We accepted surveillance as default | Hacker News Reader

We accepted surveillance as default

vivianvoss.net

329 pointsspeckx149 comments

I know there is evidence like

    Apple ATT (iOS 14.5, April 2021). 15-25% opt-in. 
    -$10B Meta revenue in 2022 (CFO   David Wehner)

But it sure looks to me like personalized ads are a paper tiger. I mean it seems like 30% of the ads I see on Facebook and YouTube are just transparent scams that they could serve me without any profiling. For instance for a week I have been in heavy rotation of an ad on Facebook which obviously looks like a crude attempt to imitate a notification in the Facebook API. After I click on it the page starts playing sound and tries to scare me that my computer has been hacked and I have to take some action. I reported the ad to Facebook but it shouldn't have stayed up a whole week, for all I know somebody is still seeing it.

It's so rare that I see an ad that is targeted to me at all so what gives? Am I really so unmarketable to? It's not like i don't buy cameras, food, clothes, video games, and all sorts of things. But all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought.

> all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought.

IMO, nothing exposes the folly behind targeted ads as much as this.

The fact that some people receive badly targeted ads isn't a prove for the surveillance system not working.

The question regarding ads is how well targeted campaigns are being paid for. But the ad space is relatively harmless.

It becomes relevant when not talking about ads, but surpression of citizens by state actors. If the data is being used to identified potential targets for some measures. These measures can involve drawing election districts, deciding where to build the sewage plant or library or where search for people to deport and how to influence them in political campaigns. Some margin of error has varying impact there, but it can help a lot to reduce manual selection by a lot.

10% of meta earnings last year were from scammers using their AI on meta users through ads. It doesn't make sense that they are allowing it, except it is making them billions. So what if millions of americans lose everything? Shareholder algo bots like the way it looks

I used to report scams to facebook, but they deny my claim and say the ads are fine. Seems like fake AI videos of celebrities/politicians asking you to invest in alt-coins is A-OK in facebooks... book.

It's infuriating.

To their credit I did get this message from them today:

    We reviewed the ad you reported and found that it goes against 
    our Advertising Standards. We let the advertiser know that we 
    removed the ad, but not who reported it.

    Thank you for letting us know. Reports like yours help us to 
    improve the integrity and relevance of advertising on Facebook.

But mine was an absolutely open and shut case.

Ads on the FB & goog network (this includes phys.org btw) are NOT paper tigers, in the sense that

  they are a reliable anti-signal

(to short, not to buy, to look at rising competitors, to look into reasons why a product might be failing, to sus out the lack of foresight in their investors, to extract other high cost channels/signals that they are still using ntless

As an example of the last one, I just learnt about an ISO standard.. )

YMMV depending on how much the network knows [it doesn't know] about you ofc ;)

Well you do know YOShInOn and I frequently find an article on phys.org that we think is interesting but will substitute a link to the paper that is referenced if it is open access. I respect their selection of topics and articles and, looking at alternatives, frequently their article on the topic is really the best. But damn their ads are awful. It's a conversation I have with them and sometimes with their advertisers ("did you know the adversarial design of that site made me click on your ad by mistake and wasted your spend?")

Maybe I should draw a firmer line for some of my values but in terms of my other values ScienceX is the best popular science publisher today by far. (compare Universe Today or Scientific American.)

I have come to believe, based on little other than my limited experience, that the targeting does not matter.

Facebook provides users with virtual crack. User pays for the high with attention. This attention is sold off to the highest bidder.

The contents of the ad is irrelevant, the data harvested is used to make the crack ever more potent.

I try to disable a lot of web tracking stuff, so I kinda understand if advertisers have trouble targeting me. But the information they should be able to use to target me just isn't getting used at all. Are other people getting well-targeted ads? because in my experience, ad companies suck at it.

I constantly receive ads on Youtube in languages I don't speak. I can kinda make out whats happening in some of the ads, I know a bit of Spanish for instance. But the ads entirely in Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc, are completely lost on me. I often cannot even tell what the product is that they are advertising. My google account has language preferences set, my browser has them set, my device has them set. Google should *know* what languages I can speak. I'm not on a VPN, I'm pretty sure google knows my exact location. None of these languages are spoken particularly frequently in my area, I don't understand how I'm getting advertisements in these languages.

I used to have targeted advertisements turned off on youtube. I changed this several months ago, because the ads were literally 100% scams, deepfakes, and illegal products. I just got sick of it. I've intentionally turned on targeted ads, as it lets you have some control over the advertisements. Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs, but its still mostly scams, and I still constantly receive ads that are completely and wildly outside of my demographic. Languages I can't speak, political ads for companies and politicians hundreds of miles away. I am shocked when i rarely receive an ad for a local restaurant or business, because it happens so incredibly rarely. When it happens, I wonder, did they actually target me to show me the local business? or was it luck? I'm convinced its the latter.

> Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs

Always fun when the ads have less rigorous content policy enforcement than the actual videos.

I occasionally use non-adblocked youtube, and I think the ads were mostly Audible/Jet2 holidays? I don't think I've ever seen a local business ad on there, presumably because making a video ad in the first place is expensive.

The places for local businesses seem to be Facebook and Instagram.

They are rare but I have seen ads for local businesses in a 100,000 person market.

Given how much you can spend on text or banner ads I don't think the cost of producing a video ad is prohibitive these days, particularly when it can be a voiceover + graphics + text, it's not like you have to hire 15 union members to do it the way they do in L.A. Even back in the late 1990s it was a well kept secret that ads on local cable were a good deal compared to newspapers and radio.

I once watched a news report about the then tail end of the Ceaușescu regime. One of the indicators of the level of oppression they described was that they had video cameras mounted on street lamps.

You watched some propaganda slop, since there is no evidence that the Romanian regime used video cameras on street lamps in the 1980's.

Why would they need to invest such insane amounts of money to acquire such tech (video cameras, lol, on street lamps) when they had a thriving population of curtain twitchers and snitches?

To an extent it was propaganda. I'm not sure why you think something I saw some 40 years ago would meet any definition of slop that would still retain enough meaning for the word to be used in that context.

Nevertheless, the truth of whether they actually had video cameras on streetlamps is irrelevant to the point I was making. The point is that there was a time when media coverage depicted the notion of it happening as abhorrent.

I remember Andrei Sakharov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov

in Russia writing that he thought there were 30 people in the house across the street from him.

What you watched was some sort of propaganda. There was no such thing in 1989's Romania. The country was too poor for such advanced systems.

Source: someone who lived through that.

Militarism, surveillance, propaganda, statism. Reminds me of something. Are we the baddies now ?

Always have been.

Ive noticed that certain people are chronically incapable of recognizing this.

Many of them in this very forum

Hackernews is at its base a forum for startups. It's hardly surprising that people paid to make a thing might find it cognitively difficult to accepts its flaws.

Standard quotation applies.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! — Upton Sinclair

I ran into this one just today ....

"Let the logician and the Godman show

The foolishness, but let the word be spoken.

Tim embraced Tom, embarking for Heathrow.

Smiling, Christmas-elated, somewhat sad too,

Blessing the filthy world. Somebody had to."

— Anthony Burgess, Byrne

Alright, name one state that is functional and isn’t a baddie in your book.

Principality of Sealand

Now I have to insist on a definition for "functional"

This is all well and good but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist.

At least the solution is obvious, even if the path to an ad-free web is not. And it's a solution that also has the advantage of being a solid public good.

The free internet of the workers and peasants? I mean, how will the websites make money?

maybe we're better off without websites that only exist to make money.

How do website owners pay for server costs if you think they shouldn't make money?

Should everyone be in a loss when they run a website?

i manage to do so using money i make elsewhere. the information i put on the internet is either of benefit to people or a matter of vanity. i don't afford special concern to people who want to use the internet for profit.

So you have never sold anything, or participated with other people or groups that have sold anything online because you believe that they should not use the internet for profit?

this rhetoric is not compelling to me.

This is not rhetoric and dodging a yes / no question is not an answer.

You didn't deny it.

So I am assuming you sold something or participated with other people or groups that have sold something for profit on the internet.

> i manage to do so using money i make elsewhere

And the place you work at most likely has an internet presence (highly likely) to sell products and services?

You don't want your place of work to make money and not pay their server bills if they have an internet presence?

You're living in a fantasy land in 2026.

I think if everyone with a website made a small financial loss on it, the web would be immeasurably better.

How?

Well in the end of the day, everything exists to make money. Because if we remove that, only goal becomes direct power - violence and domination - and it's too dystopian.

That's their problem to solve

Why do they have to make money?

So that the website... stays online?

Have you bought a domain before or anything online before?

Yes, I hosted a website for about two years. Paid for it from my own pocket. Had some fun, learned a few things.

There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?

Yes.

This predates websites, it's called commerce.

Pick any medium, humans will always find a way to transact with one another, it's been like this for thousands of years.

I don't understand why you think websites and the internet should be exempt from this?

> > There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?

Forget websites.

How are you going to pay the rent, or put food on the table for your children if you don't want to generate money?

Unless you're retired with savings (some on HN are), have an inheritance windfall or are living on government money, then you can do things that don't need an income.

Otherwise you need to generate an income.

Perhaps they have a point actually: if we assume that a significant proportion of society is retired with savings (and this is the case in the US - ~1% of population can afford a rich lifestyle on passive income alone, and ~5% can afford about a median lifestyle), then serving society may become a calling for those people - they need something to do after all - once everyone will understand that normal "jobs" became mostly harmful to society, or if not harmful, so poorly paid that anyone with even $2M in stocks will not be interested in doing them.

> There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?

Most of the world has always been this way. The idea of sharing and exploring for the sake of it was a Christian ideal that rose and fell with their influence in the west.

Multiculturalism exploits generosity; competing interests replaced shared goals. If you don't profit from your efforts, someone else will.

It's not speculative: if you make free space available to campers, the postmodern entrepreneur will sell access to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36686672

My personal website has been up for over two and a half decades. I've paid for hosting and for the domain name. Never had an ad on the site.

So do you expect everyone else to not earn an income from their website if they so choose?

> Never had an ad on the site.

You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?

  > So do you expect everyone else to not earn an income from their website if they so choose?

No. I expect the fact that a website _can_ be run without ads to become reasonably well known. Not that a website _must_ be run without ads.

> You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?

Yes, of course. And as per the conversion, there was no need to mention that obvious fact.

For a website to stay online, it is not required that the website itself make money, let alone that it do so via ads. For instance if your website is directly selling an actual product, you can make money by selling that product. Or you can make money by having an actual job, and use that money to pay for the website.

And if the place you work at has a website and internet presence which they get traffic for and use for inbound customers?

If they can't pay you because they don't have customers, how will you (in a job) pay for the website to stay online without a job without using your savings?

Mass surveillance has been the only thing where capitalists and communists wholeheartedly agreed to go all in. It has been pushed into law at every opportunity, done in grey areas when possible, and secretly when illegal.

It's evident proof that information is power.

They'll still surveil even if you pay for the product. Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.

> Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.

If customers cared, the additional income from being someone who didn't surveil could outstrip the income stream from surveilling.

I agree with you, and if you frequent tech circles you'd be under impression that the masses prioritize lack of surveillance and privacy. In my experience with IRL acquaintances, although anecdotal, exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.

That's my experience as well. However, I suspect a lot of it is not really understanding the situation, and not wanting to be bothered learning about it. In other words, I think it's possible those preferences could be changed with the right kind cultural or legal shifts. Even in my lifetime, I look at how massively public attitudes have changed around smoking, wearing seatbelts, and recycling, to take 3 examples. Each of those seemed equally immovable at one time.

Technologists seem to lack professional integrity. This blasé blame-the-victim attitude is completely normalized but I don’t think it makes sense if you zoom out far enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509

There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer.

The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.

It just takes some more explaining.

Most folks do care, they just don't understand. When you stop with the high level topics like "surveillance" and start in on the practical impacts like:

- They charge you more if they know you want something (ex - dynamic pricing).

- They try to get you addicted (gambling, vapes, social media)

- They feed you lies (curated social bubbles)

- They manipulate elections (targeted campaigns and ads, targeted social policies)

Etc... most people do actually care, they just struggle to relate the words the industry uses with the real impacts.

Folks tend to think of privacy like someone opening the bathroom door on them (and this gets immediate pushback... see all the articles about the Roomba cameras). But the surveillance we're under now is more subtle and insidious, less visceral. Harder for folks to understand without concrete impacts.

----

The reason so many tech people care is because lots of them get to watch the sausage being made, and they understand.

I know its won't solve everything but couldn't we teach digital hygiene at school and its importance. For myself I remember in English at high school being taught how different methods of advertising worked and that stuck with me.

Education is good in general, but because alternatives are not common and sometimes not even allowed, there are very few places left to avoid surveillance. Educated or not. Not to mention our schools use google docs.

  > exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.

But they do have something to hide.

Are they going to the toilet more often this week? Are they booking a flight for a funeral? Do they watch midget porn? Are they interested in science experiments that go boom? Did they just get a promotion at work? Did their car just fail the yearly inspection? Are they going on vacation and leaving the house empty for a week? Does their child have ADHD? Did their catalytic converter just get stolen? Is their phone model no longer receiving security updates? Is their child bullied at school? Did they have an abortion? Are they contemplating bankruptcy? Did they just start using a CPAP machine? Did they vote for an independent candidate? Do they listen to the local mosque's podcast? Do they smoke? Are they closet homosexual? Are they being sued? Did their dog just suffer liver failure? Did they put their teenage daughter's child up for adoption?

These are all things that your phone knows about you, which could lead to negative consequences if exposed - ranging from embarrasment to blackmail, higher prices to actual denial of services, scrutiny to arrest. Everyone has something to hide.

The old “vote with the wallet” fallacy

That's almost never the sole or core differentiator though. And getting customers to all coordinate and care is much more difficult than getting a couple CEOs to just decide to surveil.

It's also the market for lemons. You can't tell if they surveil you

Advertising doesn't require surveillance though.

No, but surveillance is profitable outside of advertising, and advertising provides a perfect cover for surveillance: It's hard to make things that can separate third-party content from surveillance from third-party content for advertising, or for UI JS libraries for that matter

I'm tired of the feigned helplessness. Well gee this is the only way things can be. Internet doesn't work without surveillance! Guess you don't want the internet! /s

Ads and surveillance are not inseparable. We don't need to accept surveillance as the price for a functional internet.

> feigned helplessness

Of whom?

Google and Meta are gigantic surveillance companies. It's their imperative that you keep allowing it. On top of that, most state actors love the idea of more surveillance.

Then you have huge portions of the population that simply don't care or don't know better and aren't going to start directly paying for anything.

I don't think we disagree on anything about that, but it does take some recognition of the problem that advertising isn't just lending political, but also technical cover to surveillance

> advertising is how folks make money on the web, the surveillance state will persist.

It is more pernicious. Those in the state who want to surveil will enlist those who want the obscene revenue from pervasive advertising. Working together, their lawyers will claim that "you never had any privacy or freedom anyway, so stop wriggling."

Even websites without ads often have tracking and fingerprinting simply for their own marketing efforts and security features.

are apps and phones more private?

Of course. Apple told me they care about my privacy.

  > but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web

Then we make this impossible.

This isn't a forum of marketers, this is a forum of engineers and makers. So... how do we make the next version of the internet fully private and prevent it from becoming overly centralized. How do we prevent companies like Google dictating the design with their browser dominance (chromium, not just Chrome)?

We definitely have some solutions to some of these problems but also need to work on others. We can probably build something that is fully encrypted and peer to peer (example projects exist!) but maintaining decentralization is still an unsolved problem. There's also issues like how we get people to buy in. Most of the population doesn't understand the nuance but does recognize there is a problem. Hell, even more informed places like HN will bicker on about the problems in certain software yet not acknowledge that there exists no perfect solution[0]. We just end up arguing and nothing gets solved, things just stay the same. That's the absolute worst part! People that want the same things end up becoming divided simply because we're really bad at listening to one another[1].

I'm sure it'll continue to be a cat and mouse game, but it also feels like many have given up. I'm exhausted too. But I'm still angry and annoyed. I'm tired and exhausted of being so tired and exhausted. To constantly be dealing with dark patterns. To constantly have things that should take 30 seconds take 30 minutes because of absolutely unnecessary (and often intentional) roadblocks. I'm tired of everyone trying to move so fast that it makes everything move so slow. I don't know how we got to a place where we're just thickening the jell-o we're trying to run through. How every little shortcut we take just makes the jell-o thicker and we pat ourselves on the back.

As we advance as a society the problems we have to solve only become more nuanced and complex, yet for some reason we've come to believe the they are simpler and easier to solve. We may have more powerful tools at hand, but a better tool doesn't make the problem you're trying to solve any less complex, it only can enable solving it or make some parts easier. The complexity is still in the problem and if we abstract it away too much then we only make things worse. IDK but somehow we've come to believe there are no such things as experts, and that we're all experts in everything. This wasn't possible in the past and our world is only more complicated, not less.

[0] I mentioned chromium so I'll use Firefox vs Chromium as an example. Every time the comparison is brought up people say how Chromium is "more complete" while ignoring how "complete" is predominantly defined by Google. The reason they have this power is browser dominance. Can you use de-googled Chromium? I'm personally unconvinced. You might be able to use something which takes out all (known) trackers, but not a Chromium that is void of Google's influence nor a Chromium that doesn't perpetuate Google dominance. But does that mean Firefox is "better"? It all depends on how you define that, and that's where the conversation gets lost. There's no truthful answer to this question and it is all extremely complicated and nuanced. There's never going to be a browser that checks all the boxes. We must give some things up in the pursuit of other things. Arguing the way we currently do is absolutely nonsensical.

[1] And by that, of course, I mean I'm a perfect listener and "you're" the problem. There's no other way to interpret me, my words are absolutely and unambiguously clear. Of course.

> Then we make this impossible.

It doesn't have to be. Building a thing is a red herring, if building things solved problems, all problems out to be solved by now. The natural inclination of the builder and maker is to create a thing to solve problems.

The reason the marketers tend to win is that they're closer to life and how it tends to actually work. People who think like engineers are in a significant minority. Real life is based on vibes.

So how do you defeat them? You pass laws and then you enforce them. And then you invest in education around the law and society so that the populace understands how the system works and how to participate in it.

Blog got the hug of death, I think. Archive link: https://archive.is/bpNAw

WHATWG wants to co-mingle document rendering with javascript (this is the real reason they are removing XSLT and not proposing a replacement, it skirts this enforcement) so that when you try to disable javascript or block tracking it breaks the document rendering, leaving the only option to leave Javascript enabled and ad blockers off. Other protocols gemini, gopher etc don’t have the same issues because they’re already excluding Javascript.

What is really needed is a hard fork of major browsers by a grass roots community to advance HTML standards to include partial template rendering solutions without the reliance on Javascript.

Of course this is a startup forum so the response is just going to be wittled down to observations about economic value. However if users start to change/fight then the economics will too.

It wouldn't be that weird a thought for me that, preferably a group of, nation states cough up some serious money and give this a real start, beginning, and end in the form of a stable release. This already happens with major science and space projects, with budgets of billions. A browser is not simply a bunch'a software, having a modular open browser is a major deal and benefit to society at this point. Perhaps arguably more valuable than pumping yet more energy in a particle accelerator and other of mankind's pet projects in search for the unknown unknowns and deal with more pressing known knowns first.

> preferably a group of, nation states cough up some serious money and give this a real start, beginning, and end in the form of a stable release

It doesn't take serious money. It takes a constant stream of "sub-serious" money, stable for a long time.

A large city could pay for that project. It doesn't take a group of nations, what it takes is non-standard politics.

I love this idea!

When Apple first released App Tracking Transparency, I immediately used it to block the trackers and I have not even thought about it since because it is so simple and useful.

What a contrast to modern websites which require all sorts of weird clicking gymnastics to disable similar tracking.

We should pass laws that require the weird clicking gymnastics to opt-in to tracking.

Instead of the default opt-in hidden in the terms and conditions nobody reads.

The EU did that and people still bitch about GDPR banners on websites.

They took what should have been a browser on/off switch and turned it into something almost worse.

GDPR isn't about cookies, or any specific tech. It's a GENERAL Data Protection Regulation.

On top of that it literally defines opt-out as the default state

As for browsers, imagine if world's largest advertising and tracking company that incidentally builds world's dominant browser and dominates all web standards would implement this as a browser switch instead of inventing new ways of tricking you into surveillance? https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923

GDPR didnt do it, lazy site owners that didnt want to read the legislation did.

Most sites dont even need those popups, but its easier to just shove one on your site than try to understand the specific situations which do need it.

Yeah, the banners/popups aren't required by gdpr, they're the "malicious compliance" solution site owners came up with because they don't want to comply with the limitations, and make it as difficult as possible for the user not to let them.

The law had good intention but bad implementation. Also the law takes so long to change. Once it became obvious that companies would bypass it by having clicking gymnastics they needed to quickly update the law saying that it should only take one click to opt out.

What is wrong with its implementation? All the cookie banners aren't in the law; their basically malicious compliance.

The original law had a rule that the opt out of all had to be just as prominent as opt in to all. Many companies didn't know that, so it took a year or so of enforcement for them to start getting the message.

Ironically Google couldn't disable third-party cookies even if they wanted to; it's seen as anti-competitive to other tracking networks and was blocked by the courts.

Really? Do you have a link? That sounds very interesting and very frustrating.

Regardless, because of such things I'm guessing the only ways to disable such tracking in the foreseeable future will still be 3rd party non-affiliated DNS/extensions or browsers such as Brave and Safari (to some extent).

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-googles-priv...

Disclosure: I worked on Privacy Sandbox.

Ironically Google is the world's largest advertising and tracking company and literally does everything in their power to trick users into tracking and surveillance. https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923

The problem wasn't "Google can't remove third-party cookies", he problem is "too much power in the hands of Google" and "conflicts of interest". From the link you posted below:

--- start quote ---

The investigation concerns Google’s proposals to remove third-party cookies (TPCs) on Chrome and replace TPCs functionality with a range of ‘Privacy Sandbox’ tools, while transferring key functionality to Chrome.

The CMA is particularly interested to hear any views on whether the proposed commitments are sufficient to address the CMA’s competition concerns regarding:

- unequal access to the functionality associated with user tracking

- self-preferencing Google’s own ad tech providers and owned and operated ad inventory

- imposition of unfair terms on Chrome’s web users

--- end quote ---

Spin off your surveillance tech, and there will be no problem. Oh wait...

Its amusing that Apple itself is one of the biggest ad companies that exists, fed entirely from their own users private data. Yet by simply pointing the finger away from themselves and helping their customers block other ad companies efforts, they seem to have gained complete trust of all their users and most dont even know how much Apple are making in ad revenue from their own data.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/14/apples-4b-ad-busi...

I trust Apple with my private data. I don't trust Google with it, and I don't trust Joe Blow's Sketchy Ass Apps & Ads Service with it. Simple as.

Exactly. Amusing indeed.

Why do you trust Apple with your private data? Unless you enable ADP, iCloud backups are only encrypted at rest and not end-to-end. So, Apple, law enforcement, etc. can just read your iMessage or WhatsApp messages if needed. Did you enable ADP? Well good luck convincing everyone you communicate with to enable it as well, or their backups will still have all your chats without E2E encryption.

WhatsApp pulls a similar trick on Android. It's E2E encrypted, but by default backups (done to Google Drive) are not. I think most users never enable encrypted backups.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a deal with law enforcement, where Apple and Meta can do and advertise E2E chats, but the defaults (which most users do not change) are such that law enforcement can still access them. But yeah, Apple and Google were part of PRISM too, so no big surprise I guess?

If you truly care about privacy, either completely disable iCloud backups or get a GrapheneOS phone. Also use Signal, because they exclude themselves from phone backups by default. So either chats are not backed up or they are backed up through Signal's own E2E backup service.

Use signal and disable notification previews… Apple saves even cleared notification text previews on device, which the feds just used in a recent case…

Yes, that is very true. Unfortunately, without a true non-Apple or non-Google OS, the ATT toggle is likely about as good as you can get. And it does stop the apps themselves getting raw access to your data, which is not something to sniff at.

A true non-Apple and non-Google OS already exists. Sent from my Librem 5 running GNU/Linux.

Wow, that is neat! I had never heard of that before. However, they still have a long way to go to even equal the capabilities of normal phones made by huge companies for a typical consumer. Whether that is normal app support or even just simple stuff like camera quality.

Although...that was likely never the main goal for that phone anyway.

The article you cite refutes your claim, explicitly bringing up the lack of access to user data.

I frankly don’t care if the App Store has advertisements. I would care if my data is (1) available to Apple to read by virtue of not being e2e encrypted, and (2) used to train models and target those advertisements.

> I would care if my data is (1) available to Apple to read by virtue of not being e2e encrypted, and (2) used to train models and target those advertisements.

Here we go:

Apple fined $8.5M for illegally collecting iPhone owners' data for ads (gizmodo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected (aalto.fi)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657

Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588

Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out (lapcatsoftware.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media) [but Apple still collects a lot!]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

I dont mean to be rude but you obviously dont do much research about companies you seem to care a lot about.

Apple have been caught time and time again undermining their users security and privacy, including syphoning off user data to government agencies etc.

The sibling post cites enough reading to be getting on with, but heres a few more of my favourites for good measure:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/12/apple-getting-sue...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...

In my case firefox + arkenfox + ublock origin advanced mode require all sorts of weird clicking to enable similar tracking :)

I haven't looked at arkenfox. But I went to the cover your tracks tool by EFF yesterday and it was still able to uniquely fingerprint my computer, even with Firefox strict privacy and unlock origin.

I think unless you run stock mullvad/Tor browser, you're leaking who you are. Sad but true. I wish canvas and webgl fingerprinting were disabled/crippled by default.

it isn't difficult. Just use ip + browser memory + hardware like gpu + some parts of useragent + OS and it is going to be accurate like 95%.

When Apple first released App Tracking Transparency, I immediately used it to block the trackers

There seems to be a common misconception that this blocks trackers, which is not the case. Use a DNS-based ad/tracker blocker and watch the logs and you'll see that many apps happily track you. As far as I understand, ATT blocks is cross-app/website tracking. If you deny, the app does not get access to the Identifier for Advertisers, meaning that tracking services cannot use a single identifier that is used across apps. While this initially had a large financial impact (see the article), trackers have probably developed other ways to correlate data from apps/websites now.

The real solution would be for Apple/Google to offer an option to completely disable in-app trackers and if an app would violate it, boot them from the App Store.

Of course, they would never do that because they make a lot of money from targeted advertising with their own ad networks, so either they would have to block themselves or get in hot water with regulators.

Put differently, Apple and Google are not your friend here.

Hmm yes I should have been more specific. I am aware that it does not block trackers...my Pi-hole logs are still full of sketchy/tracking domains.

I simply meant that the unique ID can't be used to track me anymore, at least across different third party application companies. I would edit my comment but it is too late now.

My opinion (probably an unpopular one) is that tracking for advertising is merely the excuse to justify widespread surveillance. I don't think all the advertising revenue that is purported to be in play stacks up. I personally do not think advertising directs my purchasing. I don't think it directs others either.

I get that this is Google's business, but perhaps a large amount of their 'business' is actually from the government system (directly or indirectly) - they merely have to pretend to be running an advertising business.

I'm saying that the whole point of advertising was surveillance from the beginning.

I think this blog won the most unserious design of the year.

I don't know about design, but I think there was an article there somewhere. In other news, I got a score of 3000 or so.

Whenever I read your articles, I get distracted by the space invaders and just play that instead. Maybe this is a problem with me being a bit ADHD, but I feel like I am not the only one

I just played for a couple of minutes and didn't even finish the article. Also suffering from ADHD but in my defense space invaders is pretty good with mouse controls.

Also played the game, but I'm just easily entertained, prone to procrastination given the chance... and kind of lazy sometimes.

Play and read simultaneously. Its nice.

Are you guys 12

famously, once you age past 12, you are no longer allowed to find anything fun.

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis

"If we let ourselves, we will always be waiting for distractions to end before we can get down to work"

- C.S. Lewis

> me being a bit ADHD

Wait, what article?

that was my experience too!

If the author had something important to say, that really undermines it.

The so didn't, that they delegated the entire thing to an AI. That and the horrible horrible font.

i was just scanning the comments and decided to not click through until i saw yours -- space invaders is now what i'm doing for the next hour.

I wanted to read, but my cursor was a hungry monster and so I chased after things to eat. After I played this for a while I had to close the tab. I think if you have something to say, having a cursor with an animation is a bad idea. It distracts from the content.

I found it delightful at first then afterwards slightly distracting. The current state of websites on average is very boring even if practical.

The government is going to surveil. That's not going to change.

It's whether or not warrantless searches are admissible; and they generally arent.

There's also the issues of geo-fenced warrants and the FISA courts in the U.S.

Warrant processes and issuance should not be secret nor generic enough to allow for "blanket" hoovering of Personally Identifiable Information.

I tend to agree but fear that people will value 'safety' over personal freedom. If these acts prevent x crimes, allow people to walk the streets, etc then people will think 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'. We as a society will have to accept more deaths and crimes by not implementing total surveillance. Its going to be hard to convince people of that if governments can demonstrate the benefits.

Show me where these have done any good at stopping crime. Seriously. The prism program director testified infront of congress that they didn't stop any attacks and wouldn't be able to because it was a needle in a hay stack

Surveillance has always been baked into consumerism similar to foreign aid. A large part of foreign relations is capital and rhetoric.

Sorry to nitpick but tracking and surveillance are not the same thing. Go back to the last century for a second, before all this 21st-century tech came along. Just because your cell phone and towers would be able to track what rough region (let's call it "site") you were visiting, that doesn't mean they were surveilling you.

Surveillance implies things about bith intended usage and actual usage, etc. that -- simply put -- do not need to hold when you're tracking something. If the argument is genuinely that cookies have genuinely been used to place us under surveillance rather than mere tracking -- I have nothing inherently against it, but you need to support it with evidence. Simply pointing to the fact that they track some fact or metric that indirectly relates to you is not sufficient evidence of that.

And to be clear, I'm not saying I like tracking or we should be fine with it. I hate it too. But it's also a turnoff seeing people smearing one thing as another, and I don't think it's a great strategy to help win support for your cause.

The difference is the intention. A corporation maybe tracking. The same data, once given to the governance surveillance teams, is then used to surveil. Same info and mechanisms.

"Sorry to nitpick but tracking and surveillance are not the same thing. Go back to the last century for a second, before all this 21st-century tech came along. Just because your cell phone and towers would be able to track what rough region (let's call it "site") you were visiting, that doesn't mean they were surveilling you."

Buddy, that's exactly how they are blowing people up with drones these days

> Buddy, that's exactly how they are blowing people up with drones these days

And... your point is what? Tracking can't be used to kill people? Anything that kills people is by definition "surveillance"?

The irony of using AI to generate an article on this topic...

More irony: with cookies disabled the article gets stuck in a continuous reload loop.

I agree. Was annoyed by it.

Page does not load in Safari and Chrome for various reasons

> and Chrome

Works fine here Version 147.0.7727.101 (Official Build) (64-bit) (.102 is the Mac version)

Edit: Based on a comment below, you may have cookies disabled.

LLM written article

Comparing digital ads to the Stasi is just peak Western snowflake behavior, I'm sorry.

There are many imaginary arguments about harm in the article, with precisely zero actual examples or cases. Data brokers, buy data, stalk somebody. Can you share at least something? No, it's all just hand waving. Because none of these people can offer any. The fact that the author still thinks Cambridge Analytica meant something says a lot as well. This was a scandal out of nothing.

I, for one, am extremely grateful that, as I was growing up with not much money, I was still able to access more or less the same Internet as people in the US. I don't care about a black-box algorithm looking at my habits to figure out that I love backpacks and microbrand watches, especially if it enables free platforms for me.

Stasi didn't watch you to sell your crap online, you know. They had much worse motives.

If anything, we're now going backward because of the enormous marginal costs of inference. With AI, people aren't on the same page (even a $20 subscription is a lot of money in many countries).

Do you think if the Stasi, or someone like them, ever come into power, they'll just ignore all this extra surveillance we've built for free?

Not really a hypothetical - look at China and Russia, or Saudi Arabia [1]. I'll let others make the case to add the US and European countries to that list - not because I don't believe they belong on the list, but just because I'm too lazy to meet the higher bar of evidence that goes with going against groupthink.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter#...

I know exactly what happens to Russia and all of it has nothing to do with targeted ads or anything.

Putin's cronies literally own the country's only remaining unblocked social network. They tend to prosecute people for public content, even comments or likes, but there's not a single case where ad targeting data was used.

And they have the capacity to locate a person through multiple other ways, primarily cell networks.

Well, ever since the ads i see on iPhone Safari are utterly irrelevant bullshit because tracking there is crippled. Was 1996 88x31 banners world that just advertised random stuff, better than what we have today? They gave websites less money taking more space and annoyed users more.

Yes, personally I prefer the concept of random ads over tracked, profiled, and targeted.

Not in the EU

We did not - going to a website nowadays is akin to booting your grandma’s windows 95 PC - popups everywhere, banzai buddy, 20 toolbars, just utterly virus laden filth. The web is a place that used to have amazing views but it’s now only filled with billboards. Someday a new set of internets will come up and they’ll be good - it’s not expensive to make things good, it just needs to not be borne of utter libertarian zero-social-contract profit seeking.

Hell, I was shopping for furniture yesterday, and I swear all the popups even with ad blockers were there to prevent me from buying things. It doesn’t seem to be helpful for the stated goal.

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