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Comment by robterrell | Hacker News Reader

The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere.

That makes sense. Why can't we have both? If Google needs to store all my context data off in the cloud somewhere, why not absolutely guarantee that no one will get my data without my permission or a court order? And then earn my trust by defending my right to data privacy?

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Google has done just that:

1. When DOJ sent Google a subpoena for search logs, Google fought it in court, while Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL did not: http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/...

2. Google is lobbying to change federal law to require search warrants backed by probable cause and signed by a judge for stored cloud email (and Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, etc.) files, a privacy protection opposed by the Obama DOJ: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20123710-281/google-facebo...

3. Google began requiring police to obtain search warrants for email after the Warshak decision nationally, even though it was binding only in a few states. So did (from memory) Facebook and Microsoft.

4. Google became the first tech company to disclose information about FBI warrantless data acquisition through NSLs in March, and in April became the first tech company to challenge their legality in court: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57572634-83/google-offers-d... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577958-38/google-fights-...

  > why not absolutely guarantee that no one will get my
  > data without my permission or a court order?

Google is a US company, and current US law permits the government to demand private user data without having a court order.

Options to solve this are to either move Google HQ out of the US to some country without such laws, or lobby for changes to US laws. The first is not practical, and the second takes a long time.

> The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to.

This does not make sense to me. And actually, it sounds a lot like employee cool-aid. Not everyone wants such an interface and it's not given that you need to know anything about the person it's talking to. In fact, I want the AI that I interact with to be perfectly anonymous and give the same answers to everybody.

In fact, I think I would trust search more if it were totally anonymous. What I searched for last week may or may not impact my search this week, so don't go assuming it will. I want the "pure" results, not filtered by what some algorithm "thinks."

Example: a friend runs a car repair shop and sends me email to my gmail account. When I search for car repair shop, should the AI prioritize my friend's shop in the results? What if a car repair shop sent out spam that didn't get filtered out of my inbox yet? What if I gave my email to the shop a year ago when I entered a sweepstakes?

The more I think about it, the only reason I can see to gather personal info is to benefit Google by selling more expensive advertizing. If google provided "pure" search results without using any personalized info, that would be the best in all situations.

Because then you can't sell ads.

Google could definitly still sell ads (it doesn't need to give private data to third party to do that).

Sure. But if it did, it could sell more ads.

Everything Google does is about ad sales. Self driving cars? What are you going to do when your car does the driving for you? Consume media of course, with ads all over it! Etc, etc. Which is not a good or a bad thing in and of itself, it's what they do, like McDonald's sell hamburgers. The question you must ask yourself is do you want Big Mac and Fries for every meal?

> Everything Google does is about ad sales.

Interesting contention.

Could you explain exactly how paid web services that do not embed advertising that Google provides (paid Google Apps, and backend services like App Engine, Computer Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Datastore, etc.) are "about ad sales" rather than about leveraging Google's core technical competencies in search, cloud storage, and web services to generate non-advertising revenue streams?

Sure. These things are about getting new and interesting companies to build on Google's infrastructure. Then when the time comes to acquire them and monetize them through advertising, all the integration is already done.

Interestingly I signed up for the trial of Google App Engine. The only thing they wanted to approve me was for me to enter my GMail password. In other words, they'd already scanned my email and decided if I was a good candidate. Worrying, no?

> Sure. These things are about getting new and interesting companies to build on Google's infrastructure. Then when the time comes to acquire them and monetize them through advertising, all the integration is already done.

That seems to be a strained explanation, particularly in the case of paid Google Apps.

> Interestingly I signed up for the trial of Google App Engine. The only thing they wanted to approve me was for me to enter my GMail password. In other words, they'd already scanned my email and decided if I was a good candidate. Worrying, no?

The trial period for App Engine was, I think, limited for the purpose of controlling rate of growth on the platform until it was ready to be thrown wide open. I don't think there was evaluation involved at all, which is why they didn't need anything other than your login information.

When Google has rolled out products with limited previews with evaluation criteria, they've had applicants provide explanations of their intended use and other information.

> Everything Google does is about ad sales. Self driving cars? What are you going to do when your car does the driving for you? Consume media of course, with ads all over it!

Of course, you make perfect sense. I guess we know why if Google gets into private spaceflight.

And in fact, it doesn't. http://www.google.com/policies/technologies/ "We don’t sell users’ personal information."

So, there’s a semantic trick here.

Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in <certain medication>, Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has <medical problem>.

Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?

> Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in <certain medication>, Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has <medical problem>.

> Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?

No. Its selling the service of advertising to people for whom some fact holds.

The rest is assumption on the part of the party purchasing the advertising based on the fact of that purchase and behavior in response to the advertising. The response to the advertising is what provides personal information, just as it is in the case of nontargetted advertising in offline media where the advertising includes a call to action which is directed (through the content of the add rather than user-specific targeting) to people for whom certain facts hold.

Unless you are going to argue that everyone who sells advertising space to people who include a call to action that involves a response to the party purchasing the advertising is "selling personal information" since they are selling advertisers a mechanism by which a message to can be sent to which the response can be used to deduce personal information, then, no, what Google is doing isn't selling personal information.

No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action.

That is a false equivalency.

I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google. Of course I consider my criticism to be broad enough to apply to similar situations involving other ad networks (and to Facebook), but we are discussing specifically Google’s privacy policy.

> No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action.

No, I'm saying that the personal information that the advertisers get is what they deduce from the response to the call to action. Filtering who sees the ad (among other functions, this isn't actually the most important) serves a mechanism to attempt to shape the pool of people who respond to the call to action, but its not really different (in terms of the advertiser being able to derive personal information) from the use of the actual content of the ad to influence which people who are exposed to it will respond.

> I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google.

Pointing out errors in your argument isn't attacking you. And, to be sure, the errors in your argument have nothing to do with the fact that it references Google, but with the fact that it posits a false equivalency between selling personal information and selling target advertising placement based on the fact that advertisers can derive personal information from the active responses of advertising viewers to the calls to action in targetted ads.

"People for whom some fact holds" IS the very definition of personal information.

What's missing from the GP's example is showing the ad for medication to the same user on a later unrelated search. On any given search, I would expect an ad-sponsored search provider to give me ads related to the current search term. If the seach provider stores my search history and serves me ads from previous search terms, that is personal information being sold, in my opinion.

> "People for whom some fact holds" IS the very definition of personal information.

Yes, but selling the service of showing something to those people isn't selling personal information, because the entity selling the service keeps the personal information and uses it on behalf of the entity purchasing the service.

Selling personal information is disclosure. Selling a service in which the seller uses personal information to provide the service is use. There is a meaningful difference between an entity using personal information and an entity disclosing personal information to third parties. There can be legitimate grounds to be concerned about either, but its not helpful to conflate them.

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