Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I still don't, though I acknowledge perhaps Google has the greater capacity for harm; here's why.

Over time, Google absolutely has been in a position to abuse data, and to some extent it has done so -- but honestly, if you compare what they COULD do to what they END UP DOING, they're not doing so bad at all. They mostly self-correct relatively nicely.

Microsoft, on the other hand, clearly does the bare minimum. They've had to be dragged kicking and screaming into actually providing a modicum of safety after more-or-less setting the stage for garbage tech security practices.

View on HN

From my personal and limited view I agree. But to be honest, I don't trust neither, at all, probably forever. MS actively destroyed 1 decent thing I liked about them, their OS.

First they tried to make it better and actually succeeded over the years (anybody who went from Windows 95/98 into 2000/XP and realized MS can actually make stable usable modern OS would probably agree, 7 was their best OS for me). And then they went with telemetry on product that really shouldn't have any, in same vein BIOS or drivers shouldn't have any. And despite overall feedback they doubled down with it in 11. No sympathy nor morality there.

All of these companies are obviously totally untrustworthy and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is either incredibly naive, stupid or has an ulterior motive.

"Totally" is just unhelpful.

They all have ideas and incentives and motives, and the world hasn't yet collapsed. Yes, watch them carefully, but, e.g. I don't think the world is improved if we just annihilate Google and Microsoft.

NSLs and FISAs are insidious and powerful tools that the US Federal government utilizes against the populace.

Once the government sets about forcing requirements, those two tools ensure that the companies, organizations, or individuals, cannot speak to the requirements or that there was a discussion at all.

Never attribute to malice which can be easily attributed to stupidity. Secret courts, and secret squirrel government activities against its own populace are definitely stupid.

occams razor points to grift

sure there is some dodgy govt stuff going on, but tracking peoples activities and selling it on the open market is pure sleeze

Secret courts aren't an accident. "Whoops my hand slipped and I accidentally drafted thousands of pages of legislation!"

No, secret courts are deliberate and malicious. Hanlon's razor is for credulous fools.

What could do with your data to make more money that they aren’t?

Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away.

Google may be actively harmful/evil, but they aren’t stupid.

> What could do with your data to make more money that they aren’t?

Nice try Sundar Pichai.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/792/

Well, all bad practice will lose money only if such practices get public.

Ad targeting based on vector queries of your inbox.

Indexing and fingerprinting your browser history locally in Chrome, to generate a set of demographic and special-interest identifier tags, that are then attached to your Google account; where the special-interests are used by Google Ads to personalize the ad auctions, and the demos are used by Google Ads to price your CPMs.

But isn't that far better than what most competitors would do... Just upload all the data to a server and do ad-targeting there.

Most people don't want to see ads... But if they do see ads, they don't really care how it is decided which ones to show... Phase of the moon, random numbers, or the third word of every email in my gmail account are all equally fine in my eyes.

However, I do care about what other uses my data might be used for.

Therefore, googles solution of using all my private data, but with the opensource code running on my machine within my control, is actually perfect for both me and them.

Did you ask everybody before you came to that conclusion that they don't really care?

This is the biggest problem. If it's not a big deal, fine -- explain this clearly to everyone how it all works.

> locally in Chrome

Google is likely afraid of a similar backlash as what happened to Apple when they wanted to use local hashing of images.

They might consider it if they couldn’t basically do the same thing via upload data.

If you are not making a joke, I would like to point out to you and other readers that you are directly describing Google’s proposed stalking web standard they call FLoC https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

>Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away.

I'd say that doing so might drive some of their users (i.e., product) away, but would be a boon for their customers (i.e., advertisers).

And IIUC, they are already selling access to the information they glean from reading the contents of gmail accounts by using that data to "target" ads at gmail users. No, Google isn't literally selling the contents of email messages, but they are selling access to user information based on the content of those email messages.

Based on their behavior to this point, one can be pretty confident that Google/Alhpabet will do whatever they think will maximize revenue and profit, regardless of the impact that might have on their product (i.e., you)>

Yeah, I'm not too concerned with "make more money," but the thing we seem to have to actively beat back every few years is "give Google effective ownership and control of how the web operates" -- something that I think might not be horrible in the short term, but I believe 100% would bite us in the long term.

It doesn't matter if the companies abuse the data.

Any data they have is available to federal police without a warrant.

The federal police are absolutely capable and willing to abuse the data to violate human rights.

The out of control intelligence community in the USA are like the agents from The Matrix - they can subvert any otherwise-trustworthy participant in the system. This means none of the participants are trustworthy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com