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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"Sign in".

This seems to be the future - search engines that require sign-in.

It’s just a back door to obtaining “consent” for tracking and to leverage other data about you for ads.

As much as I despise the tracking that happens, I don't see how this isn't a valid form of consent. Don't make a Google account and agree to Google's terms for making the account, or do and understand that consent has been provided.

Coerced consent for non-essential functions is illegal in many places, and that’s number is rapidly growing.

This sign-in button is coerced consent? You can choose not to sign in. What is the coercion?

> non-essential functions

Are you sure you're not talking about cookie consent laws? (The reason "non-essential" is a qualifier for cookies is that, e.g., a log in session will require the use of cookies but is also considered "essential".)

(Please also understand the appeal to authority in "is illegal in many places". That's aside from the point I bring up.)

A business duty to comply with the law is not a rhetorical appeal to authority, it is a fact.

Ask the accountant who wrote the check to the CNIL for the most recent cookie fine what they think.

Your reply suggests you're not totally familiar with what "appeal to authority" means. Your argument (so far) is indeed an appeal to authority. "It's true because so-and-so says."

I am very familiar with rhetoric, and logical fallacies. You apparently are not. I am not saying it is true because do and so says, I’m saying it is true because Google paid the CNIL a large fine and similar legislation is being drafted around the world.

> illegal in many places

> comply with the law

> Google paid the [authority] a large fine

> legislation is being drafted

This is the authority to which your argument appeals.

Appeal to authority as a logical fallacy or rhetorical weakness refers to saying something is true by virtue of an authority figure saying it.

Saying the king is wearing a crown is a statement of fact, not an appeal to authority. Saying Google paid a fine is a fact, not an appeal to authority.

This is where the confusion lies:

> Saying Google paid a fine is a fact

My point has been that Google believing they have consent for tracking usage of Bard is “valid”. Pointing to the fact that Google paid a fine to a particular legal authority as a reason for understanding that this consent is “not valid” is the appeal to authority.

(Please also consider that you have “shifted the goalposts”.)

Edit: I should apologize for the above parenthetical about shifting the goalposts. In retrospect this appears more as a regular misunderstanding. I should have tried to clarify earlier. It’s not an excuse but an explanation: I believe I was simply frustrated by the misunderstanding. I am sorry for that accusation.

It’s cool dude, no worries.

I’m reminded of being asked as a young child what I want to be when I grow up. No joke, I’d often say something like “I wanna be a lawyer because I like to argue.”

Examining it as an adult I recognize that I just enjoy navigating the logic of various arguments. Kind of a stereotypical philosopher; really, young me just didn’t know “philosopher” was a thing. Way more applicable.

I appreciate your understanding!

I’m a hacker at heart who exclusively works with lawyers on highly specific technical data protection issues, so yeah, same. :-)

>Please also understand the appeal to authority in "is illegal in many places".

What exactly do you think "appeal to authority" means in this context?

The argument being made is that Google’s consent for tracking asserted in their ToS is not “valid” (admittedly, my word) because a law (the authority) says it is so. This is ignoring that my argument just happens to disagree with this authority.

I think it’s because I said “valid” which might sound like valid “in terms of the law” (and that’s actually still debatable). I mean to say it more philosophically. Per my opinion, it’s “valid” as informed consent for new accounts. Basically, I’m arguing that these “many places” shouldn’t have made this form of consent legally invalid if that is indeed the case. (Of course, it gets hairier when considering existing accounts and unilateral changes to the ToS; I still don’t exactly think I am mistaken with my understanding but I seem to have expressed it poorly.)

Bot abuse is a huge problem for search engines and similar services. Modern scrapers are virtually impossible to detect and abusing publicly available endpoints for free compute is basically an industry today.

It's a real shame. Means everything goes behind a signup wall.

For reference, about 1% of the traffic I get on my site is probably human (20k quries/day). An attemted 2 million queries/day from confirmed bots.

Bot problems are dealt with via captchas.

The sign-in requirements are coming up because the era of cookie-based analytics is ending; iOS already blocks many by default, and a third of internet users have adblocking on anyway. Logged-in user activity is significantly easier to to track than cookie-based tracking was.

I would say that's wishful thinking. Using only captchas doesn't work anymore if you are specially targeted and also a reason why we are seeing nowadays a combination of sign-in/phone verification/captchas to combat the bot problematic.

Doesn't ChatGPT require sign-in as well?

I can understand sign in for ChatGPT to avoid DDOS of their servers by bots, but this is something Google should be able to handle

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