Hacker News Reader

Comment by kylemaxwell | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Google fanboi for years and defended them in the public square when they've been accused of nefariousness. But these revelations of intentionally ignoring users' privacy settings have shaken me. Maybe it's time to put them into the Facebook category, where I removed my account years ago.

View on HN

It's not so much that they are intentionally ignoring users privacy as they preferring the privacy settings their users have directly given them rather than those set in the browser. I've long been opted out from all of Google's ad tracking, on their site and elsewhere:

http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/ http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

Privacy is something that few of these companies truly respects. Does Google really respect it? Probably not as much as they'd like you to believe, but at least they are willing to discuss it and provide opt out solutions.

And before you know it, you will need to opt out of tracking of GoogleDrone[1]. The whole privacy controversies would go away if tracking is opt-in rather than opt-out.

[1] http://www.ww4report.com/node/10857

I'm not really happy with preferring their opt-out setting when I've already made an opt-out setting in my browser. I don't believe for a moment that Apple or Microsoft care about my privacy any more than Google does, but if I've made a choice and communicated that via browser settings, I expect information providers to respect that choice and not try to exploit the browser in an attempt to bypass my choice.

If you truly care about your privacy rather than simply making a political statement, use something like Ghostery (http://www.ghostery.com/). Even if some of the big companies care enough to respect a request like this, I assure you that the majority of tracking services will not.

If you are making a political statement, then that's fine, I agree that all companies, Google included, should do far better on privacy grounds than they already are.

Why not actually follow the P3P standard and then have a flag in the Ad preferences page to enable 3rd party cookies?

>...as they preferring the privacy settings their users have directly given them rather than those set in the browser.

That's extremely misleading. That's a default as well and not something that the user have "directly given them". I seriously doubt more than 0.1% of Google users have ever visited that page.

Don't just talk about doing it; do it. Use DuckDuckGo.com instead. It was founded by a fellow HNer.

Waiting for the inevitable DuckDuckBro spin-off

Maybe the world is neither black nor white.

Yes, but maybe there are other search engines that work well enough run by companies that aren't engaged in the business of selling out my identity.

I think you'll struggle to find one of those that is around for very long. Duck Duck Go is as close as we've come I'd say.

In fact, I've been using DDG for a week or so now and do like them.

"I've been a Google fanboi for years and defended them in the public square when they've been accused of nefariousness. But these revelations of intentionally ignoring users' privacy settings have shaken me. Maybe it's time to put them into the Facebook category, where I removed my account years ago."

Okay, wait. There's multiple problems here.

The first one is this: that you are only now objecting, and not upset at all about Google handing over dissidents to the Chinese govt to torture and/or kill.

Human fucking life fucking has no fucking value to you? Priorities???

Secondly, they haven't been accussed of nefariousness, they have been caught red-handed, bald faced lied about it in public, only back-pedalled when presented with irrefutable evidence, and then convicted in court. Now, you can try to spin that as "accused", but you're going to need to set the spin cycle longer than normal, because that doesn't wash (sic) with the rest of the world.

Lastly, the problem with replacing Google is finding a good replacement. Bing is useless. The only thing close to gmail for free email (and it's barely in the same ballpark) is yahoo.

Please don't make assumptions about what I've said in the past. I've been very vocal about their involvement in China, including emailing them, blogging, and telling everyone I know about it. However, since they changed their handling of China, I thought it wasn't relevant to this particular discussion.

I agree with your intensity, though perhaps not its specific mode of expression.

The first one is this: that you are only now objecting, and not upset at all about Google handing over dissidents to the Chinese govt to torture and/or kill. Human fucking life fucking has no fucking value to you? Priorities???

How is that different from Google/ISPs handling over persons of interest to any other government, including yours? Or you think what is allowed in that case shouldn't be allowed for China's case? Are dissidents of China better than dissidents of any other country, to deserve special treatment?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com