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Comment by jsrozner | Hacker News Reader

Yes, mostly, but google shouldn't be able to "look" at it either. No entity should be able to derive a commercial benefit from my data; any commercial value of my own data should accrue entirely to me.

You could build a test: the company should not be able to derive any additional value from 100 fully anonymized interactions with the same person as from 100 interactions with a deanonymized individual. Google obviously fails this test since targeted advertising is much more valuable if you have non-anonymized entities.

The doctor can store my data because it is necessary to provide me with the service, but the doctor shouldn't be able to sell my data, nor correlate it with their other patients' data.

Of course, a doctor will learn from treating me and become a better doctor, so you can't actually enforce this totally in practice. But it's like porn - you know when you see the violation.

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Let me get it straight. You want to be able to engage with a commercial entity, but you don't want that commercial entity to be able to look at anything that results from you interacting with them? That doesn't even sound like a good user experience. I want the companies I engage in business with to be able to look at the data within the confines of our relationship and be able to do useful things with it.

If you don't want Google to be able to do anything at all with information you put into their system, easy, don't open an account!

I can agree with some of the other points, Google shouldn't be hoovering up mountains of data, etc. Just have to be careful of extremes. If you enshrine something bad in something as difficult to change as a constitution, you're stuck with it, and all your unintended consequences, potentially forever. You say "you can't actually enforce this totally in practice" but have you ever met a law firm? They would absolutely take the most extreme possible interpretation and milk all of society for billions a year if they can find an appropriate avenue.

This kind of extremism is what derailed some constitutional reforms in South America over the past decade. It started with reasonable center-left people saying some reasonable things, the radical left seized the process and wrote the final draft and faced with a choice between insanity and an unsatisfactory status quo people made the only palatable choice.

Your argument applies to the grocery pricing situation: "if you don't want the grocery store to aggregate all of your interactions, don't shop there".

All aspects of the commercial transaction should be clear and transparent: I give the grocery store cash, it gives me food. My data shouldn't be taken from me, and nor should I have to consent to my data to be taken from me in order to shop there.

Google can store and serve me my data. It cannot use my data for commercial purposes that do not directly serve me. Nor should it be able to aggregate my interactions in a way that serves to increase its own profit, as this, over time, increases the relative power of the firm.

Nothing is “taken” when a shopkeeper writes down in his notebook that Sam Gallo bought two loaves of bread and a gallon of milk.

I’m glad the parent of this thread specified the need for a Constitutional amendment. Anything less would be an obvious intrusion on free speech.

I agree. Hand-taken notes are valid. If a single individual wants to follow me around in the physical world and record my every action, then so be it.

But if the single individual begins using robots to follow me around, it becomes problematic. The issue is in the power of the technology that is deployed. What's less clear is where to draw the line: can the shopkeeper type his notes (yes), but can he fill his store with surveillance cameras that correlate my every entry into his store (this one becomes unreasonable and this is the case for which we need laws).

When you buy a 600g loaf of whole wheat bread from Ralph's Supermarket at 6:17pm on Tuesday Sep 22 2026 for USD4.99, there is zero (0) reason to consider that any more your data than Ralph's data.

Just as you can use that set of facts plan and optimize your budget, so should Ralph's be able to use that data to plan and optimize their business.

That the company can use the fact that a customer purchased something is completely separate from tying that information to me.

And they should not be able to sell that data to data brokers, whether is anonymized or tied to individual customers.

Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly? You could make a pretty solid argument that it does.

No, ads are approximately never to your benefit, and if they are, it's entirely by accident. Their entire purpose is to corrupt your preferences or misinform you to the benefit of the advertiser. If you actually wanted to buy the thing, they wouldn't need to spend money on ads (and anyone competent would measure lift over a baseline, not just raw "did people buy the thing" for campaign effectiveness).

If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.

The ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores serve to inform me when stores that I normally don't shop at have something I already want on sale at a better price than my usual stores.

How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?

Maybe you think so, but if Youtube offered a choice between targeted ads or 5x more untargeted I bet that > 90% of people would take the former.

There is no reason we have to make the false choice you present. That is simply Google holding a gun to our heads to encourage us to choose something that is in Google's best interests rather than our own.

The choice should be between X targeted ads or X non-targeted ads. They can still target ads based on the content of the page, no different from how television and print ads worked prior to all of this data collection.

“Holding a gun to our heads”?

How is that metaphor apt?

Because in OP's hypothetical, it is the equivalent of a gangster saying "I can shoot you in the face or punch you in the face, which do you prefer?"

They present a false choice where Google is saying "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" and we are forced to choose between bad and worse. There is no reason we should not have a less bad choice: the same amount of ads but non-targeted. We, as customers, should not be held hostage by the massive corporations.

This is Youtube. You can just not go there. You have no right to set the terms they offer their services by.

This is like saying "You can just sail to Europe for your week of meetings." While it may be pedantically true, it's absolutely false from a functional standpoint for most people.

YouTube holds an absolutely dominant position in user created content. I have purchased products from many companies who post their troubleshooting video content on YouTube and only on YouTube. In many cases, those videos are literally the only content they provide. They do not provide any textual troubleshooting content.

Telling people "Just don't use YouTube" is a functionally useless piece of advice as they cannot "just not go there."

Also, I'm a paying customer of YouTube, why would I "have not right to set the terms they offer their services by?" Why is it that Google gets dictator-level control over the relationship, especially when they are operating as a monopoly?

We the People absolutely have the power to dictate terms to Google or any other company.

Sorry, what?

We’re talking about offering users a choice of ad options on a site they’re choosing to visit.

That’s nothing at all like a gangster threatening physical harm.

And businesses that are offered the option of paying "protection money" can simply go out of business, right?

Acting like YouTube is a service that is not functionally required to use in the modern world is a disingenuous argument at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

There is so much content that folks end up needing to access for so many valid reasons that is only available on YouTube. Plenty of companies only post troubleshooting explainers on YouTube, as one example. I am not "choosing to visit" YouTube in those cases, I am forced by a third party. And I'm being forced because YouTube has functionally built a monopoly on this type of content.

You might as well be telling someone to "Just buy a helicopter and fly yourself" because they are unhappy with the quality of roads in their city.

Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly?

It does until that mechanism is turned against me, as I have to assume it will be.

What does that mean?

I don't want my grocery list sold to my health insurance company, for example.

If you pay a bank for use of a secure deposit box to store private documents, would you be upset if they started advertising services to you based on the contents of those documents?

Or if your telephone service began messaging with offers for products on what you discussed in your phonecalls?

Yet it's extremism to think Google etc shouldnt be able to do this.

But Google is a monopoly, so you have little choice in the matter.

Unfortunately these things are never so clean as in the theoretical model. As a monopoly, there are likely many situations where interaction with said monopoly is unavoidable.

> nor correlate it with their other patients' data.

Halting that would pretty much be the end of public health analysis or real-world work on medication effectiveness/adverse reactions. We do a lot of work with deidenitifed data to find health patterns in populations.

I agree. One of the things this debate reflects is that societies really do need substantial trust: I want to trust that if my healthcare data is aggregated, then it will actually be used to serve society (and me).

In practice, data is often aggregated and then used to deprive some folks of healthcare, or sold to a pharma company below cost, with the pharma company then turning around and maximizing drug profits, where the drug was developed from the underpriced public data.

Maybe the law needs to be more like code and less up to the whims of whatever judicial interests are present at the time.

Tracing code manually isn’t hard for a seasoned dev. Write it in BASIC if you have to lmao

> but the doctor shouldn't be able to sell my data, nor correlate it with their other patients' data

This definitely happens, at least in the UK. With anonymised data.

I love the downvotes, probably from the people who like making money screwing over their fellow citizens.

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