This was wrong on day 1, and it's wrong today. You know goddamn well that users don't know the implication of Google tracking their purchases.
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Separately, would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
This is how they keep Gmail free.
Presumably, you've known that Google uses all the data it keeps about you for marketing purposes? Heck, even my grandmother knows this.
If you want to (supposedly) bypass this surveillance, look at purchasing a local GSuite for your use. Or look for something non-Google entirely.
Complaining about companies will change nothing as long as there are people using them. Whenever the privacy topic comes up a few people come back with I have nothing to hide, or it's too difficult to figure out which is good, or my life is busy and I can't focus on that, or it's all fucked might as well just install cameras in my shower. All this means is that: a lot of people don't care or are too nihilistic to want to change, and neither of these groups deserves sympathy.
If you still use Gmail, you don't get to complain that they scan your email, or use it to sell you stuff, etc... If you use Alexa you don't get to complaint that they might be using other trigger words to register interest, or that your parrot ordered something by mistake. These companies have been making their position on all of this extremely well understood over the last freaking decade.
If you're in a position to let someone who's genuinely not aware of this and still uses Google, you can maybe consider telling them, if they change then that's a net positive on the side of humanity, if they don't then it's on them.
The consequences are clear to US but we know what to care about, there are teenagers on Facebook, Instagram, anbd Google services. Do you really think they understood the implications of lifelong digital surveillance? Not to mention the thousands of smaller tracking and advertising companies that bottom-feed in the background without so much as a peep. Your behavior lives in the databases of companies you've never heard of before, and they sell it for pennies such is their value of your privacy.
You probably consented to Facebook having access to your photographs in order to do the business you expected them to do with it, such as show it to others in your friends group. Did you anticipate them using your face in advertisements? Did you expect them to run ML algorithms on them in order to suck out advertising interests, did you anticipate the use of your data to form cohorts that allow you to be advertised at by companies you've never heard of?
Depending on when you signed up, you couldn't have, because half of these things didn't even exist when many of us gave them consent. Now think of the billions of users these companies have that don't even know what the word cohort means, and your position is essentially that well they don't know they should be mad, so it's fine to exploit them.
- want the convenience - are not willing to pay for it - and have gone out of your way to avoid doing your research on how this thing works
== it's on you
but i'm not saying this to blame people really, i want people who are in this position to take responsibility for themselves and look up wtf is (for example) google doing and how is it free, then choose if they're ok with that (and stop complaining) or are not (and quit it). Enough people leaving Gmail will absolutely make a dent in how Google thinks. I'm optimistic about this. More people are waking up to the technological-slavery we're living in.
Because it's subsidized by their massive advertising business? They don't need to be this invasive to keep that up.
And they track paying customers too.
It's why in this circumstance I am pro regulation on the adtech industry, as I feel it is the only way to protect people who don't see the dangers. Similar to how regulation is the only way we get ethical food production at such a large scale. When systems get too big, past regular human scale and on to conglomerate scale, it's hard for the average person to see and understand the whole system and its harmful factors.
Thanks for the considered reply by the way.
I don't think that's fair. These systems are extremely complex. I work in the user privacy space for a company you've heard of, and I can't say that people don't care. I think they don't understand. They don't understand that these companies have PhD educated ML data scientist getting paid outrageous salaries mine your behavior and influence it. I will never, ever blame the user for being exploited. I will always blame the people who continue to work on these systems, because these systems are evil.
What I think is a fallacy is that _any_ of us even understands exactly what that means. The data science crap is (from what I hear from people in the industry) is mostly hype.
> I will never, ever blame the user for being exploited.
It's not exactly exploitation if the user is aware of what's happening and change causes them only inconvenience. People don't even turn off GPS on their phone even though they only actively use positioning like once a week just to avoid the inconvenience of having to go to privacy settings and turn it on/off, basically they'd rather be tracked the whole time just to save 3 seconds. If you do this you're not being exploited, you're willingly accepting this transaction. It's their loss.
The thing that every single person can see is that these companies don't have the customer's interest primarily in mind. Google is not giving free stuff because they're generous (and they shouldn't be, people should understand that companies exist to make money by "supposedly" providing value). Their standard position is hypocritical. Amazon argues for higher min wage not because they care about welfare, but because they want to prevent competition from even a 1% chance of gaining a tiny share in some market, as long as min wage can only be paid by Amazon and not some random small business, they're winning.
Our problem is not that companies are doing any of this. It's that when EA did that whole gambling/surprise-box crap, people complained and complained for months, but a lot of those same people STILL played the same stuff and bought stuff from the company. This leads to the conclusion that people don't want anything to be different, but they like to complain and have moral high standing.
I've tried to talk about privacy with many people, but very few people think about things like that. They don't even know what things like "server" mean. Even if they have a vague awareness that companies are conspiring against them, they give up because they have been told that "'They' already have all my data so there is nothing I can do."
> Even if they have a vague awareness that companies are conspiring against them, they give up because they have been told that "'They' already have all my data so there is nothing I can do."
Yeah like I said, it's a nihilistic attitude. For example saying that more countries should have nuclear weapons just because around 9 have it already is cannot be an argument. 10 countries having them is more dangerous than 9.
And by the same rational, if Google already owns you, it doesn't mean that you it's ok to sign your soul away to TikTok now!
This is the second most common reaction I get when I talk about these issues with laypeople.
The most common reaction I get is that they just don't believe me.
It isn't just limited to non-tech people. Even many programmers even aren't aware of it. They know how to code, but they don't understand the larger systems that they are a part of.