So what if Google sends me targeted ads?
theprivacydad.com
theprivacydad.com
In my opinion data should be regarded as a liability by default.
We can't rely on a given corporation being benign, or not cooperating with a given regime forever.
When I was at Apple getting iCloud off the ground, we had to carve out exemptions for all client-server syncing to allow phone-mac sync specifically for Germany. Because they know what happens when the government can subpoena your data.
When we think about the future, this is the stuff of imagination, storytelling, and mathematical models. It's mental constructs, not something that actually happened.
Many examples used in privacy arguments are like that. If you instead look for things that actually happened, it's things like journalists, activists, doxing, crazy exes, and so on. And certainly if you're in a war, good opsec is important.
These are certainly things that happen, but it seems reasonable for many people to look at them and decide their own risk is low, compared to other disasters you could prepare for.
And, this war has been foretold for decades now.
Also, I don't think Google is the problem for vulnerable minorities, and it might be part of the solution, because they do have good security?
Using Google isn't a good idea is you think law enforcement might take an interest and get a warrant, though.
A future government - one that is very different from the one currently in power or that you ever imagined possible - could use that data against you with great effect.
A foreign government hostile to you could use that data against you with great effect.
An institution hostile to you could use that data against you with great effect.
A corporation hostile to you could use that data against you with great effect.
A stalker could use that data against you with great effect.
And so on.
Or, having your own govt take you out with a drone strike while on foreign soil.
These were individuals who intended on staying pseudonymous, operated something that was legal-but-disagreeable-to-the-public, but yet fell victim to a hack that spilled their identity. And in spite of that, journalists felt it ethical to use illegally obtained data in part to "out" them. Nobody to my knowledge called out the problems with this - or that this same ethically fraught tactic may one day be used by organised harassers and right-wing outlets to deanonymise people seeking abortion or gender-affirming care.
Here in the US, the First Amendment makes any legal remedy to this hard to achieve. Yet still, we could be doing far better than to passively condone the use of illegally obtained data in investigative journalism to highlight unpopular, perhaps even vile, but legal activities.
The article used Google Ads as an example. Let's say, god forbid, Google Ads suffers a breach, and it turns out they didn't anonymise the data used to build personalised ads at all. Any one of these organised harassment campaigns can pick out targets of their ire simply by what was recommended to them in ads.
It's probably a case for why we should have anonymous users accounts for those kind of services. I don't know how practical that is.
I don't use an ad blocker and there are certain sites that are annoying, but I think the biggest influence on me is that I avoid those websites. I don't notice the actual ads very often (other than as an annoyance) and I don't buy very much. What I buy seems more influenced by other things like Wirecutter reviews. Should I stop reading Wirecutter because they influence what I buy?
We buy quite a bit through Amazon. Their problems with dodgy vendors and counterfeits are well known, but we're skeptical. My wife returns things for minor flaws fairly often. It's possible we're subtly harmed by something we bought, but I see ads playing a very minor role in this, compared to product listings.
Another example of influence is restaurant reviews. My wife and I both look up nearby restaurants in Google Maps and this is nearly all the information we use to decide which restaurant to go to. (Sometimes she uses Yelp.) How are we harmed by this? Maybe there's some restaurant we missed, but I think we eat pretty well anyway. I don't think we are harmed by using Google for that.
Most privacy arguments seem to be theoretical and/or ideological, not practical. I'm sure you can think of some, and I can easily anticipate them. It's a common trope. But if it's not a practical argument, it's not going to be very convincing to me.
yet you claim that you move away from sites that merely annoy you with ads. I'm highly skeptical.
It's not that I don't see ads, but I do tend to prefer websites like Hacker News more than ad-driven websites. I do see ads on linked news sites.
If we needed more money, it seems like there are easier ways to get it than trying to get a better bargain for information about us? We could be more careful about spending. I could shop around more. There are games with credit card rewards that I don't really play. I could invest better.
At scale, ads do something, but what it is isn't very clear. Some people are convinced that ads do real harm but the evidence seems fairly shaky. There are lots of dodgy psychological theories out there.
Here's one dodgy theory (with little evidence behind it) about how ads might work:
https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
Also, how they work in general is different from whether they work in me. I think observing my own thoughts processes and behavior is better evidence than someone on the Internet telling me what they believe about ads.
Did you successfully name a brand? Then ads work.
This problem was bad enough that I installed Brave on my phone simply for the rootless adblocker. These redirects even came from reputable news websites like WaPo or NYT - they weren't confined to "literally who?" websites using "literally who?" ad networks.
Ever since then I've used an adblocker on both desktop and mobile simply for this reason. And I've recommended others install adblockers as well, because they may not be aware that it's not your operating system telling you you have malware, it's a website trying to get you to install malware.
If this problem has receded in recent years, I'd say, "Great!" and be a little more chill about it. But until then, I staunchly recommend ad blockers just as protection from malware redirects that Google et al seemed very unconcerned about or unable to deal with effectively.
For me, the bigger risk in the ad networks is the viral vector. It's way too easy to inject ads with viral outcomes into the ad networks, still. It's the same reason I disabled flash at home, when I found out I could get local filesystem access from some work projects. It's more about sanitation than anything else.
The fact that tracking has become wholy excessive is the other issue... when you start seeing ads for things mentioned only in voice conversation, it's creepy to say the least. And frankly, I'm done with it. uBlock origin, privacy guard, pihole all in place.
It can be quite difficult to tell the difference between spooky coincidences and actual targeted ads. My money is on spooky coincidences, but it's a problem that many people imagine otherwise, and there's no way to prove it one way or the other because modern technology is basically magic as far as most users are concerned.
As an experiment, start talking about needing baby supplies regularly, not in any other format (assuming you aren't and don't have one)... you might just be surprised about the outcome.
I've never used an ad blocker. I (generally) always "accept all cookies" from that European thing. I do use "incognito mode" sometimes -- but not often.
I've never gotten any malware or other things like that. I've never had someone show up at my door in a black coat. I personally think that most of the concerns people have about targeted ads is much ado about nothing.
I'll also say: my phone company knows everyone I've called. My credit card company knows everywhere I've traveled or eaten. And I'm pretty sure those guys *sell* my info. But people generally don't seem concerned about that(?)
that's why you have all those reward cards, programs and such.
say an insurance company wants to see who they can raise the prices on without losing customers, then they can look at the data and work out peoples personalities and single out some that fit a profile of someone who wont go looking for a new insurance company just because their insurance premiums went up.
Same thing for health care, if a company wants to see how people live so they can anticipate if their children will be healthy or at higher risk depending on how their parents lived then they can know who not to cover or who will be charged more to cover in the future. it can become the new credit score but one you cant change.
whatever happens I just assume it wont be for my own good but for the profit of others so I try and be mindful of privacy when I can
No, I get life insurance for free from my job ;)
But if your question can be translated to, "Do you avoid every possible risk in your life?" The answer is, "No. Ain't nobody got time for that. But I do try to be pragmatic about what risks I do take."
I can't imagine a scenario where random websites tracking my internet browsing benefits me in any way, other than maybe advertising a product I'd actually like?
>AI to have access to as much data on me as possible to make life easier when it gets smart enough //
And it would seem reasonable if Google's aim were to provide you good AI services rather than to extract as much money from you as possible (and no longer with the benefit of not being evil).
Doesn't OpenAI seizing a large chunk of the personal-services LLM market show that you should have just put all your data on the web to be included in Common Crawl? Or at least that Google (well FAANGs) unprecedented access to user data didn't result in them accelerating their AI dominance. I know Google have done a lot, BERT, TensorFlow and such, but that seems to have been orthogonal to having access to user PII.
This includes phenomena such as polarizing news causing social strife. If we simply took the time to understand how things are connected as well as how things are not, we would not so easily fall victim to propaganda. We can't just use the excuse that since Google knows our search history that we have no control over whether we are polarized. We also can't assume that once we de-Google our lives that we are any more properly prepared against polarizing propaganda. Lessons of mindfulness toward our neighbors' struggles don't come for free.
On top of that, the author of the linked blogpost is fooling himself. Other than halfway proving a point, he hasn't solved much. By continuing to use Google Maps he essentially makes a great deal of his online activity discoverable, undoing much of his work to "de-Google" his life.
Furthermore, Google has settings to blunt ad targeting, which seem quite effective, and you'll end up learning about CNC machines and dental drills in between your YouTube binges. If there was someone I'd accuse of dark patterns with ad targeting, that someone would be Meta.
With the Google Maps mention I was suggesting it's ok not to go hard core privacy, because that really takes a lot of time an energy. I use google Maps maybe 4 times a month on my PC, in a browser dedicated to it with a Google account just for that activity. I use a VPN. On the road, I use Organic Maps on CalyxOS.
As for Google Maps, I was under the impression that you used the app; I mostly use my phone for maps so I just assumed, and I may have misread your article.
They know all your personal info from the credit card you're using anyways. The phone number you provide at the supermarket is a formality.
The proof is in the pudding: When I buy stuff at home depot, there was one time I provided my email address for a receipt. Now every time it asks if I want my receipt emailed.
"Aha!" you say "You provided them your email address". They already would know, because they track you through the store with cameras.
https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2022/Adobe-Drives-P...
(As an aside, that quote in the article about "72% of consumers say that poor personalization decreases their trust in brands. " is 100% made up bullshit, lol)
The future is doing away with the discount program. The grocery stores near me briefly did away with those (before starting up again). I assume because the Adobe-type systems are still too expensive compared to the legacy methods.
Make no mistake - the future is taking your data without an exchange in value.
If I want to keep getting it, I reply and tell them if my reply isn't enough to drop me because I don't click links (if something interests me more than what is in the email I go to the site and find it) or load their tracking pixels.
This is how it relates: I tell them no one knows if I receive [1], open, or read postal mail so why should they know I receive, open, or read email unless I want them to? They can't target ads to you without reading content you consume and tracking you.
So, let's rephrase: So what if the FBI reads my mail? So what if the IRS bugs my house? So what if Costco follows my car around to see where I shop? So what if Home Depot flys a drone over my house to see if I use a rusty hammer so they can sell me a new one?
In what sense should my digital life be any different because it's possible and easy? Fork them is reason enough for me.
[1] certified etc excepted.
At this point, I have ublock origin, privacy guard and run a pi-hole at home. I use wireguard through home on my phone so that it forces the vpn's dns through pi-hole. On top of using Brave on my mobile device. I'm tired of it. More tiresome is the number of sites that are actually broken, especially purchases without the tracking events. More companies should ensure that their payment flows work without the tracking in place. When I have worked on consumer facing applications, I always tried to make sure the fallback display without ads and the workflows were friendly. No gaping holes where an ad would be and no waiting on tracking events for checkout flows.
The conclusion we drew was much more nefarious than "the machines are listening". It's that you, personally, are a very basic machine of patterns and habit. You took as input some signal that you were not concious of which STIMULATED you to talk about XYZ. That same signal was in your environment. It stimulated others who match your demographic profile. They made explicit search engine queries for it. Since you are almost exactly the same person as the people in your environment, you are a high-value user account to target that same ad to since the likelihood that it would be in your unconscious mind and thus trigger a buy-signal when you see the ad is higher.
TLDR, you are not special. You are a meat computer consuming the same environmental input data as everyone you know. You are almost the same in your behavior and desires as your peers. If this wasn't true, ad targeting would not be worth a bazillion dollars.
Then pay attention to the ads you start to see. In my specific case, it was for a specific software I used to use well over a decade ago, and suggested against as it became a really crappy product. The circle I was talking with was a random group of strangers at a restaurant on an impromptu conversaion. It was not my friend group, or anything that was merely coincidence that I received ads for that specific software.
And what makes you think that I feel I'm a special case on this... your devices are absolutely tracking you, listening and intaking every bit of information Google, MS and Apple can acquire. It's nothing special about me at all.
And sure, your country might be fine now, but over the course of history a lot of people suddenly woke up to their government turning totalitarian. Same goes for your insurance, your school, your workplace: All can suddenly work against you and it is preferable to avoid giving them too much information to use against you.
Or using the service in the first place?
The big promise of answering "So what?" and it amounts to: it's fine if you are fine with it.
> As you can see, I'm not averse to using Google or other Big Tech companies' products, but I try to avoid putting my entire data life in just a handful of baskets.
So, it's not about using Google. It's about just using Google.
[0] https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
This is just the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is what is going to get ya. It's not about nefarious actors lurking in the shadows, it's someone like you and me that is incentivized to make more money by taking the advantage of the data they have on you.
What if you have nothing to hide? Then you should read this [0] paper that has a more rigorous treatment of privacy:
> privacy is not reducible to a singular essence; it is a plurality of different things that do not share one element in common but that nevertheless bear a resemblance to each other
> The taxonomy has four general categories of privacy problems with sixteen different subcategories. The first general category is information collection, which involves the ways that data is gathered about people. The subcategories, surveillance and interrogation, represent the two primary problematic ways of gathering information. A privacy problem occurs when an activity by a person, business, or government entity creates harm by disrupting valuable activities of others. These harms need not be physical or emotional; they can occur by chilling socially beneficial behavior (for example, free speech and association) or by leading to power imbalances that adversely affect social structure (for example, excessive executive power).
Solove primary focuses on US gov't privacy invasion but this applies just as well to Google et al.
[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3976770
Both ads and propaganda have the same objective, psychological manipulation, and the difference is that one wants to manipulate you into buying a product, and the other wants to manipulate you into buying into an idea. These are insidious objectives on both a personal, and societal level.
One more thing: once adtech has your personal data, it is sold in perpetuity on shady data broker markets, and any company with access to it can exploit it and get rich from it. As with anything on the internet, once it's out there, it exists forever, except you'll have no control over who it's sold to, under what terms, and, of course, you'll never see a cent of profit.
All adtech companies should be paying users to use their services. "Free" is not only not free, but it's extremely profitable for the company you give your data to.
The fact that most people either don't understand any of this, or don't care, is deeply troubling for the future of our civilization.
Being concerned about how one’s data is being sold is a very “first world problem”, and even in “first worlds” it’s not a very big one for the great majority of the population.
It's really not. Propaganda is very effective in non-FW countries, perhaps even more so because of lower levels of education. Cambridge Analytica had successful campaigns all over Africa and the Middle East, which had a definite effect on the outcome of elections. It can be argued that the 2016 US election result was partially influenced by this, although the tricky thing with information warfare and propaganda is that the effect is very difficult to trace back to a specific cause. It leaves the victim in a state of confusion, with no single and clear source that caused it.
Since this affects society at large, it definitely _should_ be a general concern, and not a FW-only problem.
Framing it that way, it becomes clear how unequal of a trade ads really are.
I'd add that network bandwidth, CPU cycles, storage and RAM are being traded away as well, since the means to capture your data and attention also executes locally and are stored on your systems as well.
Which makes things even more unequal.
It is a battle to explain this to my kids, e.g. in the context of why we scrutinize what apps they use; and one (of several) reason(s) we don't let them use various apps. The monkey-mind obsession with visible cause and effect is for certain one of the cognitive errors that will doom our civilization.
I would love for there to be hard reset in the premises of surveillance capitalism and our industry's starring role in it.
As with e.g. our collective non-response to climate change, glib shrugs in response to the methodical construction of total surveillance in defiance of passionate, funny, relentless criticism (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), give every appearance of being the sort of thing future generations would look back on with perplexity and justified anger. "How could they not just 'let' this happen, but enthusiastically drive it?" How indeed.
Sounds sensible. You need to pay a fee if you want to display an ad on a billboard. But they are pirating the space on our monitors for free. They really should rent it instead.
How pre-teens using metadata found a whistleblower in two hours - https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/how-team-of-pre...
Trust your instincts, you have them for a reason. If it was private investigators and spies following you around to gather what Google/credit cards/mobile networks know about you, you would immediately recognize it as malicious and dangerous. That it has now been automated doesn't change that.
I wasn’t aware of this part specifically, so I’d like to learn more. Has this been covered in the news or something? This seems like a big deal.
Oh? Which platforms? How did you come to learn that they were selling data to those platforms? Surely from either the platforms themselves or a respected news article?
(And while I'd agree they seem to collect data from anything they possibly can, they seem to poorly underuse that data collection as far as I can tell. I use quite a bit of google stuff and their ads profile for me is still a total mess including things I actively hate. If they struggle with not targeting me for things I've told them I hate, it's hard to feel too worried about how they're going to factor in their passive microphone recording data)
> We never sell your personal information, and give you controls over who has access
> We are committed to protecting your data from third parties. That’s why it’s our strict policy to never sell your personal information to anyone.
I mean, I suppose I get possibly being creeped out that Google knows you prefer Pepsi over Coke and that you recently purchased an adult toy or whatever, but...meh? So they'll use that data to sell me targeted ads that I'm just going to block anyways.
I just don't see how it's actually harmful beyond the government access issue that's just dropped in as a single sentence at the end of one paragraph.
> A relatively recent example is PayPal blocking individuals from transacting or fining them for having the wrong politics.
Any time someone cries about being cancelled for having the wrong politics, I always think of this famous tweet:
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
Frankly, if I preferred Pepsi over Coke, I'd rather get ads (which sometimes include discounts/coupons) for Pepsi than for Coke.
Similarly, if I bought an adult toy, I'd rather get ads for similar adult toys than ads for <whatever the hell else the option for that slot would be>.
I'm definitely pro-privacy, but it's got nothing to do with "so I can't be shown relevant ads".
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/the-texas-law-that-dictates-...
Legislation like this is not an abstraction confined to museums and history books. It's what the party of "Small Government" actively works to implement, day in and day out. It can happen here, along with much, much worse.
The thing that struck me the most was how banal it all feels. Unspeakable acts of evil were committed in that building. There are office memos on display telling the story - complete with hand written notes on them like "recommend this (protester) be put to death". And around the memo is corporate filing codes and such to make sure the note is filed correctly. And yet, the whole office feels so generic. It could be any office building from the early 80s, complete with generic corporate orange/brown carpets, interdepartmental telephone systems and offices for the secretaries. You can just imagine the people working there coming in to work each day and bustling around like in any modern office. "Hello Janice. Sorry I'm late - traffic was terrible. Yes I got the memo! Blah blah blah"
Movies show evil acts being committed in evil lairs, clearly signposted with lava and torture chambers. But I think the truth is far more bland than that. On the surface, where we work and what we do there looks more or less the same, regardless of the effect our work has on the world. How many people's work harms the world today? I bet most people, when confronted, react more or less the same: "What? This job is wrong? Nobody told me. It wasn't illegal. And anyway, if I didn't do it, someone else would. I'm just trying to feed my family. Its not my fault."
I hope history holds modern data brokers in a similarly dim light. I certainly do.
If you can find it, check the Murdaugh murder trial document of his physical movements on the night of the murder extracted from his phone and the phones of his contacts.
Hahahaha, yes, if you don't join their club, they don't collect personal information.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....
Turns out you could just lie and fill out anything on the form.