Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkozlows | Hacker News Reader

It's also, more cynically, trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue.

I mean, to be fair, Google does this too -- their emphasis on openness with Android, or "the next billion" with the low-cost, low-margin devices they enable are casting their business model as more moral than Apple's -- but advocating for the moral superiority of spending high-end money, as Cook is here, always strikes me as kind of gross.

(Also, when he implies that Google sells your data, he's just wrong. Google uses the heck out of it, but they don't sell it -- why would they? It's their competitive advantage, they don't want other people having direct access to it.)

View on HN

Cynically, and hypocritically. Just checked, the Facebook app is still in the store. Apple has been happy to take the search payments from Google from the first iPhone. Astonishing how Cook's "morality" has no practical implications that require his company to do anything.

If you're going to call someone a hypocrite, and immoral, you should put up evidence of such.

Apple may send traffic to google, but it has privacy protections in place, anonymizing the traffic from the browser.

I don't see how the Facebook app being in the store makes Apple immoral or hypocritical, especially compared to google.

I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?

No, it's very different. If I'm concerned about my privacy, I'm concerned about who knows stuff about me.

Google knows a bunch of stuff about their customers inherently (because their customers have all their email on Google servers, do Google searches, etc.), so Google customers have already decided they trust Google with that information.

If Google were selling it, they'd be passing it along to other organizations that users haven't explicitly trusted. That'd be bad. But they don't do that -- they use their information to show you things based on what they know, with targeted ads; that might bother you from an aesthetic/anti-capitalist perspective, but isn't an extra concern from a privacy perspective.

(Interesting fun fact: You know who does actively sell your information? Your bank, for just about any big bank.)

(1) Google also puts ads and other little tracking widgets (google analytics, G+ social buttons, etc.) all over the web, gathering massive amounts of information about people’s browsing habits unrelated to any direct customer relationship or informed consent.

(2) Use of Google search does not at all imply that a customer wants all of their searches to be associated with their identity, processed, stored indefinitely, used to build a comprehensive dossier to better target advertising on unrelated pages, or handed over to nation-state spooks who come asking. It’s not at all clear that most customers understand what information they’re handing over or what can be done with it when they use services like search.

[Yes, plenty of other ad networks, analytics companies, social media services, etc. do the same thing, and plenty of other types of companies (e.g. the banks you mention) and government agencies also build permanent profiles of people based on whatever scraps of data they can; this is not only a Google problem. It’s creepy when anyone does it, which is why there should be better regulatory oversight ensuring that customers know what data is collected and how it is used, restricting certain types of data aggregation and customer profiling, and placing limits on how long various types of data can be kept.]

Re 1 - I agree that is by a mile the most problematic part of Google's business. It's not a problem that Google knows what's in the emails I store on their servers -- of course they do, I put them there -- but it is problematic if they know I go to www.controversialsite.com when they should have no reason to.

But the implication there is that Google's most privacy-invasive product, by a mile, is Google Analytics, which doesn't really help Cook's case in any meaningful way, because that has nothing to do with the Google services that compete with Apple.

Analytics uses first-party cookies for the site's domain, not your google cookie(s). And you'll have to take them at their word, but they don't combine it with some IP address trickiness or whatever (though that would be a pretty bad idea if you want decent profiles anyway): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245?hl=en

That is just a Terms Of Service change away. Such legal changes aren't even unlikely: Google already changed their Terms of Service in the past to allow them to combine information from separate sites and services, which they didn't explicitly claim to do before[1].

The 'reassurances' provided in Google's Terms of Service don't mean jack shit when they have the power to change the terms in the future to whatever they want.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/google-wants-ability-to-combine-you...!

That would only work going forward. You wouldn't be able to merge the data retroactively.

And why would they do that is the question. Again, since they don't serve google cookies on analytics this would be virtually useless. An IP address isn't much to go on. Even a 5% misidentification rate would lead to horribly polluted data about users very quickly.

There's also https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout if you don't want Analytics tracking you.

No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.

I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.

That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me.

Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is.

I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?

That doesn't seem all that different than advertising in the yellow pages to me. You have to ask the customer how they heard about you, but if they mention the yellow pages, you're pretty sure you know what they were looking for, because you picked the section(s) you advertised in.

To my knowledge, Google doesn't tell you where the keyword was found, or even if it was an exact keyword match or something they deemed similar enough to show (but I'm by no means an expert in Adwords).

At some point you just have to accept that when you call a plumber, the plumber going to have a pretty good base to assume you need a plumber, and this is releasing some information to them. Without that, communication would be impossible.

> I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.

No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).

I actually really wish there was a way for me to more directly tell google what targeted advertising to send me.

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads

No, if they sell your data, the recipient can user it for many purposes, including redistributing. If they use your days to target adds, the external customer can't do anything else with it.

They aren't very similar.

> ... trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue.

This was the idea behind the famous 1984 commercial. Creating a sense of societal urgency and philosophical crisis.

How do you define "sell"? Adsense and Adwords - can very well be argued as selling the distilled gist mined from troves of data collected from your search history, email, photos, android app usage.

Deleted comment

>You're arguing over semantics. Selling a product (ads) that is a direct result of having that data is basically selling that data.

For some definition of "basically" that means "not whatsoever". Selling involves exchanging money for goods or services with another party (to paraphrase Homer Simpson).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com