Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity and the right to privacy as recognized by the UDHR.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Search ads hardly need personalization profile, as the query itself already has a incredibly strong signal for what would be good to sell you, and other query metadata (location, time of day) boosts that a lot.
This case against Google is addressing the symptom rather then the real problem/incentive. Make invasive personalized advertising "opt in" only and the marketplace will address the search issue.
The personalization profile based on searches and other stuff is used for their display network (ads across the web), but that entire network is way less valuable than Google Search alone. [0]
lmfao. HN never gets old.
How?
Does a village grocer, who knows you like chocolates, and points out a new brand of chocolates violate your dignity?
What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it?
For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively.
Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms.
The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference.
Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming.
Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.
If you use credit cards at both the credit card company definitely can correlate your spending patterns and send you relevant offers
Also, not sure if you’re aware, but the data that the credit card company gets is really horrible. The category information is often wrong, the business name being billed is often different than the name of the business you’re buying things at, etc. They do have your credit score and probably more accurate financial situation. Google has far better information about you and your behaviors though than the CC company in general.
https://www.checkout.com/blog/level-2-and-level-3-data-in-cr...
You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work.
If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech???
And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that
I am, but actually the government is under many more legal constraints to do so than a private party. That’s why the government does all these end runs to buy data off the commercial data streams. Cut off those private data streams and the ability for government to do this gets significantly reduced.
And it’s Google an adtech company. How are they infringing on your rights in a way that you can just not use them?
Yes. US enforcement of the drug trade is waaaay more lax than it has been in the past. The last time I remember reading about federal enforcement against state legal weed enterprises was toward’s the end of Bush’s term which is now 13 years ago. Social attitudes have also drastically shifted. Several places have already started decriminalizing magic mushrooms and weed is legal in most states and it’s more a question of when it will stop being illegal federally.
> Is anyone trying to curtail police power?
Yes. There was the whole defund the police movement, there’s constantly lawsuits about the police, there’s been actual legitimate prosecutions (albeit rare) against police (which is a step up from it never happening ever even if laughably insufficient given the amount of outrage that needed to be generated). Just because you may not be paying attention doesn’t mean stuff doesn’t change.
> How are they infringing on your rights in a way that you can just not use them?
I’d recommend brushing up on economics textbooks and how monopolies disrupt the market. Specifically, there are the two most common ways:
1. Lower prices when a real competitor pops up that runs more efficiently to drive them out of the market, raise prices back up once they’re gone.
Lots of examples like this, not sure about Google itself. Eg look at what Amazon did to kill diapers.com even though that company was disrupting the market in a profitable way (ie Amazon couldn’t actually compete but instead used their pocketbook and shady business tactics to outmaneuver them and force them into selling themselves to Amazon ).
2. Leverage your majority/monopoly position to retain that position. The government’s position with this case is that having a majority position in the market means they’re able to retain that majority regardless of any external competition.
In all cases, Google is harming me by causing hire prices in the market and inefficiencies in the marketplace. Google is also big enough that this gets magnified by quite a bit and seeps into other areas beyond search.
Also, the “you can just not use them” argument is pretty tired and requires willful blindness. That argument has always been trotted out as monopolies always had “competitors”. That doesn’t alter that large businesses can have lots of negative impact just because of their size.
Police stop minorities in most major cities and profile. As far as weed enforcement by the federal government, as long as it’s the law, it can still be reintroduced. While Trump himself didn’t care to enforce it, his first AG very much wanted to but was stymied by a bipartisan unwillingness to fund it. But selective enforcement is still dangerous.
Who do you think a Desantis administration or a Pence administration would go after?
Google sells nothing of value at any meaningful scale - but ads.
You want to see a “million ad tech companies bloom”?
Yes you have complete agency not to use Google and they don’t even have a monopoly on advertising
This would be concerning.
> ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty
This isn’t happening.
The government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications.
Sure? This is how investigations work? There is no automatic assumption of guilt, which is what you said.
I’m sceptical of government overreach. But asking what was discussed in a meeting is incredibly standard investigative fare.
> government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications
This is wrong. It’s forcing them inasmuch as my asking what you had for lunch forces] you to wear a wire.
I know I would hate to have been questioned about why I wanted to take a conversation out of my corporate channel when I was trying to have an after work “get together” with a cute coworker over a decade ago (that cute coworker is now my wife).
> I’m sceptical of government overreach. But asking what was discussed in a meeting is incredibly standard investigative fare.
It’s not just what was discussed, the government is assuming any time that you ask a coworker to “call you” that they are going to question you.
I know I would never talk to anyone in the government without my own lawyer - and that would cost money.
Okay? That doesn’t make the line of questioning illegitimate. I, too, dislike being questioned about anything by anyone.
> the government is assuming any time that you ask a coworker to “call you” that they are going to question you
Yes. They will also pull your call records and ask you what was discussed. Again, this is super normal. What, would you like to block investigators from asking what was discussed at meetings?
> I would never talk to anyone in the government without my own lawyer
You’re complaining about the government’s general right to investigate? You know that before these records you would still be questioned, right?
We see it on the state level where companies are afraid to speak out against Desantis because of retaliation.
I define the “other” party as “whichever one you disagree with”. I’m not trying to get into a right vs left argument.
The difference is that the government is not accountable to the majority either between gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc.
For instance, no matter how you feel about abortion, every time a referendum comes up for a vote by the public to restrict it - it’s always defeated even in conservative states yet the legislators go out of their way to work around the people’s will.
The same is true about legalized weed in conservative states or expanding Medicaid.
I can much easier not fall under the influence of Google than the government.
The government is the only force that has a “monopoly on violence”.
A powerful government can do much more harm than an adTech company.
As far as the government having the “public good as a motivator”, are we talking about the same government? The one that goes out of its way not to be answerable to people? The one that funds the “War on Drugs”, “civil forfeiture”, “eminent domain” to take property to give it to another business, etc?
Google has profit and return for shareholders as its mandate. Anything it does towards that end is not a mistake and will not be corrected.
Nor is it a “mistake” that the government seizes people’s property through civil forfeiture without a trial or that the government is actively fighting the will of the majority of the population.
Again, Google doesn’t have the power to do anything but serve ads. The government has the court system, a police department with military weapons, etc.
You have an extremely wealthy corporation incentivized to collect massive amounts of very personal data about every part of you and you desires and psychology, incentivized and well-able to collect it in hidden and powerful ways across the web and build deep learning models of your psychology and desires, and store them in a place where it's possible for nefarious actors and governments to either legally or illegally access and use that information for unknown purposes. If you object to this characterization, fine, start with the objection, but it's an obvious characterization which I've presented, and it's obvious that this is what people are concerned about! Starting the conversation with "it's no different, philosophically, from your grocer knowing your love of chocolate" is such a non-starter only because it seems so disingenuous, like, how could you not see how your interlocutor sees it differently? It just presents so clean and abstract a little simplification, though, so it's handy for winning point in a debate setting.
I don't agree with GP but I want to defend the analogy, which I found perfectly fair. Analogies help us understand the world and uncover internal contradictions in our thinking.
I thought vlovich123's sibling comment did a great job responding the analogy on its merits (making some of the same points you did).
I did *not* "opt in" to allowing the shop owner to follow me everywhere I go.
In the online world, Google follows you almost everywhere --- without any "opt in".
See the philosophical difference?
There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.
https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...
Paying for search won't change the fact that 75% of all web traffic contains Google trackers. This is a fundamental violation of privacy that no one should have to "opt out" of.
Basically, you value Google's business model over human dignity.