Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled used to be convincing the world the devil doesn't exists. Now, his greatest trick is to convince the world that it's okay that he exists and all of his schemeing done by his minions are perfectly fine

Netflix is a paid subscription service that does not show you ads, yet they have just as strong of an incentive to keep you on their platform as much as possible so you don't go to a competitor. This is simply the nature of online services -- a better online service keeps you on there longer, and in a world of significant online competition, everyone is trying to suck you in.

Recently, a woman got an abortion and part of what the prosecution used against her was data collected from facebook.

With google's tracking, is it not unlikely that a government body could subpoena them for search histories? (which, they do already) to look for questions like "has this individual asked about abortions recently?"

Perhaps you view that as moral, but what about other things a totalitarian government might want to control? What about China trying to find the identities of people protesting them? Is it not unlikely that they might have search history data betraying that they are a protestor or likely protestor?

But then there is the question of why they even need that data in the first place. You argue "how else would they make money?" and I'd argue "well, ads?". The reason, the real reason, google collects this data isn't because they have to, it's because it's more profitable if ads are better targeted and more customized per individual. Google would certainly take a profit hit if they stopped the data tracking, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still be one of the biggest and best places to advertise on the internet. They'd simply be less profitable.

Put simply, it enables massive power inequalities that threaten to be permanent, if they aren't already. Several living examples:

* Black advocates have already raised attention to pre-emptive tracking mixed with AI to "anticipate" crimes committed by "at risk" individuals (read, racial profiling) when this goes against everything that the Constitution stands for re: presuming innocence.

* The recent controversies with Roe that another sibling comment is a textbook example about how information mined from menstrual apps or location services can be used to criminalize women seeking an abortion.

* On a similar tangent, there was a case early on in adtech's history when a young woman who was pregnant and hiding it from the people she lived with got found out because ads about baby supplies were shown to them (after she had searched up the items). People's living situations can be volatile and this could have been fatal for her if they were sufficiently abusive enough.

* Health/Medical apps tend to be especially obscene with tracking - collecting data on the most medically vulnerable (eg disabled people) and letting that data be resold often times means locking them to a sub-standard life because jobs and insurance can and will discriminate in obvious and subtle ways if they know about certain medical conditions, if they can get away with it.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Material - During the bombings in Austin, Google provided a blanket location/data dump to the police of everyone with Google accs within x-miles of the event. That data, regardless of linked to the bombing in the end, is kept by Austin PD and likely the FBI, forever. You have given the police a warrantless log of citizens basically based on “well they use Google and live in Austin.”

If you don’t see the glaring material issues, that explains a lot about why Google is Google.

Not to mention the completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent. I bet that most ppl twenty years ago, if asked if they would consent to giving an exact timeline of their activities to third parties in exchange to free entertainment would probably not readily agree. Big tech lied to consumers until it normalized the new surveillance status que, that's immoral and wrong, even if it's extremely profitable.

Your individualistic perspective, where you dismiss any harms if they do not relate to you personally, is very short sighted. Authoritarianism can creep up on you, first it targets the weekest, and before you know it, it could be you. Surveillance tech is a tool for authoritarianism, apart from it's inherent immorality because of how it was hidden from the consumer, it is corrupting democracies and gives them a very authoritarian tint.

Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders.

Big tech has significantly aided in the delivery of these harmful messages, and seeks to use personalized information to find the channels, times, and context that are _most_ effective at undermining the will and agency of the viewers.

Are there models where an information / recommendation broker could justifiably collect what would otherwise be concerning amounts of personal information? Potentially, if it were using that information to compute and facilitate the maximal individually beneficial outcomes of each individual user, but that's not what's happening here. Right now, we're building a system that would happily have people die painfully and preventably at 40 after living miserable lives because the economic returns of that model maximize the returns on advertisers / delivery networks.

So you seem to be referring to Google (annual revenue ~$250 billion.)

But Wikipedia (annual revenue $160 million) also qualifies.

Also The Library of Congress (annual budget $800 million.)

Another interesting data point is the USPS $77 billion annual revenue.

So there are definitely proven business models that provide services basically at-cost and without all the negative externalities. And Wikipedia's budget is so small that even relatively poor countries could fund it with less than 1/5th of their education budget. (e.g. Uganda's education budget in 2020 was roughly $700 million.) And that would let them pay globally competitive salaries to hire software engineers to build indexes that are actually optimized first and foremost for knowledge that's focused on their culture rather than the US.

Yes, I do, at least for the very large majority of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer. As problematic as that relationship may be, it does set up a wall such that (a) the cost to me, personally, is completely standardized; and (b) there's a large gap between my individual online identity and my identity as an employee within my organization.

Further, health insurance is just about the most heavily-regulated industry in the universe. Aside from the trivial assertion that it's absurd to refer to this industry as "capitalism" because it's so far from a free market, the fact is that the insurance companies are watched very closely, and I think it's improbable that they could have a setup like this without anyone having learned about it.

Finally, again for the majority who are covered through their employer, most of these policies are self-insured. That is, it's the employer themselves who pays the charges, and they're also paying the insurance company to administer the program, but not to shoulder any risks. The more the insurance company has to spend on that administration, the less likely they're going to be hired. To make such a trade-off there would need to be a pretty clear demonstration to the employer that more money is being saved in medical payments than is being spent on that additional administration - and again, that's consistent with my argument in the prior paragraph.

If this is the typical quality of your privacy argumentation then it should be no surprise that your children don't buy your arguments.

If you can't mount a coherent argument that doesn't assume the conclusion, you should consider the possibility that the conclusion simply isn't true.

No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot of data is sound. The part that's missing is why is this bad.

No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in their own argue why this data collection is bad. This argument as to why is what's missing, and until nominal privacy advocates start putting together coherent arguments as to why it's bad (and, importantly, why these costs do not merit the benefits), they're not making forward progress.

Such as?

I might add the initial discussion was about Google tracking ads but I'm curious to hear what you have to say about these down market trackers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/18/google-...

The SHA-1 thing is a complete non-sequitur, but since you asked, small amounts of data run through unsalted SHA-1 can be brute-forced very easily if someone cared find out where you are.

When you think of it like this you’ll stop asking questions like “what would they do with this piece of data?” Because the answer is always that it is a drop in a giant ocean of machine learning data.

From https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq:

> The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection ... the Google Fonts API does not set or log cookies ... resource-specific domains...don't contain any credentials ... IP addresses are not logged.

From https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/terms

> Google Hosted Libraries uses resource-specific domains... Requests unauthenticated ... Google Hosted Libraries only uses cookies as necessary for security and to prevent abuse ... Our systems are designed to remove HTTP referer information before logging

But analytics is a totally different story. https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

> when you visit a website that uses...Google Analytics...your web browser automatically sends certain information to Google. This includes the URL of the page you’re visiting and your IP address. We may also set cookies on your browser or read cookies that are already there. Apps that use Google advertising services also share information with Google, such as the name of the app and a unique identifier for advertising > Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to ... personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps

So Google's policies do let them use 3rd party Google Analytics data to target ads.

I never stated my ethics. I was only echoing the comment above, the statement of their ethics.

Working your way through life requires heuristics and stereotypes based on our personal experience.

If you have to think about which muscle to move and when while walking you'll fall down.

If you want to sacrifice your ability to move quickly through the world to dogmatism, knock yourself out. I'm going to stick with fluency and real time behaviour that allows me to act in the world in a timely matter.

AFAIK the image selection is only part of determining you’re a human, the other part is tracking your mouse movement and so to see if you’re real.