Hacker News Reader

Comment by cronaday | Hacker News Reader

This is very ethically dubious. Google is collecting raw URLs from Chrome users who turned on history syncing across their own devices, then reusing the data and funneling it through Stanford. No way Chrome users understand or approve of this.

The paper tries to justify its ethics with Google's privacy policy, which is laughable. There are so many papers about how meaningless privacy policies are. If Apple or Mozilla did anything remotely like this, Hacker News would riot.

Edit: I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but this post suddenly got a bunch of downvotes at the same time as defensive comments from a current Googler and recent ex-Googler. Then one of my responses below to a Chrome developer got flagged for no obvious reason. Hmm.

View on HN

Can you please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines? You did that here with your last paragraph, and worse at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197958.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Hi dang, I'm new here so I'd appreciate clarification.

Someone defending this privacy debacle on Hacker News is a Google employee on the Chrome team and was a business cofounder with the Stanford collaborator. That person not only failed to identify how very close they are to the topic, but also phrased their comment in a way that falsely represented distance from the topic. It seems to me essential for understanding their misleading comment to be aware of the factual context.

I thought I had phrased this factual correction in a way that was neutral and not a personal attack. My assumption was that the commenter may have violated Hacker News guidelines by being so misleading. What did I do wrong?

As for the downvotes, I see that I should have emailed you rather than adding a note in the comment. Nonetheless, could you see what's going on?

by being so misleading.

The commenter publicly identifies themselves in their HN profile and you're using that to attack them. It's completely backwards to say they've misrepresented anything. The essential thing is to assume good faith and not go on weird innuendo-laden witch-hunts.

It's a tough thing to balance, but generally, bringing in someone's personal details as ammunition in an internet argument is not ok on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). I'm not saying those are never relevant, but the default impact of doing this is to poison discussion so badly that the default bias has to be "don't do it". Certainly you should not be doing it as part of a flamewar post, which your comments in this thread have been. We want curious conversation here, not people cross examining each other.

I'm not disagreeing with you about the underlying issue—there's an argument to be made that the kind of "publishing" that Google/Chrome does here is is really a way of obscuring it from the majority of users, and so on. HN commenters are certainly welcome to make that kind of argument. But we need you to err on the side of not posting in the flamewar style. If I see a commenter posting in the flamewar style and then also bringing in someone's personal details as ammunition, it's no longer a tough-thing-to-balance, it's just out of line.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Google has written publicly about how this system works: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux/methodology/ https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#usages...

This includes only listing publicly discoverable pages, only including data from users who have turned on "Make searches and browsing better (Sends URLs of pages you visit to Google)", and only including pages that are visited by a minimum number of users.

> Google has written publicly about how this system works

If this is news to Hackers News, there is no way that regular Chrome users are aware of it. Saying something in a privacy policy or on a developer website just can't be enough for analyzing a person's URL data.

> This includes only listing publicly discoverable pages, only including data from users who have turned on "Make searches and browsing better (Sends URLs of pages you visit to Google)", and only including pages that are visited by a minimum number of users.

Since when does aggregating this type of data make it fair game? This is analyzing a person's URL data from their own devices. There has always been a big bright red line for browsers touching a user's browsing history. Google crossed that line.

Also, I just checked on a fresh Chrome install. The "Make searches and browsing better" option is enabled by default and buried in Chrome settings. How is that acceptable consent for analyzing a person's URL data?

> only including data from users who have turned on "Make searches and browsing better (Sends URLs of pages you visit to Google)"

One big problem there is that we don't know what percentage of users for whom "turned on" is a euphemism for "didn't notice."

If crux is what Google is willing to make public, it makes one wonder what else is collected and stored for their own use (i.e. their moat).

I’m not using Chrome on all my devices.

Does this setting apply to Android assistant?

"Users who have turned on" implies that they opted in. Is this behavior opt-in or opt-out?

1. They're not funneling it through Stanford. They're posting it publicly, but on BigQuery https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux/

2. Chrome prompts you to opt-out of metrics collection on install.

None of the reasons you've listed for this being ethically dubious are true.

This is ethically dubious: "Chrome prompts you to opt-out of metrics collection on install.".

Because the default should be "opted out by default, let the user opt-in if they so wish"

I very much agree with you. This type of data collection MUST be opt-in to be ethical, and in Chrome it’s enabled by default and buried. The VAST majority of users have no idea this is even happening. It is grossly unethical and it is obvious that it is so, but unsurprisingly folks at Google are happy to do things like this given their salaries.

Edit: I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist

That's not merely a good idea but also

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

There's also just not writing in the high-dudgeon flamewar style which helps with the downvotes.

Maybe your posts would get better votes if you made any effort at all to back up your claim on unethical behavior. You provided nothing.

re: Edit.

I've noticed similar behavior in HN voting. Down vote spikes but few if any comments in-line with the voting. Not sure if it's bots, human-based click farms, or too just don't understand that disagreement is not grounds for down voting.

Perhaps a bit of all three?

just don't understand that disagreement is not grounds for down voting.

It is perfectly fine on HN and always has been.

Nah. I see it differently.

The Guidelines are clear about why we're here and expectations. The emphasis is on discussion, learning and objectivity. Yes, disagreement is mentioned (i.e., allowed) but even that needs to be constructive, yes?

A down vote - with no discussion - well, frankly in the context of the Guidelines, is:

1) Not in the spirit of the guidelines; 2) Perhaps redundant to 1, but lazy; 3) At best, small-minded and childish;

If people want to pout about reading something they don't like, this isn't the place for them.

Yeah, I see who you are. And I'm ok w/ pushing back. That's what make HN what it is ;)

You see it differently but it's just not accurate, it's not in the guidelines super-explicitly so easy to miss.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22910444

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 and there are many many others

Yeah, I see who you are.

I'm literally a random scold on the internet, I just happen to be right about this.

I disagree.

I'm not going to explain why.

How does that feel? What value does it add? (Sweet FA, eh.)

You're right, you might be right. But that does make it right. I get zero satisfaction from context-less down votes. I don't do them. I ignore them when I get them (i.e., they have zero influence on my HN behavior). If I'm changing my mind over some lazy a-holes' click, I'm losing. Big time.

I can't imagine why anyone feels any differently. The reality is, there are pointless noise. There's not enough context to drive anything actionable for anybody.

But while I have your attention: how about a feature request: Karma points that consider the discussion below a top-parent comment.

> ” If Apple or Mozilla did anything remotely like this, Hacker News would riot.”

My perception is that, collectively, HN hates and criticizes Google much more than Apple and Mozilla. I mean, much more. This last sentence accusation sounded bizarre to me.

Just suggesting that prior browser and OS privacy blowups involving those companies have been over less worrisome things, not that those companies are subject to more or less criticism. Looking back on outraged discussions of Mozilla's telemetry is kinda quaint in comparison.

> My perception is that, collectively, HN hates and criticizes Google much more than Apple and Mozilla.

Not the entirety of HN. As I have more than once delicately pointed out[1], Mozilla is Google's bitch.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732539

> I mean, much more.

Because Google is a web advertisement company that dominates many large spheres: search, browsers (including standards committees), email, mobile (Android is 77% market share) etc. All are things that we've come to view as crucial to modern life.

And time and again they've shown that they only view that dominance as a funnel for ad revenue, data collection, and whatever benefits them at this particular moment.

> HN hates and criticizes Google much more than Apple and Mozilla.

That is mostly because Apple almost never does something like this, and Mozilla literally never does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com