Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it
proton.me
proton.me
Google clearly believes that they can obfuscate identity by enough so that ads can be targeted while privacy can also be preserved.
If you don't think that all ads are bad (and Google argues that ads help make many of the sites we rely on economically feasible), then I think you may agree that sometimes, ad targeting produces more useful ads. Many of my friends have actually found Instagram ads interesting enough to talk about them at dinners. It's better to have those ads rather than random banners for things that you don't care about. Google would definitely also argue that ad targeting improves the worth of the Internet and allows more sites to offer their services for free because they can make more from AdSense.
The following only makes sense if you buy this argument:
The data for ad targeting has been abused so often that for many (most?) consumers, it's not worth it.
Google's perspective is: "we can be a responsible steward of this data for this new age of privacy-conscious ad targeting". The Chrome topics API and mathematical/statistical obfuscation are things that a blunt tool like the law may forbid. As far as arguments go, I think this is actually a plausible one. I do think Google has somewhat OK privacy controls compared to other large tech companies, and way better ones compared to bad acting small sites and ad companies/data brokers.
That being said, I don't love the concentration of power (that's why the DOJ is going after them) - I'd much rather there be some decentralized way to ensure privacy but still allow useful ads, but we get what we get.
I do. Ads are psychological manipulation at scale. This well predates the Internet, even. Advertisements and marketing are immoral. As long as we have them though, I will concede that better targeted ads are sometimes better than non-targeted ads. However, I believe targeting does not need to be personal to be effective, it can be based on the content the ad is placed next to, rather than the individual visiting and be equally as effective without necessitating spying.
As it stands, at best ads are malware, at worst they are concentrated form of social evil.
So if you are selling something it's literally immoral to tell other people about it? How do you think people will ever find your store or product that you make? Just randomly stumble upon it? I'm genuinely curious.
If I visit a website with ad blockers, it has the right to block me. It’s business model will depend on whether the number of people it has to block will kill it. This means it should probably find a better business model, not force itself on everyone.
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Advertisements are no longer "we make stuff. Come here to buy stuff".
It then progressed to "people who buy our stuff feel good". But that wasn't all.
Then it progressed to non-spoken feelings when in proximity of thing.
And it turns out, that you can manufacture want of your good or service. And if you gatekeep the emotions of good, wholesome, fresh, clean, happy behind your product, you can tell people they're horrible trolls unless you buy and consume.
But even those tactics weren't enough. Now, most sales are in tech related stuff. And instead of telling people over advertisement channels, now they get pushed to your devices.
And the current stage, also known as enshittification, is also cloud-tying to guarantee captive consumers, so they can't easily leave. Cloud is the ultimate hardware and data roach motel.
So yeah, looking at the recent history of advertisements is just broken, unethical, shits on the environment, and assails human thoughts just to sell more garbage.
I am an anticapitalist, and I am acutely aware of what I am against. Advertisements, and how they solidified in the 1800s to current is one such thing I'm directly against.
I've also seen Rome Collesuem's chiseled graffiti to what amounts to "eat at restaurant". Rudimentary, when compared to hiring psychologists to extract as much wealth by exploiting the human psyche, but they were adverts nonetheless. And even those shat upon infrastructure and the humans who were there.
I do think there's a gradient of unethicalness in advertising. If I'm looking for a thing, and shown lists of things that match what I'm looking for, it's at least consensual behavior.
But these days, advertisements are anything but. They're invasive, insidious, and many a time try to fool the human that they're legitimate (and not paid) content.
But I'm guessing the emotional words you chose to use tells me you're probably in adtech.
An argument I find compelling here is as follows: sometimes I will look for something, and the world will tell me what I want does not exist. I will either build it myself or do without. If the state of the world changes, and a solution emerges, I would like that fact pushed to me (concrete example: new, more efficient battery chemistries for hot climates).
Waiting for everyone to pull slows down growth of whoever is innovating this new thing - which in turns hinders their innovation - which in turn slows down innovation in the economy.
There's a tradeoff here with all the bad things you lay out about advertising, but I'm not convinced I should prefer the more rapid rate of innovation.
Anything much above that starts to veer into the territory of paying to distort people's understanding of the market, or convince them they want things that they don't, etc.
I've taken a stance, DECADES ago, that all ads are telegraphing a very simple message: "my offering is not good enough to be discovered on its own merits, therefore I have to spend money to drown out the more worthy options".
That's kinda like assuming that because you're such a good guy, you never have to leave your basement and your future wife will find you.
You could just as well interpret advertising as "I am so convinced my offering is good, I am willing to spend money for you to become aware of it."
It is definitely not counterproductive. Mountains of evidence and real $ back the fact that advertising works.
You have a quirky pocket theory
If you want to conduct an experiment, try making a product or starting a business and don't advertise it.
It's like being in the countryside, where each inn and resting spot has a fire going on. You can spot them by their smoke trails. Then some entrepreneurial individual wants to grab market share from the punters and puts up a massive tire fire. A billowing column of black smoke will be seen from way further off, and as luck would have it, blocks visibility to anything behind it. It also makes the surrounding environment worse off for everyone.
And anyone who is attracted by the big flames will soon find themselves inhaling toxins.
But it's ok! Because I also financially benefited from it.
Yes, marketing is immoral.
Though if you reject this implication, I totally agree.
Advertising is fucking everywhere. I don't want to hear about new products and services because all of them literally just want your money. I'm not always shopping or looking for a product. I find navigating markets a massive ass pain.
We need legislation that forces advertising to the margins of society, where it belongs. We aren't just sacks of meat to be manipulated. There is nothing just about commercial communication having a louder voice than the people.
I don't understand why or how you see my question as one made in bad faith. OP said all advertising is immoral - I want to explore if they really think all advertising is immoral, or just some subset of it. Like, if you own a butcher shop and have a sign up front that says "fresh meat here!", is that immoral? If yes, why? Again, I'm genuienly curious.
Sure you do. If people are talking about cars for their families, and I have a suggestion for them based on my prior research, I'll share it. It's been raining a lot in my area recently, so lots of folks talking about which basement waterproofer they had a good experience with.
The reason these things don't feel like ads is because they are "super targeted" - I am telling someone about a product/service that I believe they would be interested in based on what I understand about them. Obviously I also don't get paid for this messaging but that's probably not the crux of the matter here. If advertising was "so good" that I would only see ads for products that are genuinely valuable and relevant to me at that time, that would be great.
Businesses that sell a lot of products that people actually want and do not end up returning. The money for advertising is not sustainable if it doesn't result in some sort of purchase down the line.
Words in general don't go through endless focus grouping and internal company debate to ensure the exact choice of words, tone of voice and cadence in uttering them, elicit the correct emotional response. Advertisements do.
You are being disingenuous in your response to me and trying to set up a strawman.
I realize a lot of highly paid tech workers on HN work in adtech or adtech-adjacent. It's even helped to pay my salary at different points in my career. It doesn't change the fact of the matter. The /entire point/ of advertisements is to psychologically manipulate the person viewing the ad. That is immoral, full stop.
If you cannot articulate an actual point in response to me, I'd advise barking up another tree.
> Words in general are not specifically crafted by teams of sociologists, psychologists, and marketing professionals to elicit a particular feeling at a particular moment in time to make me more psychologically susceptible to a particular belief or outcome
I have presented something, journalism, that does the same things. You claim that some journalism is not immoral which is true. It must follow for the same reason that some advertisements are not immoral either.
Seems like you don't have an actual argument - posting on a Y Combinator MARKETING page, no less.
Disclosure: I've done about a decade of freelancing, and during that time was trained by old-school practitioners on how to structure my writing.
People are so used to being inundated with commercial attempts at manipulation that it's just part of their day.
Do you use an adblocker?
Car ads selling sex appeal, power, status and freedom are provable features of the car? Same goes for influencers pushing products, submarine marketing, etc... It is all psychology and it is manipulation at scale. Words at scale designed to manipulate people into doing something is psychological.
The idea occurred to me after someone here proclaimed that they're simply unaffected by ads, reasoning they don't make rash purchases. Someone naturally countered with the extreme subconscious effect of ads.
This list thing is imperfect (I mean look how omnipresent car logos are for example) but it's an improvement from thinking you're immune to ads. Memory is fickle, and why Memento is my favorite movie.
"no more" in your sentence implies the impact is roughly the same (not that I agree with your premise that all communication is manipulation, unless your definition of "manipulation" is so vast as to be useless).
If the subject was propaganda, instead of advertising, then sure.
What do you think advertising is? It's propaganda for a product.
> Ads are no more psychological manipulation at scale than words in general.
This is a statement about magnitudes and in my estimation the statement is mostly wrong.
is paid poster in a college dorm hall - an advertisement - more or less manipulative than Trump's January 6th tweets?
If you have evidence to suggest that advertisements are inherently more manipulative than other types of communication feel free to share.
There are many other examples. It’s much more a matter of degree than just saying “ads bad”.
Yes, that's a well-established conflict of interest which is why there's supposed to be disclaimers whenever it happens
That's quite a position. Are you also taking the position that capitalism and commerce are immoral? Because you really can't have those things absent marketing.
At any rate, I can't agree with this. The way that ads/marketing are done can be immoral, for sure -- but you also have PSAs against littering or simply marketing / advertising for any number of things that I'd hope we'd all agree are good ("Spay and neuter your pets," "Don't drink & drive") or at worst neutral ("Now available: The Beatles 50th anniversary Sgt. Pepper CD").
Promoting a thing is not the same thing as "psychological manipulation" unless you consider "making a person or persons aware of something" is manipulation.
One might even argue that marketing is a good when the thing is something that people benefit from being aware of. Is marketing open source immoral? Fitness, as a concept? Ads for animal adoption are immoral?
At any rate - ads are a symptom of consumerism and capitalism, so as long as that's the system we exist in they're going to be present.
Are you saying that greed and straight-out lying is moral, and just because there is a powerful and dangerous minority of super-greedy liars it actually is the only means of social existence? LOL. LMAO even.
"Ads are just making people aware of something" is either a five-year old understanding of what ads are, or a deliberate lie.
I don't personally agree with this, but I think it's an irrelevant point. The point is that targeted advertising requires spying on people. Google's "solution" is a nonsolution because it simply codifies that spying. That it's arguably less comprehensive spying is beside the point.
It's not the ads I object to, it's the data collection that drives the ads.
I'll take this one step further, it's not the data _collection_ that bothers me, it's the data _sharing_.
I have an Instagram account, I'm fine with Meta hoovering up every tiny bit of data from my account to generate highly targeted ads. They know my posts, my photos, my follows, my comments, my faves. They can use all that data to deliver highly targeted ads directly to my timeline.
What I don't want is Meta knowing anything at all about my actions _outside_ of Instagram. What apps I have installed, my purchase history, my search history, my location, my real-life friends and family. That's all private and Meta should never know about any of it.
However, if Instagram is collecting browsing history and location data on me from some other source, it's hard/impossible for me to avoid.
Nope, nothing I wouldn't wouldn't share publicly. Just like every other time I checked.
(I won't copy it all here since I'm on mobile, but otherwise I would. it's all very bland topics like "Online Communities.")
It's technically targeted advertising, but only barely. I voluntary share much more information on the Internet.
The key word here is "voluntarily". My objection is having data about me, my machines, or my use of my machines being collected without my consent.
If I have given informed consent, there is no problem.
Ads are, at best, malware for the brain.
What little positive they could possibly serve (discovery) is unfixably corrupted by the profit incentives involved.
No. The most ad targeting that should ever exist is by geography, and that's it.
Advertising has value in letting people know about your product. If you're selling locally, you rent a billboard on some street crossing, or a banner at a mall, or you buy a sponsorship at a local event because you think your target demographic will be there. At a demographic level, not individuals.
On the Internet, geography translates to maybe using zipcode from an IP address, and demographics translates to choosing which websites ("publishers") to put ads on.
And that should be it, that's fair and should get you enough bang for your buck.
Putting cameras in people's homes, listening to their conversations, following them around in their cars, stalking their relationships, tracking their voting records, etc should not be an acceptable way of increasing the efficiency of the targeting.
Of course you would make more money with this kind of spying (as what happens today). But this kind of invasion has great societal costs to privacy, and subsequently to freedoms, and should never be justifiable.
This is an arbitrary moral line, and if you that's the one you want to draw for your own life, then fine.
But it's also really dumb.
Why should men see ads for tampons? Why should women see a message telling them to get a prostate cancer checkup? I already have tickets to see the superbowl - why am I getting ads to once again buy more tickets to the superbowl?
There's all sorts of value and productivity that can be gained from targeting ads. Are those capabilities used 100% for good causes? of course not. But it at least does something for society, unlike a weird moral finger wagging.
The moral line is that you do not spy on people in order to "improve" their "ad experience". Geography is one way to do it that's then acceptable.
> Why should men see ads for tampons? Why should women see a message telling them to get a prostate cancer checkup?
If a man enters a lingerie shop, he will expect to see ads for tampons. If a woman enters a man's cigar club (or whatever), she will expect to see ads for a prostate cancer checkup.
"Why" is because the only possible way to do otherwise is by spying on them. Anything that requires customizing ads per person inherently requires the spying.
> There's all sorts of value and productivity that can be gained from targeting ads.
And there it is. You see it as an optimization problem of "value and productivity", and there is no place for privacy in that equation.
Much like a factory dumping its chemical waste in the town's river. A lot of "value" is created during the process.
Why do tampon ads need to exist? It’s something you purchase on a regular interval.
> Why should women see a message telling them to get a prostate cancer checkup?
Why would there be any ads at all for prostate cancer checkups? This should be brought up by your doctor in an appointment with you. Who would even pay for and produce such ads?
> I already have tickets to see the superbowl - why am I getting ads to once again buy more tickets to the superbowl?
A stadium holds what, ~70k people, <0.05% of the US population? The massive adtech infrastructure privacy invasion just to avoid potentially showing an ad to someone who won’t convert on that incremental impression.
None of the arguments for hyper-targeted ads are compelling in the slightest.
The idea is that as long as it is coarse-grained geography it was less damaging.
But would that make it dangerous for political and ideological mass "influencing"? Maybe you're right. If we ever get a chance to have laws and regulate it, maybe allowing certain categories only.
Firefox and Safari blocked third party cookies ages ago.
It's obvoius that we cannot just trust google to control important technologies the way we used to and need consider the competition if we care about privacy.
And you don't think that user-based targeting is bad.
This is a huge parenthesis, that you forgot to put on the disclaimer. In fact, it's more important than what is there.
Besides:
> Google clearly believes that they can obfuscate identity
Yes, they act as if they believe. What is either incredibly negligent or fraudulent.
I don't think it's at all unreasonable not to accept this premise in the first place.
This often happens with government laws and policies too, in the U.S.
Google may indeed be a good, responsible steward of the data but what those that come after them?
I don't think this is a good argument, because the same argument can be used against technological advancement of any kind.
For example with genetics research that addresses diseases - you can say "ah but even though the current government is responsible, who is to say that we won't get a bad govt in 20 years who will use this capability to use bioweapons that perform genocide".
We shouldn't build factories, because the next generation can convert those factories into ones that make guns?
No, we have to count on each generation of humans to be responsible. This worked for the last ~5000 years of civilization or so, and I think it's the way it has to keep working
Of course, over time that's been corrupted so you see only ads. Don't bother beating that dead horse.
All the "targeted advertisement" efforts are to figure out what you want when you didn't say anything, and reduce that 10x to 5x or less. I don't see a good reason not to prohibit those, if people object to them. There's no right to make infinite money off the Internet.
It still results in strong perverse incentives. If I search for $company I don't want to have the top hit be $rival_company
Relevance presumably increases p(click).
"advertiser's ability to pay" has no bearing on things. If the advertiser does not pass credit checks, it doesn't even enter the auction.
There also is clickbait.
Search Ads are pay-per-click (or conversion now? Not sure)
All others are pay-per-impression.
conversions are what the advertiser really cares about, but they're hard for Google to be sure about. And what if you see the ad today but buy it next week in the store?
Organic search? Corrupted by SEO, so not neutral. The advertiser's ability or willingness to pay, is at least something of relevance? It reveals at least someone has the product you want, and possibly a deal.
You can read about how it was in 2008-10 here:
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads
Undoubtedly it's different now.
p(click) is an estimate, of course, but you'd reasonably expect that Google has gotten pretty good at that.
This makes sense if your genuine perspective is that you don't have a monopoly.
Like if I sent a bunch of emails saying "Hey guys, we are making great progress on committing genocide" - people would say "wtf man, we don't commit genocide, we just make software, why are you talking like that?"
Then you're all like "shhh don't say the G word..."
I'm not sure what you did in the company, but unless you had a VP+ level position, how are you qualified to know whether Google has a monopoly or not? Like, how do you have omniscient data on what competitors sales look like? You're just speculating in an unhealthy way. And that's why people told you to be quiet.
You can read in the trade press what market share everyone has. Judging whether a company is or isn't a monopoly is something anyone can do, although if you're not the judge you have no impact.
If you're an L4 code, you're not going to getting a bunch of confidential data piped to you.
>You can read in the trade press what market share everyone has
This is exactly the point - some jr associate sipping morning coffee and reading whatever news declaring Monopoly internally is not helpful in any way to the enterprise.
This "confidential" data, though: I call BS. Maybe 40 years ago that was true. Not anymore. The "wider section of the business" : we're talking about a business that transcends G's internals.
Your snobbery is showing: "some jr associate sipping morning coffee and reading whatever news declaring Monopoly internally is not helpful in any way to the enterprise."
"some jr associate" -- how dare those peasants have an opinion?
"sipping morning coffee" -- what does that have to do with anything?
Insinuating that they could not say the word “monopoly” could not be said because it was a giant conspiracy to keep it hush. It’s cringe.
Same energy as “that’s exactly what a guilty person would say”. Turns out, “I didn’t do it” is also exactly what an innocent person would say.
I don't think what I experienced was an admission of guilt. There's a lot of different ways a company can exploit its market position inappropriately. And bringing up a sensitive topic like monopolies can make people uncomfortable because it's related to other ideas - like anti-competitive behavior. I literally had a manager describe a tactic to me that would be illegal anti-competitive behavior. Granted, it was something well outside of his control so he's no risk to the free market.
My hope was that by asking about the topic people could confidently describe why Google had no monopolies and wasn't exploiting anything. I didn't get that at all so I stopped.
> I literally had a manager describe a tactic to me that would be illegal anti-competitive behavior
But presumably that was in a face-to-face conversation, which would not be discovered. And "I don't recall" would be his answer if ever asked about it.
I like this a lot. Google is massively profitable. The only argument in favor of continue to extract every cent they can off the market, is that we have a fiction of perpetual, constant growth. It should be 100% okay for a company to say “we’re super profitable, we’re going to tone it down now and focus on making our services better”.
At a certain size, the answer should be "It's not."
And then they get valued by their dividend yield. That IS boring, to some people.
Privacy is an ambiguous term. Probably no two of us agree on 100% of the implementation details. Yes, Google’s approach does not align with my desires. But I’m not arrogant enough to think my definition is the single correct one.
How about “Google’s is lobbying for a weaker form of privacy than customers expect”?
I am arrogant enough to know what is acceptable to me, though, and to work towards that. Just like Google (or most anyone else) does, albeit Google outguns me by many orders of magnitude.
If the law says I have no privacy whatsoever, all that would mean is that I need to put a great deal more effort into safeguarding my privacy.
The people can take this country if they want it. It would be ugly but it's entirely possible.
... in the abstract. I hardly imagine it'd come to a shooting war over something like the perpetual push-pull of figuring out what "privacy" is. That's a conversation that's been going on for hundreds of years.
(And that's just the behavioral aspect. The literal, legal aspect is that laws define terminology. From a legal standpoint, personal definitions are irrelevant when the law recognizes a definition in plain-letter).
... the law rarely completely leaves the field once it has entered into regulating something previously unregulated. To do so is, generally, seen as returning an issue that needed the heavy hand of force back to the "chaos" of personal choices. So once the law replaces the murky, per-person-and-entity definition of "privacy" with a legal definition, that definition will stick.
I expect, for example, any law latching what data companies may and may not keep to be very, very sticky. The details may change, but I find it highly unlikely that the government, having crafted such a law, will return to the condition of "On this, the law remains silent; it is up to the corporations what they collect and the people what they yield," which is (mostly, with some notable exceptions) the status quo.
Can you think of examples where something was regulated and then the government retuned it to an unregulated state? Closest example I can think of was Prohibition; we added and removed an entire amendment, and even then, the current state is "a combination of state and federal authority regulates alcohol," stepped down from a ban.
The adversarial system has a time and a place, but in this case it's not like Google ever publishes blog posts on why ProtonMail may or may not be bad, and it would be quite impossible for them to debunk every accusation against them.
This isn't the adversarial system as much as it is just one company making marketing material for themselves by attacking another company.
Lol, sounds like Google and the tech industry used targeted advertising to prevent a ban on targeted advertising.
Google doesn’t even respect opt out.
There’s no role for user privacy advocate at google . There’s no room for the discussion. They regularly and actively subvert even the weak privacy laws we have here.
Notice how they nag you forever to log into google maps? That’s so they can share your location data across all properties. They aren’t legally allowed to do it unless there’s a reason. The login service is their reason. How do I know this? They said it openly. Is this conscious, active and continuous violation of privacy law? I’d say it is.
Google is the Ministry of Privacy.
Minister of Privacy: “Let us gather to celebrate a trillion dollars of profit in one quarter. Our goal is to harness the world’s data and exploit it. Surveillance is Privacy”
—
Minister of Peace: “Comrades, our Ministry has an important duty to ensure the perpetual war that maintains our control. War is peace.”
Minister of Plenty: “Let us not forget our crucial role of the in rationing resources and keeping the populace in a state of need. Scarcity is Abundance.”
Minister of Truth: “The past is mutable, and it is our duty to control the narrative. Ignorance is Strength.”
Minister of Love: “Our goal is to eliminate dissent and ensure the loyalty of our citizens. Fear is Love.”
As a consequence, they have heavy skepticism about both government and public capacity to self-regulate here. Neither group has usually done either the deep reflection or trial by fire that Google has in figuring out all of the parameters of the problem, all of the consequences of the decisions, etc.
In short, they trust themselves more than they trust anybody else and they put their lobbying money in places that allow them to maximize acting on that self-trust. They'd rather be making mistakes and correcting them than forced to make what they perceive to be the wrong decision by bad ideas baked into unmovable law. Good bad or indifferent, that's where they're coming from.
(And to be clear, this is not an endorsement of their position. I think people who believe that there is a gap between that self-image and of the reality of the decisions they've made as de facto arbiters of privacy online have plenty of evidence to bring to the table to support their position.)
So what're their options, then? People get real, reeeeeal mad that YT offers premium as if for some reason they deserve to use things like Youtube for free?
Granted, if we actually taxed the rich and focussed money on more important stuff yeah we could totally have all of these service for free, sponsored by tax dollars. But that is _never_ gonna happen as long as we're dragging the chains of evolution behind us.
Google is a big company. That's why it has conflicting ideas about privacy... They can't all talk to eachother there!
After all, they're not evil, are they?
Only the naive believe it's possible to not have advertisements. Advertisements even existed in Ancient Rome.
I don't accept Google's approach because it is intended to reduce my privacy from them. They are not trying to preserve some semblance of privacy, they are trying to preserve some semblance of their ability to spy on us.
I reject their position entirely.
> In 3000 BC, a slaveholder in Thebes, Egypt created the first-ever written ad. [..] The slaveholder was trying to find a runaway slave while also promoting their weaving shop.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...
> Even David Ogilvy, widely considered the father of modern advertising, expressed his disdain for the medium back in 1963. “Man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard,” Ogilvy wrote. “When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon.”
How's your work in adtech going? It seems only those who profit from ads are defending them.
So clearly it's possible to advertise without tracking, we just innovated that benefit away.
That means they're trying to take resources from other people and profit. That's where the ethics fall to pieces.
Such offers are usually sneaky ways to collect personal information. Whether or not you consider that "harm" depends on your worldview, but a lot of people do.
idk why people bother saying things easily proven to be false. it is true that some advertising is harmful, yes. it is not the case that advertising in general is inherently harmful. it only requires a single counter example to prove false.
I never claimed that it was.
But harmful/deceptive marketing is quite common. A decent rule of thumb is to consider all of it suspect.
Also do you realize everything you do offline is being collected as well - your credit card transactions (visa knows more about you than Google), camera at traffic stops or your favorite restaurants, government listening to your phone call, etc. etc.
In Google’s case. In Apple’s case I’m giving them money for products and services. The money Apple makes from my data is meaningless when compared to Google’s M.O.
Neither of them are particularly transparent or accountable from a privacy perspective. It's kinda funny that someone would acknowledge the helplessness of the present duopoly, then claim they feel safe inside the lion's cage because "I already fed him earlier".
Accountable is interesting - they are as accountable as any other company, and if anything, both are under much closer scrutiny than anyone else, and have bigger reputational risks than anyone else.
People say this a lot, but why does nobody care so far?
I'd posit the simple answer is "it's easier not to", but also that governments are happy to reinforce a duopoly they control. We already know both Google and Apple are PRISM members as well as involved in the international FIVE-EYES network. That never really stained their reputation, despite being a universal backdoor. Google has exploited and broken YouTube several times over, but nobody stopped using it in objection. Apple moved their servers into government-owned Chinese datacenters, and nobody protested it financially.
The threat to their actual reputations is almost non-existent, from what I've seen. If people cared, we wouldn't be fixing FAANG's problems 10 years after-the-fact.
I don't feel very captive. Plus Apple devices have great resale value should Apple's interests ever stop aligning with mine.
That's an interesting interpretation, but what I actually did was point out the elephant in the room — that Apple's business model is completely different than Google's, and so painting them both with the same reductive label doesn't make sense.
Given two business models — one based on monetizing your data and behavior, the other based on accepting money for goods and services — which would you say is more pro-privacy?
Whichever one you trust with less data. Neither of them can be held to a bar of inscrutability because both of them manufacture surveillance devices. You can't even deny it.
> Apple's business model is completely different than Google's, and so painting them both with the same reductive label doesn't make sense.
Their business model has nothing to do with the topic of privacy-washing though. That's why I responded to you in the first place; your assertion that these revenue models matter is nonsense. It's a quaint fairy-tale you tell yourself to justify storing sensitive data with them. I'm not going to jostle you awake, but I am going to remind you that they're no more transparent in their approach than Google. If anything, your original comment highlights just how effective the duopoly is; both of these adtech companies are being treated like Marvel vs DC instead of Moloch vs Satan.
So... as far as privacywashing is concerned, I'd trust neither of them. They're both proven snakes who lie about their opaque infrastructure and do little to contribute to society's collective safety, online or individually.
I'm fascinated by this take, and I understand your comments better knowing that this is your honest POV. Although we'll never agree, keep fighting the good fight!
None of the conditions in this situation are ironclad.