic categorizations (Promotions, Social, Updates) generally have them.

The point is that it supports IMAP and POP3.

If it's an Android phone, then Gmail came with the phone, that I paid for. I have no idea what the manufacturer paid Google, but I paid.

OK but it works on my iPad, my iPhone, Thunderbird or Outlook on a PC, etc., and what you’re saying does not apply to any of those.

You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Similarly, they should have the right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking and be able to decide if they still want to do business with you as a result. This is how a free market works.

How does this work if you’ve never done business with the company or ever intend to?

If I get a random email from a company with a tracking pixel, am I ‘doing business’ with them?

If a friend shares my name and number with an app, am I doing business with them?

If a friend posts a photo of me on a social media service I don’t use, do they send out a PI to track me down and let me know they’re going to be running facial recognition tech on the photo which could build an album of me?

This is more the Wild West than a free market.

Equifax is a great example of a service which you don't do business with and get opted into without consent.

>without consent

That's like complaining that they are making you pay the balance when you didn't consent to paying off the charges you made.

When you get a credit card you agree to the credit card agreement. I just picked a random credit card agreement I found online (Chase Amazon Visa) and it says:

>We may obtain and review your credit history from credit reporting agencies and others. We may, from time to time, obtain employment and income data from third parties to assist us in the ongoing administration of your account. We may also provide information about you and your account to credit reporting agencies and others. We may provide information to credit reporting agencies about this account in the name of an authorized user. If you think we provided incorrect information, write to us and we will investigate.

Equifax and the like collects massive amounts of data about people whether or not they have a credit card. There is no way to stop that without completely withdrawing from society.

That right there, in my opinion, is beyond wrong.

I've never had a credit card in my life, but I do have a credit rating.

For “random websites” there are laws around cookie approvals.

For emails, you can’t drop tracking inside that can follow you around, at best you can determine an email was opened (think certified mail, for an IRL analog)

If you don’t want your friends sharing your contact info that seems like a problem between you and your friends. Sharing contact info without direct consent is not a new problem in the internet age. That’s been happening forever.

Oh hey, the "growth consultant" thinks we shouldn't have privacy. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it.

Aside from growth consultants, importance of privacy will be lost on a large and critical subset of engineers. This is why a huge blame goes on academics who train wave upon wave of new engineers with pathetic levels of ethical training.

this is true in a non malicious way and has basically gone berserk in the realm of complicity

This is an ad hominem. He's making a fair point, attacking him personally doesn't improve the conversation.

It is an ad hominem, I agree, but the opinion stated by GP is clearly dictated by their past career and experience. Actually seeing the ad-hominem made me check the GP profile.

Sure, pointing out a bias is fair, but it needs to be followed with an actual refutation of the idea presented. Just saying "you're wrong because of who you are" doesn't add much.

Better than being a self-important navel-gazing privacy nerd.

And there you went, down to the same stupidity level.

> You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result.

Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now.

You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself).

But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.

'...You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do...'

Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed

Disagree strongly. You’re ignoring the disproportionate power that tracking companies have compared to citizens. Is it really a free market if every single website you visit has the same tracking code built in?

As is always the case, rights are there to protect the weak from the powerful.

Sure, now let me know how that works when you have massive corporations, controlling products that you can't really move completely away from because there is simply no competition, or they also serve (and get revenue from) part of the competition?

My choices are to simply completely disregard a huge chunk of the market, like messengers, I would have to communicate with my family on the other side of the world through some app that my parents or older family members would not use, I would have to train them because the massive corporations bought out all the competition, so I either suffer a massive pain in the ass on every corner of my life or I have to surrender my data. Because I have no other choice: it's my data or death through a thousand cuts over my life due to all the inconveniences when these corps sprawl over more and more markets with their unlimited cash machine coming from the crops of data from all people they sell profiles about.

Either give me regulations to never allow monopolies to ever hint at appearing in a free market or give me regulations about how well my personal data, something that tells a lot about me as a living person, will be treated, marketed, etc. It's a resource being extracted from me, so why the fuck can the free market bleed me out if they are also going to inconvenience my life by taking more and more market share?

The free market is an illusion, it's just an ideology. Not too dissimilar from believing in real communism.

Sure, but then that opens up a lot of questions about "is this actually a free market?"

It certainly makes sense in a space that is one - if you don't want to be tracked by e.g. an online newspaper, there are certainly plenty of alternative offerings on the market. But what if Comcast wanted to track you? Depending on where you live you may not have the choice not to do business with them, which means your desire not to be tracked gets steamrolled by your only available option - you're forced to accept tracking or be denied access to the internet.

That is a reasonable concern. Perhaps utilities, or other oligopolies, should have different rules.

That's assuming a maximally unregulated market is an ideal we're striving for, which isn't the case - at least not in the EU, and that is a good thing.

An unregulated market cannot be a free market.

For long at least and this is the reason why GP's assumption is doubly wrong.

> This is how a free market works.

Said free market tends to create weird customs that are not necessarily good for the most of us.

Someone once said radiation has healing properties and last radioactive items for healing appeared, oh well, on Amazon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

and before that, there's a museum of the same stuff

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa...

Note that I am not saying the regulator can not or will not abuse their rights. This is a big issue and I'm not competent enough to say where I'm leaning there.

I only disagree with "free market will lead to the best solution by itself".

> a right to know if a given company wants

> right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking

I don't get how looking at this as rights and intent does any good.

- Getting legalistic about intent immediately makes for more arguing.

- Asking for a right to know about someone's "intent to block" is... odd, and seems to set the stage for all sorts of messy shenanigans. How is that supposed to work, exactly? If you want to go this way, contracts seem so much more straightforward.

- If you're concerned with a "free market", trying to layer on all sorts of external rules about 'rights to know' just doesn't work. Asymmetric information is the nature of the market, and here we are, right now. If you want "freedom" in that sense of the word, be happy, you've arrived.

You’re making this unnecessarily complicated and I can’t tell if it is in bad faith or not.

- users should know of they are going to be tracked (part of the value exchange)

- companies should know if ads/tracking are going to be blocked (part of the value exchange)

Both parties should then be able to decide how to proceed accordingly.

Your statements lack agents, which contributes to the feeling that they are intentionally slippery.

Who is responsible for telling users they are going to be tracked? Further more, whose responsibility is it to ensure the user understands the implications of that tracking? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that tracking is not abused?

Secondly, who is responsible for telling companies that their ads/tracking are going to be blocked? The user? If so, why? I don’t care one bit about the business model of the websites I visit. As a user, my attention has been manipulated for years, my behavioral data has been harvested, resold, abused… to be totally blunt, I don’t trust a single one of you any further than I can throw you. If you go under, I’ll find something else that meets my needs. I’ve already had to do that dozens of times in my life because it’s not like companies have any commitment to me as a customer in the first place. I’m just a big ol’ bag of potential sales determined through my data.

You’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical of these simplified terms, wherein you appear to propose me and giant mega corporations, who I can’t see, can’t sue, and don’t even know I’m doing business with, are on a level playing field. The information asymmetry is and lack of equal recourse are a bit hard to overcome in your simplified world.

As a notion user I’m now concerned with the data that application is harvesting from me, given the stance on privacy you gave here.

Cool, bro.

I'm trying to take what you're saying seriously, and think through how it would work in the real world.

You're just repeating that you think some things "should" be the case. If they were, how would that work, how could it go wrong, what are the costs and benefits relative to other ways of achieving the same goals?

Policy is more than random assertions that feel right.

"The free market" is demonstrably a sham. It, like communism, is good in theory, but broken by human behaviour.

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