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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but:

"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."

I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.

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Google became a monopoly in search, advertising and various other things. It uses all of those to extract money from everyone, especially the advertisers with absolutely no accountability. All the large and small businesses have to jack up prices to make up for the money that Google extracts from them through those monopolies, and then reflect that expense on the consumer. Just go to reddits like r/ppc or r/googleads. Google became a company that single handedly amplifies inflation during its endless extraction of profit.

I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.

> and sold to the highest bidder.

Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore?

When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.

Google Adwords is quite literally using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements based on it to the highest bidder in its ad auction system. There was zero hyperbole in that statement.

> using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements

You changed what you wrote to make it accurate now, but refused to admit that and instead just prepended it with "literally"!

Wonderfully ironic given that we are talking about being accurate in your writing!

Can you please be specific what I changed? I meant every single word exactly in the first post as in the second. Both are completely accurate. What exactly did I change with any substance?

You said the fact was sold to the highest bidder, which implies that they sell your data. Which is something that most people believe because people use language like you have. But it isn’t true.

The second time you were much more accurate. You wouldn’t have even had to restate it differently if the first time had been accurate.

That's among the worst takes I've ever seen.

"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"

Geez.

It's basically a language quibble, that copying data is never "stealing", also in the copyright-violation context. I suppose they'd be happy with a rewording.

> I still have all the facts about my life

No, you don't. Google knows more about you than yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840916, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584589

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