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Comment by kylevedder | Hacker News Reader

This a bit orthogonal so I put it in a separate comment, but let me be even more aggressive and do a bit of offense:

I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having this information, rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful.

But attacking ads and ad tracking, the revenue model of the free web, is materially harmful. Imagine how much worse the world would be if Google search weren't free -- even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge (not to mention how much worse the user experience would be to quickly Google something). Humanity collectively would be very non trivially worse off.

Seriously, what other business model besides tracked ads can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, let alone power growth, at companies providing free services like Google Search, Maps, etc, that don't have such grossly negative externalities like severely curtailing human development and don't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of people who are prima facie annoyed by a company using the interactions with their free service to make money?

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So let me bring up some of the exceptions I can think of.

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.

Are you sure the desire not to be imprisoned or killed isn't aesthetic?

So truuuuu, tech companies are imprisoning people or killing them, not governments.

At an object level, "not having XYZ actions occur from the government" is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving); it's absurd to complain about tech companies when you're actually upset with the government. This does doubly so when the primary threat to the ads tracking business model in the West is government legislation produced by elected representatives.

At a meta level, this is just a list of grievances. You've not suggested a workable alternative business model that, on balance, provides more net good. It's possible that all your complaints about tracking ads are legitimate and it's still the best business model for providing the sort of massively positive societal value Google search provides.

> is a problem with the government, not any tech company. You almost certainly live in a western style democracy, and so you possess mechanisms to modify the government behavior (if you don't, I suggest moving)

Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" as one of their issues. I mean, come on. This is a niche issue that has little public awareness. To suggest "Oh, you just need to vote better" is simply laughable. I (and I'm guessing most people) don't live in a government where you can simply vote in new laws or regulations, we vote for candidates and whether or not those candidates care about privacy rights is a crap shoot. Most people don't have a cursory understanding of how data tracking works.

This is a google problem. They don't have regulations pushing them to track their users in a way that makes their data easily accessible and consumable by government agencies. There aren't regulations out there forcing it. This is made evident by Apple's run ins with the FBI because their encryption wasn't crackable.

And frankly, while this is an issue, there are so many other issues I care about politically that a candidate running on the "limit google tracking" platform wouldn't have enough to win my vote. It's important, but so are so many other issues of the day.

> You've not suggested a workable alternative business model that, on balance, provides more net good.

More net good? Or more profit for google? These are not the same things.

I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model, ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular throughout the internet right up until google took things over with doubleclick.

Again, this is not a business model that will be as profitable, but you are conflating "good" with "profit".

And as a counter example, duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy.

>Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies"

Again, your list of complaints revolved about the government getting their hands on all this data and using it for purposes you don't like. If you're upset about that, there's plenty of people interested in civil rights.

But if digital privacy is such a niche issue, how come Europe and the United States have GDPR?

>This is a Google issue... ...the FBI...

Again, you're upset with the behavior of the FBI, not Google. Vote for people who restrict the FBI's ability to request this data instead of getting mad at the existence of tracking ad data.

>I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model, ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular throughout the internet right up until google took things over with doubleclick.

And the fact that Google captures information about what sites you've been to in order to make ad auctions more efficient is so odious to you that you want to move everyone back in time to a demonstratively less efficient business model which hurts ad buyers (other businesses) at least as much as it does Google? You must know your proposed business model isn't nearly as good, but you've yet to articulate what exactly we're getting for it that makes the cost worth it.

>duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.)

> DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.)

If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam sites with vapid auto content.

Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to remove the doping to see how he really fares against the others.

>If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO

This is just nonsense. If there were no ads, hyperoptimized SEO would only be more important because it's the only way for you as a web admin to surface your content in people's searches.

Okay, and that's going to benefit blogspam and auto generated content how exactly? That's the SEO that people complain about. Not being able to search for reviews for products because the results are all spammy "BEST VACUUM IN 2022" type results. Googling tech support questions leads you to auto generated mirror sites that only exist to scam you into viewing ads. etc. etc.

Anyway, you conveniently ignored the rest of the post.

> If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse ...

You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly still get good results from google.

There are dozens if not hundreds of discussions here in HN where people complain about exactly the opposite.

Google search results have become worse and worse in recent years, mostly except for search queries that involve finding buyable products anyway.

Many other searches where the goal is to simply find a text containing the search terms in a common context (simple retrieval of information) have become consistently worse, is my impression. The results for these searches are typically littered with non sense sites that contain ads for related products and random collections of key words.

> You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly still get good results from google

Add me to that list. Google results are invariably superior every time I've tried out alternatives. I wish it weren't so, as there's still a lot of room for improvement with Google but they have such a monopoly they're unlikely to invest heavily in further advances if there's any risk it reduces their ad revenue.

Do you have some specific examples where an alternative web search returned better results than Google?

My point wasn't about google results possibly being superior to other search engine results. But about them having become worse and diluted by SEOed sites that sell something over time.

"Good" isn't a very high standard! But fair enough.

I've never seen such a concise and well-articulated statement of this position. Thank you for presenting it! I instinctively disagree with it, but I can't actually provide a coherent and convincing counter-argument, which is probably a sign that I need to think more on it. Thank you for that prompt.

The best counter-argument I can think of is:

> the claim that only Google (or, "only organizations large enough to require ads as revenue support") can provide these services is false - Open Source solutions (like OpenStreetMap, etc.) provide "good-enough" value. That is, the drop in value from "premium shiny BigTech solution" to "less-fully-featured Open Source privacy-respecting solution" is smaller than the gain in value from the associated privacy-aesthetics.

That's a subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis (is Google Maps more socially valuable than Google Drive?), and won't be true for everyone - perhaps, not many people.

EDIT: for a more fully-described alternative business model - https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

A lot of AV companies bootstrapped their maps off of OpenStreetMaps -- it's great anything is free, but they kind of suck. The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info.

> The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info.

This is a perfect example of the "subjective statement that applies on a case-by-case basis" that I was referring to.

There's a free market of platforms without subpoena power, and people time and time again choose the free platforms powered by ads. I'm in the overwhelming majority with my statement when you look at people's revealed preferences.

Right - as I acknowledged by saying "[this] won't be true for everyone - perhaps, not many people"

Putting this in a sibling comment because it's tangential to my more-relevant response about an alternative business model.

---

The claim that citizens of western-style democracies have mechanisms to modify government behaviour is technically true, but meaningless. The average Western citizen has more chance of becoming an Astronaut or solving a Millenium problem than they do of effecting real govenmental change without access to extraordinary social capital or Super-PAC-level donations. Especially given that most western-style democracies' mechanisms consist of "pick which of these two broad bundles of choices you want to support" (as cogman10 pointed out, "the candidate who is opposed to data-tracking" does not really exist as a viable option; and even if they did, they would need to have a broad platform of popular positions, not just that one) - so if the option you want is not offered, you not only need to change voting behaviour to support it, you first need to create that option out of whole cloth.

And you think that complaining about tech companies, companies owned by share holders who have no particular obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders, is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want?

Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation, something which we've already seen occur with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US. It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those bills though, so I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.

> And you think that complaining about tech companies[...] is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want?

No, I don't. I was pointing out that your claim that individuals can effect political change is broadly incorrect. That doesn't imply that the alternative (direct petitioning of companies) is effective.

Attempting political change probably _is_ a more rational strategy than petitioning tech companies. As an individual, neither seems powerful.

> Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation

No disagreement here!

> I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.

To be clear, these are two separate claims. Privacy might or might not be a niche complaint - I feel that it is (given how little my non-technical friends care about it), but I'm purely working off anecdata, and I concede that GDPR (and the slew of other Privacy regulations following in its wake) are datapoints that contradict me. The other claim - that individuals are powerless to effect political change - remains undisproven to me. In particular, I reject the position that _individual_ privacy advocates were responsible for GDPR. It's large groups like the EFF (as a sibling commenter pointed out) that cause governments to take notice, not individuals.

I disagree vehemently as someone involved in transit and housing activism. The cause did, does, and probably will continue to feel hopeless. There are days I walk out of talking with others about issues or days where a Mayor walks back a commitment that punch you in the gut. But through organization and by looking back over the last 5 years of activism in my community/area, I can see the real work that's been done. (It helps that our work results in infrastructure changes, of course.)

As far as a candidate, trust me there are hungry junior political candidates all the time that are happy to take campaign donations and meet their constituents demands. The quickest way to become a popular, well-funded candidate is to represent a wealthy, grassroots cause with no representation. If you're concerned about this, contribute to the EFF, and maybe even consider joining them! Don't put your anger into online zealotry if you live in a democratic country, use that energy to petition the government for change.

> If you're concerned about this, contribute to the EFF

Doesn't this just prove my point? No individual can make a difference - only large organizations can.

The EFF is hardly a "large organization". But yes, some amount of organization is necessary for political change. Fundamentally, an individual in a democracy pays into a system and cannot change the entire system at their behest.

I'm a trillionaire who can hire maybe 10,001 minimum wage workers to follow you and the top 10,000 earners in the US around anywhere you go and record every single thing you do from a safe distance in public spaces (including stores, malls, church etc, looking in through your windows from the street). I'm not doing anything illegal, but you probably think it's creepy. How can I explain to you that it's not?

Earlier you said, tracking pays for free services you use but doesn't have a net negative effect on your life. How can you tell? And if you can tell, what's the problem with being informed of how often you're being tracked?

The problem with your argument is that the same mechanisms that are used by government for broad-reaching surveillance are also used for legitimate government purposes. These are things like subpoenas and warrants, which are impossible to eliminate completely while keeping a functional court system.

You could try to argue that we should make sure that these are narrow in scope (that's already the rule despite the current practice), but that doesn't eliminate the problem completely: someone can already subpoena Amazon for "recordings taken in kylevedder's house between 4/22/2022 and 6/22/2022" related to an investigation, and they will get them. Even if you are not the target of the investigation, but they have reason to believe that the target may have visited you during that time period. Such a subpoena has not been tried in civil court yet, but it will likely be allowed. In an alternative world where tech companies don't track you, these subpoenas wouldn't work.

Google, Amazon, and other data collectors have a principal-agent problem with respect to data about you: while you would likely fight a subpoena for your location data tooth and nail, they don't care so much. They will often give up the data, and they won't even tell you they did.

The alternative business models are ad support without tracking and subscriptions. Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. WolframAlpha is a search engine on a subscription model. Micro-subscriptions are already a thing (albeit invented/normalized after Google was invented), and it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products.

As far as this being bad for people, allowing companies to track you invasively is a little like not buying insurance. You won't care most of the time, but you may care a lot. Lots of people don't buy insurance, even though they should, because they severely underestimate tail risk. This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates (or single-payer healthcare), and car insurance mandates in some states all operate on this rationale. So should privacy legislation.

I don't see why you can't add guardrails to things like subpoenas -- it's not like they are allowed to engage in aggressive subpoenaing of non digital info without a due process procedure, just make the digital one more rigorous. The issue lies in the flawed execution of the current legal system, so fix that instead of taking a hatchet to big tech.

>Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you.

A very non trivial subset of their revenue is personalized ads, and I promise you they work pretty well; if you don't believe me I recommend taking a job on the ads team. This is a huge revenue hit, for a company that's consistently putting that money into product innovations as well as societally important moonshot projects, all in order to side step the issue of your concerns with the American justice system's subpoena process.

>it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products.

If you're a SWE you probably have coworkers raised in India. Ask them how likely they would have been able to afford such a subscription system and by extension how much worse their life would be if they didn't have access to Google. I would bet a substantial fraction of them would still be in India and not software engineers.

>This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates

We have healthcare mandates and social security because if a person has no money and is out in the street or gets health care and then can't pay, it's society's problem. If you get nailed by the government for doing something illegal due to invasive subpoenas, it's not only not society's problem, depending on your opinions on the role of the state this is a feature not a bug.

There are already guardrails in place on subpoenas. They are about as strong as they can be. That doesn't stop overreach, it doesn't stop corruption, and it doesn't stop people from being people when trying to get them and when granting them. The best way to stop abuses of a system is to remove the potential for abuse. Do you want to remove subpoena power from courts around the world? I don't - you kind of need it to prevent people from destroying and hiding evidence. The only thing that is left is helping people understand the harm that comes to their lives from giving intimate data up, and regulating its collection.

Also, privacy legislation does not need to "take a hatchet to big tech." It will just reduce profits for a few months while the ads team figures out how to work around it. I promise you they will do a really great job figuring it out. Some of the smartest people I know work on those ad models, and they will still be able to use things like location, web browser, and search query to find relevant ads.

Most of the people who can't afford a subscription fee (who, by the way, are not your Indian colleagues, who largely have come from rich or middle class families and can afford a subscription fee) are not worth serving ads to anyway. They don't have money to spend on stuff that you are advertising. I see no problem with offering a free tier with limited search capabilities, and a version with a subscription fee. Lots of SaaS does this. This is basically what Google does now with the ads: the high-value users (young rich people like the HN crowd) subsidize everyone else by having high ad impression prices.

By the way, I did work at G. I'm not convinced that personalization actually helps the bottom line at all for Amazon and Google search when you balance against the reduction in CTR due to latency (personalization prevents caching), and the added compute and engineering cost of personalization (since personalization prevents caching, you need a ton of additional servers and a lot of extra brains thinking about how to make them work). The idea of a search engine that produces personalized and highly specific search results feels like a local maximum to me in light of the costs and the research around CTR and web UX.

Unfortunately, that local maximum is currently so heavily entrenched in the market that it can strangle any competition. Google got its market share initially by having really fast search results that had the words in your query, and having no ads (and then later, a few clearly marked ads). This was in competition to web search providers that tried to offer personalized search results and highly relevant ads. Since then, they have become the thing that they proved was an inferior product, and they keep out upstart competitors through market power.

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

Two crucial details you omitted:

1. Facebook didn't just hand over the data. It was a court order. At no point had the data just randomly got collected in some dragnet. They got a targeted precise warrant from the court to obtain specific messages of a specific person. Unless you got a court warrant against you, I don't see a reason to worry about here. None of this is related to "data collection".

2. It was unencrypted messages where the defendant was conspiring with another person to perform an abortion past 23 weeks (aka 5mo+, which is illegal almost everywhere in the world), and then conceal the crime by burning (in a literal fire) the physical evidence. Mind you, abortions are totally legal up to 22 weeks in Nebraska. Meanwhile, EU has only 2 countries with limits up to 24 weeks, with the rest being 20 weeks or less[0].

Tldr: if you send an unencrypted message to your crime co-conspirator (where you are discussing specific details of your actual plan to commit a crime), and then get caught via other methods, don't be surprised when the court sends a legal order to obtain your unencrypted messages as evidence.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe

It is a lot easier to get a court order for something than you probably think. Dragnet versions of court orders also exist, such as geofence warrants. Also, that data is often sold packaged up and sold to third parties via data brokers. The FBI has been known to buy data from data brokers instead of getting it by court order.

Sure, those things might happen. None of those things happened in that Nebraska case though, so using it to as a specific example to support your claim feels a bit off.

Especially considering the fact that the original comment omitted some pretty crucial details that end up painting the overall situation in a very different light.

What happened in the Nebraska case was more subtly bad: if the government had to subpoena HER for her location data on that day, there would likely be no criminal conviction at all. The 5th amendment would be a valid excuse to avoid giving out the data. However, they only had to subpoena Facebook, whose data is not covered by 5th amendment protections, and who would like to maintain a friendly relationship with governments.

EDIT: This is generally called the principal-agent problem, and there are lots of rules around agent behavior when it traditionally applies (eg attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality).

Also, you should note that there are lots of crimes, and you probably commit a lot of them. If you have ever used someone else's WiFi without permission, that's one. If you carried a screwdriver or a sharpie into a store, that's a separate crime. The list goes on and on.

The fifth amendment provides a right not to testify against yourself. It has little to do with documents, whether they are in your possession or someone else's. The fourth amendment is the one that applies there. If her phone were recording location data locally (or if she were keeping a paper diary of her location, for that matter), the government could have obtained that information with a search warrant, and it would have been perfectly admissible.

What you're saying is true only if the data is unencrypted or not password-protected. If the data is encrypted, the government would have to crack it (which is not usually possible with decent encryption and anything short of the NSA breathing down your neck). They could not just ask you for the password.

The case law on compelled decryption is less clear-cut than you're describing. (Possible exceptions include: biometric, as opposed to password/passcode, encryption; and the government being able to prove that the defendant knows the password.) Moreover, even when the government can't obtain the decryption key from the defendant, cracking the encryption is not the only possibility. They could also seize the device while it is running, with the decryption key and/or decrypted data already in memory. That was done in the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, for example.

Also, this is entirely different from your original claim, because it has nothing to do with where the encrypted data is stored. If you store encrypted data in the cloud, then the fifth amendment provides you with the same degree of protection from disclosing the decryption key as it would for locally-stored encrypted data.

The attitude that if the government is using the data collected by tech companies to bypass constitutional limitation, then it's a problem with government and not big tech, is rather reductionist. This is a tangled system and you cannot completely separate the issues as you so simply claim. Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system. The citizen/consumer is massively under represented and underpowered to make changes to the system once it's in place.

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.

I wholesale reject the following:

1) Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system -- they're getting raked over the coals at dog and pony show anti trust hearings.

2) completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent -- you literally gave these websites this information, and there's legal privacy policies that no one reads describing how it's used. If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't give it to them.

3) Authoritarianism can creep up on you -- ok and? The fact that Google's ad auctions are more efficient isn't going to cause authoritarianism.

4) Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? -- lmao no

Upton Sinclair would be proud. Try using a smartphone today, which is becoming more and more required, without giving up PII.

- Our school district requires our kids to do business with Google, there is no way around around it without significant pain. They don't have another option.

- Last week my attempt at buying concert tickets was refused because I would not disclose my phone number and Ticketmaster no longer allows other options. A small thing but they add up.

- More and more restaurants won't accept cash.

- DMV is selling our information, ADP is selling our paycheck information.

The idea that we have "every choice in the matter" is already silly and getting falser by the day.

> If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't give it to them.

Did you hear about Facebook's shadow profiles?

1) The antitrust hearings are literally dog and pony shows. Nothing has come of them, except slightly increased lobbying spending by Google and Amazon.

2) Other people give it to them, not just you. I tried for years to keep my face off Facebook, and finally made a page to take control of my "shadow profile" because people kept putting it there. Companies often give it to them too, through data brokers.

3) Google's ad auction technology will make authoritarian government much more efficient, the same way IBM's census technology did in the 1930's and 1940's.

A significant quantity of the ad space is pernicious: The ads seeking to be displayed are explicitly intending to manipulate the viewer to change their cognitive orientation to the benefit of the buyer, with anywhere from callous disregard to outright contempt for the viewer's outcomes.

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.

> rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful

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.

The police asked for stuff and the company complied and now you're upset that the government has it, but somehow it's actually Google's fault? Pass laws so your government can't do things you don't like.

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

I don't work at Google anymore. Feel free to click on my profile to see what I'm up to these days.

Putting aside the business model side of it (I can't speak for that), I agree with you about pro-privacy arguments tend to be annoyingly insufficient on the material justification ... when I can think of plenty.

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.

> even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge

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.

Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.

You can have ads without tracking. I don't think anyone is against ads per se. People are against pervasive continuous tracking and wholesale sale of data to anyone.

>wholesale sale of data to anyone

You know Google doesn't do this, right? Besides being against their own terms of service (and outright illegal), they're economically incentivized not to; they use the data to make their ad auctions more efficient, an edge they would lose if they sold the raw data.

Google is big enough to not need to sell that data. Doesn't make it a right thing to do.

the data goes to the govt

I would love a model where the fees you pay anyhow for internet access go to support the servers you are visiting.

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