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Comment by eftychis | Hacker News Reader

My take: Ok so for the "crimes" that we do not currently like Google should not log to protect us. That is naive.

The article is naive. Now when a class of people is affected they realize the issue with Google collecting data or providing location history information (incorrect or not) to the authorities.

Google has a history of actively i) resetting opt out settings, ii) making location tracking de facto mandatory on android, iii) pushing for AMP (which pushes their ampanalytics), etc.

Time to actually push for privacy.

How about: "Hey Google, to protect people, stop tracking anything." (Which for Google would imply to stop existing per se.)

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It's naive, very naive. It's also required.

Google, like other industries, where build on the ideas that what they did was more or less harmless. As we learn more about what massive data collection entails, we also have to reconsider the laws surrounding it.

Google will never stop on their own, as you say that would mean that they'd stop existing. It's the same with oil or tobacco companies, and few would cry foul if Philip Morris would be forced to shutdown.

I no longer believe that tracking and data collection can be done safely and it's time to dismantle those business that rely on it. Give Google, and others, five to ten years to close down their data collection business and after that they can stop existing if they can't cope.

What power can we imagine will cause them to stop existing? What power can we imagine will compel them to stop collecting data?

It certainly won't be the law. The entire situation we're in right now is considering how data collection by Google assists the United States government in enforcing the law. The master's tools will not be used to tear down the master's house.

Comparing google to big tobacco is very flawed. Big tobacco has essentially one product, and that product is always harmful.

Google on the other hand has a variety of products. Even when it comes to their biggest product i.e. ads, they'd still make a shitton of money without tracking and storing everything in perpetuity. Would they make less? Very likely.

But they will not "stop existing", even if they were forced to stop all tracking tomorrow. They can still sell ads not based on the users tracking history, but based on other context that doesn't require a huge data store, but ephemeral information at most (e.g. "user is searching for term x RIGHT NOW, and has a German IP RIGHT NOW"). And of course they can still make money from the "play store tax", money from users of their APIs, cloud and services.

If we actually prohibited tracking now, far beyond what even the GDPR does, advertisers would still spend money, like they did in the print and television days as well. And google controlling a large part of the market already with an iron grip (search, youtube, android) would still come out ahead of the competition.

> Comparing google to big tobacco is very flawed

That actually a completely fair observation, this should only be targeted at the part of their business that does data collection. Google could do very well without their large scale tracking.

Tracking and data collection must bring in a significant amount though. It's a rather large liability and attack vector for lawmakers and critics. If it was just a few percent of overall profit, it would sense to just dump that business unit.

Generally the whole targeted ad business is a little weird. If it works so well as we led to believe, then way aren't there fewer ads. It seems reasonable to assume that a highly targeted ad would be more successful, but also more expensive to buy. You'd need few of them of reach your target customers and I as a consumer should see fewer ads. That's a little besides the point though.

so just to rephrase: "google should stop collecting data because it might be compelled by law to provide it to the government. the government should compel google to stop collecting that data"

More like Google will be/is compelled 100% by any random state court or not-a-court-but-cops-directly-because-we-decided-warrants-are-for-suckers to provide data (you don't need a warrant for "give me who you think was there" queries -- that is a different wtf). So Federal lawmakers should make it clear that Google (and any Google) should not be doing any of this.

Might as well use the whole branching of the government and make use of the checks and balances for mankind's good and welfare.

And if one needs more convincing I would point them to look at the whole 19th and 20th century history.

It'd be great if the code processing highly sensitive personal information were open source, which seems like a whole lot higher priority than the printer drivers that got Stallman hot and bothered in the 1970s. Holy crap did we miss his message over trivialities.

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