Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

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"...tech corporations like Google who collect personal data for living"

I agree. The largest and potentially most-revealing information about you is captured by technology companies like Google and Facebook.

The Amsterdam registry recorded "Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death"

Create a Google account and you are asked to provide: Name, Gender, Date of birth, Location, Mobile phone number.

This is some of your most private and personal information and it's tied to your actual behaviour on the web. Google's ability to track you across the web and across devices is simply unprecedented.

Google omits basic facts in their privacy policy about the data they collect about you. Things like: how long they keep your data (presumably forever), whether the data is anonymised, whether your searches or activity are disassociated from your identity, and who sees your data inside the company.

Does Google use your mobile number solely for two-factor authentication and absolutely nothing else? Google doesn't tell you. Do they really need your date-of-birth? And is it only used for age verification? Could they simply ask if you're 16 or over? Sure they could, but date of birth tied to your online activity is so much more valuable when it comes to crunching all that big data on user behaviour.

The amount of information that Google captures about you is gargantuan. They know more about your online (and possibly offline) behaviour than you know about yourself. Just to be clear, I don't believe Google does anything nefarious with your data. But even if you trust them, why is it considered perfectly acceptable for them to track you to such a relentless degree?

They also are really insidious about how they get you to sign up more of your data.

View a YouTube link on a fresh Android phone it puts you on the sign-in screen, hit back the video plays, they make it look like you have to sign in to watch the video hence make it easier to follow what you watch.

Run Chrome for the first on an android phone, the sign-in button is bigger and clearer, the skip button is small and greyed out.

Chrome history can only be suspended, accidentally enable it and it's on forever again, no warning.

Login from one google account and then accidentally login in from another and it tries to join them (this is so bad I new hit incognito mode before signing into anything google makes).

All of these things in isolation seem relatively minor but the goal is clearly an all encompassing pervasive monitoring of everything you do (so much so that my next phone will not be Android, I'm seriously considering a dumb phone and using my tablet).

I don't trust Google and tbh as a company I don't like them very much.

https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

It's not a popular topic here on HN, but I strongly recommend Aral Balkan's talk about the actual business of Google, Facebook, and far too much of silicon valley.

The fact that Google doesn't have the power to throw you in prison or kill you makes a lot of difference. Governments maintain a de jure monopoly on force and therefore we are at more risk from a government's ability to suppress us using our information than Google's ability to effectively influence people's purchases.

They literally know more about you than yourself, because they can predict your future behavior.

> why is it considered perfectly acceptable for them to track you to such a relentless degree?

Throwing around "tracking" as a dirty word made sense when the Internet was a brochure. Paper doesn't normally remember that you looked at it, and HTTP pretended to be a way of looking at a piece of paper, instead of what it is, an interaction.

Tracking is integral to all interactions. Taking sensory data from two different points in time, and deciding that both are representations of this thing called a person that's standing over there, and that said person comes with all these characteristics that are fixed, and all these characteristics that are mutable over time, and that I have all these previous experiences with that person, and a mental model of how they might react to certain things, and a mental model of their hidden internal state like mood or sleepiness, that is the essence of tracking. Friendship is sort of its ultimate form, so it makes sense that an electronic medium for friendship is the heaviest "tracker" on the internet. We humans can absolutely consent to and facilitate tracking that we want, or else we wouldn't associate with each other.

Google's suite of services and the tracking it performs make it more useful to me. When I search for an English word that has a special meaning in programming, it knows I mean it in the software engineering sense. When I open Google Maps I can tap two keys instead of 20 to get directions home. I have the agency to accept that.

The privacy issues of the modern world, to me, have little to do with tracking: rather, they are a violation of expectations, of confidence. You might think, when you send a "private" message on Facebook, that it will only be read by the named recipient. But it may just as well be read by an anonymous NSA analyst. That's where the evil lies. Or, you may think, when you're on a site other than Facebook, that Facebook has no idea you're there. But the "Like" button is watching you, associating that visit with your Facebook profile. That's what's fucked up.

And imagine if they get pwned. Not fun.

I think the working assumption should be that they have been. There is no way that a company that big is not leaking like a sieve. Between social engineering, disgruntled employees, and active intrusion, they is no way that have remained unpenetrated.

The real reason they ask for mobile number is to stop spammers creating a ton of accounts.

Or maybe that was just a convenient excuse at the time. Now they present me a screen to input my phone number every time I login. I choose to ignore it.

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