How to stop advertisers from tracking your teen across the internet | Hacker News Reader

How to stop advertisers from tracking your teen across the internet

eff.org

118 pointsmooreds72 comments

Cats gotta be out of the bag long by now.

Am I to believe Google classroom isn't storing my students information, from as young as 3rd grade, to sell to 3rd parties once they turn 18? Or am I naive to think they aren't already selling it while they are literally children?

Most kids just stay logged as as their google classroom email, so that includes search/youtube/etc. Of course Google is tracking all that usage and targeting them for ads.

By the time they turn 18, Google will have such a perfect model of who they are. Will sell to the CIA, FBI etc. Complete profiles of how citizens think. Really evil stuff.

this is a lie and you feel ashamed and stop spreading it. Google doesn't sell profles period and doesn't sell data to the fbi/cia

The only evil here is you spreading false info

You are either being dishonest or are just ignorant. User data is disclosed to advertisers when they auction for ad placement. Many of those advertisers then sell the user data they collect through the auction, whether or not they win the auction, to other parties. It's a virtual certainty the FBI, CIA, NSA etc purchase that information.

Your argument is basically Google didn't do anything wrong because they are not the direct point of sale. But they aren't fools. They know what happens to the data they disclose to advertisers. It's repackaged and sold again.

User data is not disclosed to adveritsers. Please produce the documentation where I can purchase user data. All I can do is ask google to target people. I can not get info on those people from Google.

The police don't buy it, they get it for free

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/

I'm going by this document from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a lawsuit brought against Google, signed by member of Congress, that alleged data brokers are "siphoning" off bid-stream data and reselling it . It makes the claim that U.S Dept of Homeland Security uses real-time bidding data for warrant-less phone tracking.

https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre...

https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-user...

I get the desire for a smoking gun. Maybe one exists and someone else interested in the subject could share it. But at some point, people make judgement calls based off of the information made public. I would bet my original assertion is true, and that Google data is somehow being sold to the federal government, to build dossiers on it's citizens. Same with E.U. citizens.

i wouldn’t claim sale, but was prism a lie?

Well, we all know about Prism, the Google law enforcement portal, subpoenas and national security letters. Do those four not cover their description?

"Google turns over data when served a warrant" and "Google sells data to the government for profit" are very different things.

And why is your claim not a lie? How are you so sure they aren't doing that?

The FBI / CIA is known for demanding big tech companies for information about citizens. They obviously also do that, and largely probably, at Google. So actually it's not selling, they just demand it, and Google gives it.

For what it's worth since the DMA went into effect in Europe, you can now turn off sharing between almost all Google services.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14202892

Tracking isn't the kind of thing where once you cross some threshold there's no point in caring. Even if your kid's schoolwork habits are all bundled and sold to advertisers, protecting their privacy in other areas remains just as valuable.

Sarcasm? "Even if your kids schoolwork habits are all bundled and sold to advertisers". I think by that point we have done such a shameful job of protecting the privacy of children that we should put our heads down and throw in the towel. Not to mention all that data being fed into Gemini, profited off of.

No point in protecting whatever private crumbs remain. Requires a full social reset. Imo.

What is a "full social reset"? Ideally I'd prefer to make incremental progress on privacy, but if you pinned me down and made me choose between accepting the status quo and abolishing all networked education apps, I'd pick the status quo. They have real benefits and I wish they'd been around when I was a kid.

That’s my biggest concern. Schools have no idea.

Certainly not siding with Big G here, but the onus is on the school. They should be able to be held accountable.

I've worked in the education sector—at least in the US there are well known data protection laws that schools very much do know about and attempt to comply with. It's not quite HIPAA levels of serious, but they do take it seriously, and as another commenter notes Google actually does comply.

I remember a teacher telling us that parents should not check their kids Google classroom accounts because it would be a violation of the other students’ privacy. I understand what they were saying but there’s no way I’m not checking my kid’s Google classroom account. Ridiculous.

I was offered a job by a large ed tech company that has all sorts of data including parent teacher communications, grades, hourly attendance, etc. For millions of students enrolled in k12 programs in the USA. I initially accepted but then they wanted me to build an early warning system to predict whether a student would have a behavioural problem on the next day. I quit because I do not find it moral to build panopticons for children. But I'm sure they found someone to replace me.

Good job. I’ve quit a job similarly over ethical issues. But this is the problem with software engineering lacking an ethical standard: there’s always Bob, three desks down, who is willing to build the Torment Nexus. One person’s ethical stand is meaningless.

Thanks. When I quit that job I didn't really have any other option lined up. But I had just finished my PhD and someone there at the university offered me a postdoc for six months and then I won a little grant that let me stay like another year and then I won another one for 3 years, and I started working at an AI company in my city. But at the time I was like, fuck now what am I going to do? Haha.

lmao! I apologize, I really do. I know Dang says NO to snark but "data protection laws" for students?! Despite lobbying against it, my school uses the King of All Evil software suites GoGuardian.

"GoGuardian Beacon continuously monitors online activity across school-issued devices, search engines, web apps, Gmail, and more to proactively detect concerning behavior." - What data is being protected? It's being collected and analyzed by everyone but the child's parents.. All you have to do is whisper s a f e t y . . . and data protection is tossed out the window.

I just hope you people are being paid to defend these immoral monstrosities. Google, Microsoft, Meta etc comply with nothing. They just pay a miniscule fine when outed a decade later.

If your student has a google account created by the school using Google for Education, then their data is not being used for ads. And if their admins delete your student account after they graduate (as they should) then their data is truly gone (after a relatively short retention period).

Now if you have a student using a non Google for Education account, then Google will store and use their data for ad targeting after they turn 18. Also if they lie about their age when they create their account (which is very likely, especially because Google doesn't allow you to create an account with age less than 13) then this will kick in sooner. In addition even though ad personalization is off for under 18 and advertisers are not supposed to target them by other means, they can and do by targetting search terms, youtube categories etc that under 18s are frequently interested in.

(FWIW Google never really "sells" your data. That would loose their monopoly on their most valued asset. It's more like they rent it out, but allowing advertisers to target you. The advertisers never actually get to see "person X has attribute ABC", more like the advertiser says "target people with ABC" and they trust google to show it people like that.)

"If your student has a google account created by the school using Google for Education, then their data is not being used for ads" - then how do they make money? Is Google classroom free for schools?

Yes, but there are enterprise-y tiers that are paid.

Yes it's free. And yes it's not making money. They do have phenomenal education resources for teachers that are paid, though.

It's about getting them baked into the google ecosystem. Microsoft did this in the 90's, but with businesses instead of schools (and not for free to be honest).

Get them used to Google so they use nothing but Google when they're adults. Then monetization happens.

And Apple in the 2000s! The iMac G3 and eMac was everywhere in classrooms.

You should check out the Apple II…

> because Google doesn't allow you to create an account with age less than 13

Actually you can - you create the account under FamilyLink.

See here: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338

TIL

> The advertisers never actually get to see "person X has attribute ABC", more like the advertiser says "target people with ABC" and they trust google to show it people like that.)

Only if you never click. Once you click they know.

> then their data is not being used for ads

maybe, just maybe this is half true as in: they do not use this data _directly_

What are you implying? In other words what non "direct" ways is google using such account data for advertising?

I bet they somehow analyze it to learn something. And then they use that knowledge to make money.

Google for Education accounts don't see any ads at all, so there is no indirect usage for ads either.

They surely do not use this usage data, no way :)

I very much doubt this. Often deletes are just soft deletes, and they have to provide all data they capture to intelligence agencies.

They might not use it for advertisement directly, but I am 100% convinced they’ll build up your profile and use the profile for advertisement instead.

>Often deletes are just soft deletes

It probably is, with purges (including backups) happening a few months later. Otherwise they're setting themselves up for fraud lawsuits (see also: the recent incognito browsing lawsuit which arguably has less merit than a straightforward "we told you we'd delete it but didn't").

> and they have to provide all data they capture to intelligence agencies.

1. Source?

2. If your threat model is intelligence agencies operating extrajudicially, you probably shouldn't be trusting googles delete functionality at all. At the very least they can pull up a copy that they captured before you deleted it from google?

1. Prism and the snowden leaks, and EU regulation which prevents the transfer of EU citizens data to the US specifically because all of it is being harvested under PRISM and FISA. 2. Very true, which is exactly why all EU data had to remain in the EU and could not be transferred to the US, until recently, with the express statement that US intelligence would still have access.

AFAIK the Snowden/PRISM leaks only revealed that tech companies were part of the program, but not whether they were compelled or voluntarily gave the information up.

I didn’t state if they gave it up willingly or compelled.

There are also reports of the US buying lots of data from data brokers, as well as hackers.

I mean, I would too, if I were an intelligence agency.

It just means I’m more careful about which data I put where

> their data is not being used for ads

Bullshit. Even if that were true they still collect the surveillance data to funnel it to another arm of the government.

> Google never really "sells" your data. That would loose their monopoly on their most valued asset. It's more like they rent it out, but allowing advertisers to target you.

I think most people understand this, it's just that it doesn't make the situation much better.

I'm no longer convinced the Google actually stores very much personal information. A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers I started watching YouTube without one to see if it was tolerable. That test is ongoing.

In all that time the only ads that were not completely worthless to me have been:

1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information.

2. A few ads for products or services that I already use and already intended to continue using.

3. Ads for Verizon Visible which were completely worthless to me at the time, but a couple months later I was looking for a new carrier because I was about to upgrade from an Apple Watch 4 without cellular to an Apple Watch 10 with cellular and my carrier, T-Mobile Connect, did not support Apple Watch. I ended up picking Visible and there is a chance that seeing those ads made that more likely.

If they knew anywhere near as much about me as people think they do they should be able to do a much better job with the ads.

They have a metric ton of data about you. I think they just don’t use it much because they probably realized that unless you get super creepy about it, most of this data is worthless from an advertising point of view. Except on YouTube they don’t really know what you actually like - most of us don’t tend to express our real desires in the web but only in instagram or TikTok or YouTube. YT has ads but it doesn’t seem to have devolved into a cesspool of content only designed to sell you things as Insta and others have become. Your location could be useful but it becomes creepy if google used that to target you with ads so it seems to have bowed out of it (they don’t even seem to store location history in their servers anymore).

Clearly they’re happy with the money they make from AdWords and andsense. So they’re leaving us alone with the rest of the data for now.

It could be that the wow factor of ai/ml/data/whatever came about because of these examples like Zappos increasing sales 1% because of changing the colour of the website or Netflix making better recommendations and ever since then that has kind of set the expectation. Both of those were great examples of what to do with data and algorithms but there's a catch, neither is really tailored to the individual in a way that it will consistently work over time. Netflix recommendations work because you will eventually pick something to watch and they increase the likelihood that you like what you pick. It works the other way too , knowing what people like helps them decide what new shows to make. But the only way they know this is that your profile matches a set of profiles. And this aggregate way of doing things will always have too much variance to be able to consistently be applied to an individual because different people are different even when they are similar. This is the ultimate conclusion that foundation model people have come to, at least implicitly, as they hope that by putting all data available such as the entire internet they will arrive at a combination of things that will consistently meet everyone's needs on demand whatever they may be. But the complexity of life is still higher than that and people are quick to notice when things are being averaged and then served to them.

"1. An ad for a countertop food composting machine. I have no interest in buying such a machine, but I hadn't even known they existed and that was interesting enough to get me to go the seller's site for more information."

Well, not knowing they existed is perhaps the preferable state. Such products turn out to be borderline scams. I call them borderline because whether they are completely useless is somewhat debatable, but certainly they do not just ingest food, hum for some period of time, and emit compost, despite the well-produced videos to the contrary. You can find a number of YouTube videos not selling them analyzing their performance.

>A few months ago when they started cracking down on ad blockers

People have been talking about this for almost a year now, I think, but I still haven't seen anything substantive. My ad blockers work fine, and so does SmartTube. Sure, some days I'll start up SmartTube and videos won't play, but then I'll see "Update" in the main menu, go there, see there's a new version with a changelog line like "Fixed [issue] with videos not playing", do the update, and then everything works fine again.

I've seen absolutely no evidence that YouTube is actually successful at blocking ads, or that they ever will be unless they resort to some very extreme measures that probably have feasibility issues. It all seems like fear-mongering to me.

> My ad blockers work fine

How did you measure that? AFAIK they become practically useless. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305

How did I "measure" it? I didn't, I just kept using YouTube. Nothing's changed: everything still works just fine. What's to measure?

Why don't you just try it out for yourself instead of reading what other people have to say about it?

I was thinking more about ad tracking, which probably works reasonably well with your setup.

So you used an ad blocker before, now you disabled it and you're surprised you don't get relevant ads?

Ad blockers also often block tracking cookies and scripts, which prevents Google from collecting information about you. So it might very well be because of your previous use of ad blockers protected your privacy, resulting in you not getting relevant ads now you disabled your ad blocker.

Also, do you use Google Search as your main search engine? Are you logged in with your Google Account when you do that? I prefer search engines that don't store any personal data from me, so if you use that, Google will also miss relevant information about you.

But yeah I'm quite positive that if you keep your experiment going that you will get more and more relevant ads.

This is one of the situations where I would use a more baity title: "Protect your teen from non-consensual ad tracking". The subject is boring and abstract enough that you need all the trigger words you can muster to garner the interest of the public at large.

This is the larger problem with discussions on privacy. Anti privacy articles are often very emotionally charged “Apple REFUSES to unlock killers iPhone”, and pro-privacy ones are more neutral like “Why end to end encryption is important”.

I understand the attempt to remain neutral sounding, but all that’s doing is making it easier for people to ignore.

I would hazard to guess that Google classroom (starting at Kindergarten and continuing through post secondary) software is mostly installed via next-next-finish (i.e. whatever the defaults set by Google are). I'd also assume that these defaults are set to very minimal privacy protection for students.

Having this digital record entrusted to any company that is not under strong privacy controls should be frightening to parents.

School administrators figure the low-cost low-barrier-to-entry is well worth the long term privacy risk to children.

* Fortunately my children were out of school when this became common place - so kindly correct me if I'm mistaken.

Google for education has very thorough and strict privacy controls. They have to, most states have pretty strict laws around that anymore.

You are correct but it's worse than that. School admins are full blow ignorant to technological privacy risks for children and themselves. Same goes for teachers if I'm being honest. Just assume their level of understanding is equivalent to the general population.

They are ambivalent/confused when you try and explain it.

The best minds of our generation are being used to stalk children in order to sell their data to autocrats and monopolists.

Digital Moloch.

> The best minds of our generation are being used to...

This idea is repeated often in threads like this and I'm not at all sure where it comes from.

Do the best minds of our generation all go into tech? No. Do the best minds that go into tech all go into software engineering? No. Do the best minds that go into software engineering go to work at Google and Facebook and other advertisers? No. Do the best minds that go to work at Google and Facebook and other advertisers work on advertisements and tracking? No.

If it were possible to come up with a rigorous definition of "best minds", I see no particular reason to believe that such a definition would have substantial overlap with "pursues FAANG salaries", much less "works on ad tech".

> This idea is repeated often in threads like this and I'm not at all sure where it comes from.

I think you have a reasonable idea and you’re playing the devils advocate.

I'm definitely not playing devil's advocate, I genuinely and fervently disagree with the notion that the brightest minds of our generation work on (or even adjacent to) ad tech.

The only explanation I've been able to come up with for the idea is that some people assume that the "best minds" of our generation will tend to optimize for salary above all else and therefore would (since they're smart enough to find the high salaries) end up working in a FAANG company as a software engineer. That doesn't seem like a very convincing argument (hence, I'm not sure it's actually the origin), but I haven't yet seen a better explanation.

I’d respond but my commenting is throttled and I’m showing up as [dead] especially with lengthy comments. @dang?

@dang is a no-op, try the email in the footer.

It's an aphorism not a longitudinal study

"The best minds of my generation" originally referred to heroin-addicted artists. I wouldn't take it too seriously or literally.

If only Congress realized that some of these advertisers and data brokers answer to the CCP ... maybe we could have a tracking-free internet.

> If only Congress realized that some of these advertisers and data brokers answer to the CCP ... maybe we could have a tracking-free internet.

Yes, but Google, Microsoft and Meta answer to Uncle Sam. Why intetfere with their business ? /s

You kid but perhaps https://www.vulnu.com/p/government-wiretaps-in-u-s-internet-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com