Don't Trust Google (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Don't Trust Google (2002)

idlewords.com

152 pointskryptiskt83 comments

And 14 years later there still "is no evidence or even reason to suspect that Google is not being an honest broker. The searches give good results, the rankings seem fair, the service remains free, and we haven’t heard of anyone being arrested for running a dodgy query."

So while the author is right about potential dangers mentioned in the penultimate paragraph, it's been more than a decade and those fears haven't really materialized. The article sounds exactly like things that are being said in anti-Google threads in 2014.

Here's a few ways the post became true:

Tracking Google Apps for Education students and even paid Google Apps for Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Conspiring to kill SkyHook just with its outsized influence like Microsoft used to. http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking. http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

Google employee access personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email? http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

Paid inclusion for shopping search results http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-...

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...

> lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth

This seems like a really strange argument to me.

I'm sure you're aware that this collection of yours pertains to complaints of interested parties, and that if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture.

But seeing as you had a cherry picked list of the harshest (and incomplete) reportings at the ready, augmented with you're own slanted commentary my guess is that a "full picture" isn't what you're aiming for here.

>if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture

Why don't you expound on that very different picture instead of such a hand wavy kneejerk dismissal without any reasoning or references?

Perhaps not yet but they have amassed all the data the author describes and much more.

For example, I just drove half way across the UK. Google knows that because I was using Google maps.

I stopped at Pizza Hut. Google knows that.

I stopped at a BP garage. Google knows that.

I searched for houses in an area in the UK via right move. Google knows that because the embedded map knows my Google cookie...

And so forth...

Now I'm not saying they have done any evil but perhaps it's fair to consider that the past doesn't always hold true in the future and by then you've already hung yourself.

Edit: why down vote facts? Someone work at Google?

Google doesn't specifically know you stopped at Pizza Hut or the BP garage. It uses coarse location (GPS being too taxing on battery to get constant location updates) which has an accuracy of 100+ meters. So it would know you stopped somewhere around the Pizza Hut, but not specifically that you went inside. Could have just as easily gone to the Tesco next door.

Actually yes it does know I stopped at both of those location.

1. The BP garage has a wireless AP with a known SSID to them. Location services uses this, the cell network and the GPS to build an accurate location. There are no other wireless networks at that location. I was at this location for around 10 minutes. Google location history shows this location on the mark.

2. They know that I was at the Pizza hut because I left a review in Google+ and was approximately near it at the time and stayed in roughly the same location for about 90 minutes. Google location history shows this location on the mark.

It's all about correlating events and data, not specifically accurate bits of data.

Granted these are all assumptions but they would stand as evidence in a court of law.

Now I'm not fussed about this myself as it's something I trade for the service, but the data is there.

Besides which, consumer GPS has a resolution down to 3M, 95th percentile - not 100M [1].

[1] http://www.gps.gov/technical/ps/2008-SPS-performance-standar...

I don't agree with gp's dismissal, but the point about gps and coarse location was that continuously updating gps (for full 3m resolution) would be too taxing on the batteries -- not that gps resolution was poor.

Don't think that applies if parent was using google maps to navigate, though -- how useful would navigation be without correct and updated position? Not to mention wi-fi location, correlation with plus posts/check-ins etc...

You didn't explain how they knew about the PH/BP, which makes people assume it was due to location data (like your first example).

However, as for comment #1, Google doesn't use the SSIDs to determine locations on mobile, they use the [MAC Addresses](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...). They do have a database that also includes SSIDs for these MAC addresses, but there could be a dozen SSIDs around you at any given time, and you could be at any one of those businesses. I have already explained that Google uses coarse location to determine your location, not fine because of battery issues (and you can check this in Android, it's listed under the lower-power location use). Coarse doesn't use GPS, and its accuracy is generally 100+ meters because of this. It will know the general area you were at (and, no, it won't know you were there for 10 minutes, as it only picks up your location at fixed intervals which IIRC is above 10 minutes), but it won't know, specifically, where you were in that area.

I will concede on the Pizza Hut location, but it would have only known you were there because of the review, not because of the location (for the same reason as above).

I purposely avoided explaining it to demonstrate a point: the average user doesn't know this or understand it. They understand the outcome only.

Sorry, you are 100% correct with the SSID vs MAC. If I'm in my car with the handset externally powered, does it use course location or does it use all three sources because on KitKat on my Moto G, it gives me the option to use all three at cost of battery life?

I disagree with your assessment of the location ability. It's definitely better than you explain it. I can go through at least 100 previous data points in my history and it's spot on each time.

The way Google gets your approximate location is not as simple as just sending Google a list of visible access points and figuring out where the Google Maps car was when it saw that access point, it also passes along the signal strength of every access point and because the Street View car is recording signal strength and GPS location for every measurement as it's driving by it allows for a much finer resolution than just a binary "can I see this access point".

Basically, even though there was a dozen access points visible, that increases accuracy, not decreases. Like if your phone reported that it's got the same signal strength for BP and PH it will estimate that you are in between them with other access points helping to conclude that you aren't off to the side otherwise the signal strength to xyz access point would be higher.

In other words, Just sending a list of access points and signal strengths to Google gives them a rather accurate guess as to where you are in the world, much greater than just 100+ meters.

Also, Android can also figure out when you are in a car moving at highway speeds thanks to the accelerometer and is quite accurate at telling when you're walking, jogging, biking, or driving. Enable Google Now on your phone and it will send you a summary of how many miles of what activity you've done in the last month with rather surprising accuracy for me personally.

You haven't explained why Google wouldn't know about PH/BP.

In Apple's implementation which I do know well the WiFi triangulation is enabled even at the coarsest resolution. Which is obvious since it is low cost. So if indeed there is one SSID/MAC in the area and it is coming from BP why would Google not know this ?

The presence of a SSID isn't indicative that you went to said business. If I lived above a McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Subway, all with their respective SSIDs, that doesn't mean I am at any of the businesses. So sure, Google could know that there's a Pizza Hut near you, but they have no way of knowing whether you're actually at the Pizza Hut, or, say, the Tesco next door.

If you have an android phone you may want to check out your location history: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0

Certainly far better than 100 meters in my case.

I think 100m is the best they can guarantee. You may get better results based on the data they have in your area (especially WiFi triangulation), but it's not guaranteed. In any case, the best they have for me is: http://imgur.com/vVbqSvr which is coarse enough to not actually provide much data. I could have been to any one of a dozen or so businesses in that area.

We all know it was Tim Hortons.

This is by far one of the creepiest things I've seen.

Also one of the most useful.

Funny thing though - Google could easily blow all those Endomondo et al. "share my running" apps out of the water by just allowing to publicly share a time-delimited subset of your location history...

I am really confused here. Why would Google Maps not use GPS at its highest resolution ?

No kidding, any Maps user can see their GPS location being collected when they use Maps. I think mynameisvlad may mean they wouldn't necessarily know if you stopped at a specific place as part of the location data collected when you're not using Maps, because in that case it may not use GPS. But I have a nice phone, battery life isn't really a concern to me, some software on the phone probably knows that too, and I don't trust the word of a random person on HN that the software wouldn't do an opportunistic GPS look up at least every now and then. In any case I want my phone to use GPS whenever it can so that it's as accurate as it can be, that's why I have in my settings GPS always enabled, with high accuracy (uses GPS, wi-fi, and mobile networks) and indeed I have Google Location Reporting on as well which looks up my location throughout the day whether or not I'm using Maps.

Because in this instance, the argument/discussion is about the phone specifically, not Google Maps. When my phone is on stand-by, like when I'm driving and not using the GPS, the phone will rely on less battery-taxing things like triangulation, Wi-Fi AP's that Google knows (MAC/SSID ?). Google Maps would however use GPS when it is on, not when the user hasn't specifically turned it on.

> I just drove half way across the UK. Google knows that because I was using Google maps.

I think you're a little confused.

> I think you're a little confused.

It's you who's confused (as you said previously, no offence). The post you replied to talked about "I just drove half way across the UK. Google knows that because I was using Google maps", and the mention of not using highest resolution is about Google (not Maps) using other means to determine location. Clear difference between Google Maps and Google.

Silly technicalities, don't know what the downvote was for, was only trying to help your initial confusion :)

> [Google] uses coarse location (GPS being too taxing on battery to get constant location updates) which has an accuracy of 100+ meters.

You mean Google Maps -- the app -- doesn't use location data from GPS? I am pretty sure that isn't true.

If you meant Google Maps -- the service -- then the sentence doesn't make much sense, since it doesn't use any location service on the mobile directly. It is just interfacing with the mobile app over a network.

No I mean Google, the company. Specifically, Google pings your location at intervals (building their Location history, linked above). For this specific use (which isn't tied to Google Maps), it's done through the Google Play Services, which, under the Location setting on your phone is listed as "Low battery use". This indicates that it is not using the GPS chip, but relying only on WiFi and Cell tower triangulation.

Uhmmm, nearly everything he described became a reality. Personalized search results, mass data gathering, filtering / censorship of results, the growth of Google to megalithic proportions ('next Microsoft'), etc.

> filtering / censorship of results

Could you please elaborate on this one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

What is wrong with HN that simple questions with no obvious agenda are getting downvotes? It's becoming impossible to have even a simple conversation here any more.

(sorry, yes, rant ..., and far more deserving of downvotes than the parent)

Not to open up a whole other can of worms here, but I've heard people blame Reddit for an influx of downvote brigade types.

Regardless of where they're coming from, I know what you mean. I wish at the very least we'd see more questions or rebuttals or whatever being replied to the posters.

New people (I am one of them as you will see if you go to my page) do not have the ability to down vote. From what I understand, the assumption is that by the time people get to the magic number (currently 500 I believe), they will have been here long enough to understand what to down vote.

I'd say the best recourse we have available is to set showdead to yes. I think it is quite obvious that we are not supposed to down vote things just because we disagree.

I can imagine a system like stack overflow where down voting a top level comment takes away like a tenth of a point from the down voter so if the down voter does nothing but down vote, they'll ultimately lose the privilege.

See any given DMCA takedown request for Google to filter search results. There's more than 1.5m to look through.

https://chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi

Aside from the fact that Google doesn't have much choice WRT to DMCA and it's the US government fault, there's this funny thing about ChillingEffect that it doesn't really censor that much.

For instance, let me search for "Edge of Tomorrow full movie". At the bottom of the page I can see that some results were removed due to DMCA request. There's a link to the complaint:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1802711

Voilà! All the "censored" links enumerated right there (many of them working).

Censorshop by Google : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

In addition to "Right to be forgotten" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. There are many intersting cases I haven't heard about. But my general impression is that Google is not giving in to censorship requests easily and try to go around them in any way possible. See the DMCA "censored results" that are available one click away at ChillingEffects.

As for "Right to be forgotten", I'm happy to see they're fighting it in whatever way they can.

I'm not saying Google is crystal clear. I just don't see obvious signs of malice that is often attributed to it by people here.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there's been more than a few people arrested in-part based on their google queries, some of them wrongly and some of them rightly so.

I believe at least that "internet history" has been featured in legal proceedings (arrests/trials) -- I'm not sure if there have been warrants issued based on getting search history from google. I'd love to hear more, if anyone has a reference either way.

Google itself might have remained relatively benign, but the fears have absolutely materialised on the government side. Google is now clearly being used as a point of central control over the internet with the "right to be forgotten", the NSA interceptions, etc. The fact the internet made this far has been largely due to its decentralised nature. The point of the article was that centralisation of any of its functions undoes that robustness.

and weirdly enough google services that compete with eg yelp are almost always at the top! sure couldn't be them using their near-monopoly in search to juice their other businesses, could it?

Antitrust lawsuits are a powerful deterrent, otherwise they surely would have gone ahead.

The evilness has been materialized, you just dont want to acknowledge it - Occupy Wallstreet was effectively dismantled, one of the biggest protest movements in modern time as well as Tea Party. The biggest thefts in history went by, quite efficiently put down - and you think that the NSA, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple were not complecent in those events? That the big data aboundant about the people was not used against them?

Who knows whom, where they go, what they read, what theyre interested in, what they search for, what they say to each other. A good college CompSci student with that data could pick out the troublemakers/leaders.

> A good college CompSci student with that data could pick out the troublemakers/leaders.

Occupy fell apart because it didn't have leaders. Or any coherent agenda. It was a bunch of people dissatisfied with the status quo without any realistic prescription for improving it.

The Tea Party at least knew what they wanted. Their problem was taking money from and thereby becoming owned by the entrenched Republican power brokers.

Neither of their failings had anything to do with Google.

Got an android tablet for 94 year-old grandma a week ago. To simplify her experience I turned off most services she doesn't need. Every time I visit, Google has hoodwinked her into switching something on. Location services, Google+, Google now. She only wants mail and pics. Yesterday I got her an iPad because Apple just makes money on the devices and doesn't spin their BS web of ad-based services at grandma.

From an ex Google absolute fanboy writing this on a Nexus. They used to be an example of open trustworthy behaviour. Now they're just another company to me. The ultimate 'you're the product' company at that, and I dislike that phrase.

I'm not going to comment on the horrifying way you seem to throw money around...

I am however going to comment on the absurdity of how you seem to protest this whole situation. If she only wants mail and pics, why not get rid of all the other junk that comes pre-installed and put in a generic mail and a generic pics app?

Do you think the situation will be any better on ipad, which is running on a platform that is twenty times as closed as android?

Luckily I had backup plans for the Android, in case she didn't want to use it :) It was a test machine to see if she could even begin to find it useful, and I assumed it'd probably be good enough because hey, they're all the same these days.

That's the reason why I chose Android in the first place, assuming I could set the launcher and just make it dead-simple. I did a week or two of research looking into apps that might suit an old-timer. Big Launcher is great, but doesn't fix Skype because Skype's UI is a nightmare (contacts + favorites + recent? really? she has about four people she'd Skype. Why are the video/etc buttons so tiny? Yes obviously that issue will be on iPad as well.) Tried a couple photos apps to see which was best. Tried a couple mail apps. Get PPS from daughter, have to find tiny buttons to move to next slide of cat, rather than just swiping, so app closes and she misses half the pics. I've found websites dedicated to the elderly but none that seem to clear the whole mess up. While trying to do this, I'm listening to her talking to Google because she clicking something and Google says "Talk now", so she's telling it she can't find her email. They put in a quad-core processor so battery dies in no time. The Google tells me the mini has better battery life.

Home button disappears sometimes (e.g. camera, or Solitaire game) and replaced by tiny dot (so you want to go home but can't, or at least can't find it). iPad, it's always there - the physical round thing. Sometimes she touches the home/back buttons when typing (closes game or mail, very surprised - so now you don't want to go home but do), and iPad doesn't have soft buttons below the space bar. Send button is very close to the menu on Android. On iPad there are only two buttons and they're far from each other. Just above the home button Google has the "all apps" button, which she just doesn't need front-and-center. Back button sometimes does X, sometimes does Y, depending on context. Small USB cable works one-way only, iPad's can be inserted both ways. On this device can't remove the Google search bar near the top (I think?) and she's not quite ready for the web yet. Or Google's voice thing that didn't help her. At some point I need to take her off Google+ because she doesn't need any alerts that some random person is now following her. That shit is not in the user's best interests, it's in Google's. Then she's building up a great set of drafts because she'll edit and hit the wrong thing and it'll be gone, whereas the iPad app asks "Delete Draft? Save Draft?" when you click cancel. AFAIKT you can only hit "Send", "Cancel" or the hardware home button while writing a mail. Nothing else goes wrong.

Please don't assume your ten seconds on the problem has shown me to be an idiot. If you find a perfect setup, please tell me.

Btw her daughter and granddaughter both have iPads which helps the support situation greatly because they know what the button does. And shops currently have specials on the older non-retina, which is fine for her. We'll try it out and if she finds the Android better given her extra week of usage, that's a useful experiment. The money is very secondary compared to finding an experience that makes an old lady happy that she can "write letters to her friends". It's a game changer and she's enjoying it despite frustrations.

Current annoyance is that the toolbar icons on iPad can't grow with the fonts. Yes can use the Zoom but that's a bit crap. Will test it with her.

> I have one idea for how to do that, through a network of peer-to-peer search engines, and I hope to post it soon.

This was 2002 ... Is there any follow up posting on it?

I'm actively developing a censor free distributed search engine, with the abilities to parse the layout of a page into fields like author, title, date, abstract, article, pictures. The system is able to login into sites, hide itself as a normal browser to scrap the dark side of the web. Nodes and leafs of the network will communicate with tor (nyi), and act like a torrent of search engines.

Use the /chat/ or contact from my homepage, if you want to discuss my vision of a Google killer.

Have you seen YaCy? It's a distributed search engine project that's been running for several years. You can start using it to search and crawl right now.

http://yacy.net/en/

Well, I wanna hear about it, but I don't know if I can contribute with something right now (maybe I can, after I hear about it, but I don't think so), so I'm not going to ask, I don't wanna bother you, I just look forward for reading more about it someday somewhere.

(In fact, I really miss a place where we can post drafts of ideas we're working on, or just thinking about, to get others' feedback on them.)

There were some blog posts in 2003, referring to a paper. Hmmm... the link is broken, but this should be it: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.58.4...

Something like 5 out of the first 16 comments on this post were all from accounts (1 each) created under 1 hour ago. Weird.

It isn't surprising. There are lots of reasons why people are unwilling to put their "primary" HN account at risk when they want to say something which can be used against them (or simply down voted into oblivion). When I worked at Google I was very careful about what I said outside of Google, there is very little the company doesn't know about its employees. Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.

So when folks want to contribute to the conversation in some way (either to support, attack, or deflect it seems) but don't want to do so openly, the new accounts come out. One motivation for having a 24 hr waiting period on posting is to mitigate that, but sometimes folks do bring good data under an extra layer of anonymity.

  > Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your
  > calibration scores and that translates into real money.

Based on the successful career progressions of several well-known troublemakers at Google, I believe this statement is not currently accurate (if it ever was).

Can you name some names?

I was far from a model employee at Google - I continued to post on HN, I would challenge executives as to whether their actions were really in the best interests of users, and I would raise complaints I heard about elsewhere internally - and I don't feel like it hurt my career progression at all. I was promoted during my time there, and I largely got my pick of projects. When my old manager left the department, he told me that one of the things he and his superiors had really valued about me was my willingness to call things out that weren't working.

I do think that there's a right way and a wrong way to criticize your organization. As Ben Horowitz says, "Come from the right place." When I would say something negative about Google it's because I want it to be the best company it could be, and I'd often raise complaints internally rather than externally because that's where the decision-makers are. And if you want to be taken seriously, you also need to buckle down and contribute, and listen to considerations you may not have thought of. My manager said once that the folks who get fired are those who "Complain too much and contribute too little", and I can think of some prominent personalities on Hacker News who fit that description. Complain and contribute and you do fine.

Ah. That makes quite a bit of sense given what you said. Thanks for sharing that.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that google keeps tabs that thoroughly on employees -- but it still feels disappointing to hear it.

> Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.

Wow. Did you actually see first hand anyone who was punished by Google for things said outside the workplace? And did this extend to topics other than Google?

Seconded. Could you elaborate on how "being a trouble maker" affected calibration scores?

I remember some of michaelochurch's comments that mentioned Steve Yegge at Google:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017446

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462217

Who, you will note, did NOT get in trouble for his public stuff according to michaelochurch's posts.

Yes, but michaelochurch's point was about why.

What motivation could you imagine I would have in order to ruin someone's day? Ask Laszlo.

and they're all anti-Google, something smells.

They're not anti-Google for crying out loud. It's the same thing as saying you're afraid of heights. No they're not. They're afraid of falling.

Not anti-Google/Heights

They're anti-Exploitation/Falling

"[...] what would you do if Google required you to set up a user account, or enroll in a service [...] so that you could have more ‘personalized’ search results, and the occasional special offer?"

Um...

Key word: required.

This is incredibly prescient but then again Harry S. Truman said a long time ago "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know". It seems that all corporations travel the same historically beaten path.

Once a company has too much power, the physics of corporations states that it will be abused: https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly-trick...

I wrote about this last year. Somewhat similar. http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind-faith-i...

Personally I do think Google is not perfect but I never liked things such as Scroogled.

using a service like scroogle might help to avoid local/targeted search results (which I don't like most of the time)

I am talking about the campaign.

Seems like recently these anti-Google posts are being dredged up at a noticeable rate. Is there a reason behind it or is all just ad hoc?

For instance I wonder how OP stumbled about the link.

That's an easy question to answer, I was trawling through the dusty attics of idlewords.com (feel free to go read A Morning in Iceland http://idlewords.com/2003/11/a_morning_in_iceland.htm), I found it amusingly prescient.

It's at the forefront of people's minds at the moment so it is written and posted about frequently and people are interesed in historical articles as a baseline.

It's good that we're thinking like this. It's simply critical thinking.

Seems a little suspicious that this is the very first comment from a new account.

>For instance I wonder how OP stumbled about the link.

The same way I stumble across other pro-Google or anti-Google links.

Regardless it is completely irrelevant.

Thanks to Google these links and many others are kept down under the rug.

This HN page is currently #3 for the search query "Don't Trust Google". So I'm going to call BS right there.

Are they? On what do you base that claim?

I don't think there is one instance in the history of mankind, that great power hasn't been misused. ..I believe in unicorns too. ..But not that much.

um, so what happened to the p2p search engine?

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