Contra Chrome [pdf]
contrachrome.com
contrachrome.com
I'm disappointed with a few things about it, though, because:
- It makes it sound like Scott McCloud did this, but he didn't
- It unfortunately includes a political viewpoint that is irrelevant to the message
- It omits context on a few points to make them sound worse than they are, which is completely unnecessary, because the message is devastating without them
When you're speaking truth about a powerful and deceptive entity, you have to be absolutely factual and focused, and this isn't quite there.
Scrap those sections and re-publish I'd say. If not, this is a lost cause, just more 'progressive' propaganda.
Apparently it is blocked due to being part of DOMAINTOOLS hotlist https://www.quad9.net/result?url=contrachrome.com
I just used the form to report a false positive.
I believe that you can use the "no malware blocking" settings in order to avoid occasional false positives like this one: https://www.quad9.net/service/service-addresses-and-features
There's more context in the introduction pages of the PDF, but the website skips them: https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
(Speaking only for myself)
We all love our shiny objects and the convenience they bring.
Yet, even if we stipulate Noble Intent on the part of the FANG companies, there is no way to halt nefarious usage by some future actor.
Do we invent some sort of agent layer that tries to let us use the internet while restoring a level of information control to the user?
I can envision some cloud proxy that degunks the traffic for me, but that seems like:
A) a lot of yak shaving that will never be smooth, and,
B) a solution that would never scale or generalize, even if workable for the individual.
Even if such an agent were turned into a business to support subscribers, the basic problem of leaky information still exists.
However, some of the "monolitic" nature of Google could be mitigated.
Leave behind all the peeking at user data and dark business models, and just do and sell what you're good at? Make hardware and software that users (and companies) can trust and build on? Products that are not tethered by the manufacturer for business strategic reasons? Thanks.
If not, perhaps there should be laws. Because if the market starts working against the interest of the consumer, then we have a problem.
From the elite's point of view, the function of big tech companies nowadays is to keep the consuming masses in check. It doesn't matter if this means not executing anti-cartel laws.
So yes, you would have to look at laws to "fix" this, but you will find out that there is no way you will be able to get it passed in a democracy because almost no one wants to have to pay for social media, a web browser, search engines or other such commodity software.
But that’s not been the deal since the mid ‘00s. The deal is “ads, plus we build a model of you and rent access to that model for anyone who’ll pay, allowing them to manipulate your politics and world-view”.
That’s the deal. But they just call it “ads”.
> but you will find out that there is no way you will be able to get it passed in a democracy because almost no one wants to have to pay for social media, a web browser, search engines or other such commodity software.
I suspect that people do care about their data, their privacy and such. But tech is so hard, the effects so distant and the public’s ability to affect change so minimal that people guve in to the privacy breach. That’s quite different from “not caring”.
I admit, this is a hunch.
What the point of paying, when even a retail copy of the most common commercial OS still has ads for frickin' Candy Crush in the start menu? Not to mention an amount of telemetry that dwarfs what's described in OP's comic by multiple orders of magnitude? The best software is for free these days, any paid support is completely voluntary. Commercial software should be treated as abusive spyware unless it can prove otherwise.
Still this extra expense turns away a huge number of customers :(
But of course an ad-supported "free tier" is an easy way to try a service with zero obligations, and it will remain popular. Also, if for me $10/mo is not a big deal, for other folks this may be not so. Those who can't pay with money pay with what they've got, with attention and privacy. They might like to pay with money, but sometimes can't afford that. Count all the ad-supported free services you likely use (e.g. Google search, Twitter, Facebook,..), and at the rate at $10/mo they'd add up to a noticeable sum.
That fact along with the average piece of consumer software having such low perceived value (try getting people to spend 99p on the app store) and consumer software has become this awful race to the bottom of lock-in and advertising. I suspect business software is much healthier for this reason.
Economic pressures are why we've arrived here.
The modern web is the surveillance web because the modern web is "an endpoint" for users (witch means a new mainframe dumb terminal, at a far higher price and complexity than the old ones) and someone else service, typically run on giants cloud datacenters.
To avoid that, and still have the modern level of life PLUS MANY MORE, we already have had a solution: the desktop computing. The first one on record the modern way AFAIK was the Xerox Star Office System, but even the older NLS (1968!!!) have networking, videoconferencing and screen sharing. YES, you read correctly. Dates are not wrong.
So what? So it's a real mess because since Xerox except for LispM and Plan 9 we do not have developed desktop computing anymore, so the old model might still be rediscovered, at least it still exists, but on actual iron, very badly designed even if far more powerful in mere horsepower terms, and with essentially no modern software. The last living vestige is Emacs, witch is VERY good but not enough evolved for actual end-users, so we need:
- public universities, paid enough by the government and government only, with a very effective separation from the private sector, to create a new old classic research not for short term business but for the society;
- enough years to write a modern desktop, which means around a decade because it's not just a matter of code, it's a matter to learn how classic systems works and design a new one, a thing most today devs do not know and have issue imaging, than time to develop it, to spread it etc.
The other option? Well... A small Canadian TV series (Continuum) recently gives a nice idea, perhaps mixed with a small French movie (Virtual Revolution) to see a more realistic one. Be prepared to a future where you will have to eat only if some IT giants gives food to you. Be prepared to live to work instead of working to live because yes, I'm not joking nor exaggerating, it's just a matter of observing the world today.
So, it might be tasteless, but agitation is a valid style to push ideas across for some people.
Did you look to the comic? Seems yes. Did you read it? Seems yes. So it pushed its ideas across. So, it was successful in a sense.
Welcome.
That word implies something was originally good and pure. Which seems an unusual take.
> I find it disgusting actually.
Why do you find it more disgusting than the behaviour it is calling out? I think there's a moral imperative to challenge bad behaviour and satire is an effective method.
Which parts are you disputing?
Leah Elliott
Contra Chrome
... a little down in the address bar:
"Remixed from Scott McCloud's Google Chrome Comic"
Next page: Again "Leah Elliott" and "Remixed from..." notice.
So the actual "remixer" isn't hiding or anything.
On the actual webpage, there's an "About" link, which is not hidden or anything either.
Discussions about adtech and privacy always have this kind of ultra-abstract feel to them, for that reason. Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete, specific harms due to better ad tech is nearly impossible, so the space gets ignored by all except middle class activist types who have to resort to ever more manipulative stunts (like this comic book "remix") to try and get attention, to convince people that this is what matters and not other issues.
Also, opposing advertising is kind of a luxury belief. It's reminiscent of the sort of champagne /r/antiwork socialists who earnestly ask, why do people have to work? These people would certainly blanche if suddenly asked to pay the full ad-free rates for all the services they enjoy, especially because the average person's internet experience is being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month by advertisers (I saw stats on this once, how much is being bid in the ad auctions on a per-person basis but you can also just work out crude averages from Google's revenue and guesstimated click traffic).
And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services, including those they maybe didn't even realize existed. Basically you'd need to replace broadcast brand-style ads with very specific "pull ads" where they're only seen by the people who need to see them. Which is ... exactly what search advertising is.
I don't really want to this sounds like a reductio ad absurdum but really, this is like saying that you don't need to have written down privacy or free speech rights in a country which is truly democratic because it has been impossible "Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete specific harms". Under your point of view the GDPR is a completely useless law as well, because it protects the user from a phantom menace.
> And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services, including those they maybe didn't even realize existed. Basically you'd need to replace broadcast brand-style ads with very specific "pull ads" where they're only seen by the people who need to see them. Which is ... exactly what search advertising is.
There is GIANT difference between advertising and tracking individuals en masse. I have no problem with billboard advertisement or passive one. I still don't like them and personally try to filter them out as much as possible (by paying for services directly or using adblockers) but I don't see them as a big moral issue. With tracking, it's a whole different story! Also, most of the good things that tracking can give users, could nowadays be done on the edge, local to the user device, without reporting it back to the central servers.
It isn't though. It's trivially easy to find people who suffered concrete harms from lack of free speech protections, because they usually end up in prison or exile. Consider what happened to Manning or Snowden. Although most people would agree that it makes sense for there to be limits on free speech for people in the military, nonetheless, they suffered badly for speaking out. Look at the fate of Chinese activists who speak out. Or for a non-government take, look at the lives being wrecked by cancel culture run amok.
> Under your point of view the GDPR is a completely useless law as well, because it protects the user from a phantom menace.
GDPR is in fact a useless law in my view and I've expressed that many times. Partly because it's far, far too vague to be a law at all let alone one with such high penalties attached. But mostly because again, nobody cares. When actual Europeans are polled on what matters to them, internet "privacy" (let's assume for a moment that GDPR actually creates this) doesn't appear anywhere in the list at all:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2553
"Europeans thought that the most important issues facing the EU at the moment of the survey were the environment and climate change (26%), rising prices, inflation, cost of living (24%) and immigration (22%). 41% of respondents mentioned prices, inflation, cost of living as one of the most important issues facing their country, before health (32%) and the economic situation (19%)."
Note: cost of living and rising prices are amongst their top concerns. What makes prices rise? Fining companies, imposing onerous regulation on them and preventing them from funding products via advertising.
> With tracking, it's a whole different story! Also, most of the good things that tracking can give users, could nowadays be done on the edge, local to the user device, without reporting it back to the central servers.
Again, "tracking" is a vague abstraction. There's no real harms being done here. Transient anonymous numbers that are linked to general categories of interest aren't tracking in the sense that a government agent following you down the street is, or even the NSA recording all your phone calls. The potential for abuse is just orders of magnitude lower, as evidence by the fact that you can't find people hurt by it. Compare to actual abusive tracking by governments, where people have been drone striked!
As for doing it all locally - maybe one day but ad fraud means you can't trust the client.
It works so well that we usually end up get ads for things we already bought and do not need anymore. Doh!
> These people would certainly blanche if suddenly asked to pay the full ad-free rates for all the services they enjoy, especially because the average person's internet experience is being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month by advertisers
Seeing that most of the web content is accessed through procrastination which is usually an addiction pattern. I tend to think forcing people to pay the real price would make them consider better if what they consume is really worth their time and money and would make everyone's life much better.
It is like modern transport. Most people use cars and plane for anything not because it is only faster, but because it is heavily subsidized to make them more affordable. In reality if we made people pay the real price for their transportation they would switch to more environment friendly alternative, better air, more liveable cities. Sure everything would be probably more expensive, less immediately accessible, but also immensely more enjoyable.
> And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services,
You can do search without advertising. Also mouth to mouth is a multimillenium old tech but but still works a lot better than what google has ever proposed.
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
I wonder how many folks that use DDG know this is taking place (or even bothered to read that far down the TOS).
When we founded https://you.com we read other search engines' TOS and decided to give users a choice: to have some personalization or be completely private. In private mode, we do not store any queries or anything else about the user. You can find details about our privacy policy here: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at...
Would love your feedback also.
Everytime I read something new about this subject I realize things are always worst than I though.
I really don't see why people keep using this thing...
It's really amazing!!!
Still the comic misses to mention the funny "I've got nothing to hide" argument
We may never be able to counter or reverse the effects of their relentless efforts to normalize corporate surveillance.
I'm sure you haven't ended up working for Meta just because you couldn't find a job at a less destructive company.
You have a leverage, you could refuse to participate in this, so why are you still writing code that harms people?
Also, i find it interesting to note how tech salaries have climbed in the past two decades, precisely as IT was more and more employed as a means of ruining peoples' lives (micro-management based on metrics, surveillance industry, IoT and other scams, centralized monopolies like Amazon, etc).
The price of keeping IT people complicit/quiet in the scheme has risen, but we as a privileged class of IT people should understand that we're precisely being paid for silence about the atrocities we help build. We are collaborators to an oppressive system, and if that's something that bothers you maybe you should consider alternatives.
Believer or not, there's a lot of wisdom in the Bible.
Including John 8:7
Not everyone shares your viewpoint and values. If you think everyone thinks Google and Meta, or even the idea of personalization as being harmful to society, you have found yourself in a bubble.
what harm to society? from where i’m standing they’re a huge net positive, they’ve enabled huge advances in society, they’ve enabled great collaboration across the whole planet and enabled us all to benefit from the one of the greatest inventions of humankind: the internet.
could they do better? sure. are they past their peak? maybe. but their past contributions are immense.
Ads help SMBs and larger ones so much. Sure there’s issues here and there but meta has probably pushed GDP forward pretty hard and enabled awesome amounts of product discovery, and this is just on the ads side. Think of everything people have learned on FB/IG. I’ve met so many valuable people.
There are far worse companies for the world than Google -- in the grand scheme of "harm done to humanity", Google pales in comparison to Exxon or BP or Phillip Morris or Lockheed-Martin or Dupont etc.
Facebook/Meta, that's potentially a separate discussion.
In any case if you feel like companies like Google are causing serious harm to the world then you need to have a deeper conversation about capitalism generally [which I encourage you to do]. Is it possible that the whole model of profit incentives as we have them now inevitably creates the things you're complaining about? Why attack engineers personally when in the end it's just "rational actors" acting like mice following the cheese?
PS totally aside from what harm Google might be doing to the world (again mild compared to the above named corporations), we probably should talk about what harm Google is doing to our industry.
I think Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Palantir, Comcast, Juul, Uber, any defense contractor, Nestle, Philip Morris, etc are at least arguably less ethical work than even Meta, and get less flak just by being behind slightly less visible to users.
While there's many legitimate serious criticisms of both Meta and Google, I think many of the concerns are misdirected or overexaggerated. The omnibox thing mentioned in the comic is a pretty concrete example to me of a false criticism: the Chrome feature is that it fetches query suggestions for what you've typed so far, which means it's going to be sending what you've typed to a server. Firefox also does exactly same thing and continuously sends what you are typing to Google or Bing to fetch query suggestions, and I don't see people writing this same comic about how Firefox is somehow evil to implement such a feature.
On android, try turning off search suggestions, it is a literal maze as depicted:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en&co=...
In firefox android it is a simple toggle button under settings->search.
I believe the linked documentation is account wide including going to google.com in Microsoft Edge and then typing into the search box on the website. It's not surprising to me that turning off behavior on across your account in any context can't be done in browser settings.
Sure, but it’s not just querying based on what you type in. It takes what you typed, adds it to the model of you built from your past searches and web history and tailors the results to match a mixture of
A) what it thinks today-you wants based on yesterday-you
B) what someone else is willing to pay to inset above the results of a)
It’s way less benign than you make out.
They also aggregate all the similar searches and correlate that over geography and demographics, and probably sell that. They can predict infection progress through a population from search terms.
Admittedly, that’s useful… but it also feels “underhand” in a way that simpler “product->fee->customer” relationships used to work.
I think most users genuinely do prefer to get personalized suggestions instead of irrelevant ones. Firefox is still doing this by default implies pretty strongly to me that the feature is a meaningful benefit to the product, and isn't just in Chrome as a covert data collection mechanism.
I don't believe that (b) is true for Google (paid placement in autocomplete). Google, for all it's flaws, does consistently mark Ads as Ads. I'm pretty sure smaller companies like Yelp and Uber are much more likely to be doing some "secretly paid placement" than Google (but I'd still presume any one of them is not).
You're probably right. I also muddled "search results" and "autocomplete suggestions".
Edit: your/you’re
> Perhaps by working there, people believe they can be that change?
We're talking about highly intelligent people, at least some of them understand that the code they maintain sometimes performs actions that are illegal. They could lift their fingers from the keyboard when they recognize that something is not right. They could choose to not be complicit.
The rationalisations and denials point strongly to the answer being: Because we're bad people.
I was hoping for better, but live and be disappointed, I guess.
I dealt with multi-containers, didn't like it, and then I found this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc.... There is no reason to go back to Chrom(e|ium) with this.