
The Creepy Line: a documentary about Google, Facebook and user manipulation - znpy
https://www.thecreepyline.com/
======
Lio
I think that a lot of Google and Facebook’s creepyness would go away if they’d
just voluntarily respect the Do Not Track header.

There’s no techical reason why don’t, just business ethics.

That header is someone explicitly telling Google “I don’t want you to do this”
_before_ collection happens and Google’s response is “we don’t give a shit
what you want” and doing it anyway.

The current model where you have to register with Google or Facebook and then
hunt down all the options to clear data just doesn’t cut it because they’re
still using that data. They just clearing it after use or hiding that
collection or use from you.

Facebook and Google could be looking at BATs as a way forward for targeted
advertising without user tracking but they’re not in the “not creepy”
business.

~~~
vatueil
Microsoft turning DNT on for all Windows users automatically pretty much
killed the movement's momentum. While privacy as the default has strong
arguments going for it, as a practical matter since DNT was supposed to be an
intentional signal Microsoft's mass-flagging effectively drowned the signal in
noise. And those who didn't know better lauded them for it, too.

~~~
Lio
Even if Microsoft turned DNT on by default Google/Facebook should still
respect it.

They could ask users to turn it off in the same way they bug people to install
their software.

Alternatively they could work on business models that don’t rely on collecting
massive amounts of personal data about people who don’t want them to do that.
E.g. Basic Attention Tokens and others.

~~~
vatueil
Sure, you could wish for that, but if we could have everything you wished for
we probably wouldn't need DNT in the first place.

Since DNT was specifically raised, bringing up how Microsoft's hug of death
killed it seemed pertinent.

~~~
Lio
That still sounds like we have a problem with Google/Facebook and not with
Microsoft turning it on by default.

The default behaviour for Google/Facebook should be not to track people that
aren't logged in to their services.

That should go double for people who are not just neutral but explicitly
telling them "really, don't track me" in a header.

There is no justification of "we're just improving services" for people who
are telling you "I don't want to use your service and I don't want to help you
improve your services."

------
arun_suresh
I watched half of it... but began noticing the frequent references to how only
'conservative' views are suppressed. And then there were a bunch of Tucker
Carlson snippets and then realized something wasn't (no pun intended) 'right'.
Looks like M.A. Taylor, from his IMDB page is hyper conservative anti-
obama/clinton political hack. Sure, some of what the film talks about - how
google and facebook - can nudge peoples opinions and view of the world is
true.. But it is creepy that he has snippets in there projecting them as
liberal anti-conservatives hipster organizations. Come on - 2016 would've
turned out very different if facebook was really suppressing conservative
content at the scale this film is talking about.

~~~
drak0n1c
> But it is creepy that he has snippets in there projecting them as liberal
> anti-conservatives hipster organizations.

I don't think that means the characterization is false, though. My friends
working at Facebook and Google are very liberal and internal polling and their
message boards have shown that to be overwhelmingly true for the wider
organization as well.

> Come on - 2016 would've turned out very different if facebook was really
> suppressing conservative content at the scale this film is talking about.

It's possible that it happened and simply backfired. Conservatives aren't
blind and turned out in greater numbers due to personal anecdata that they and
the current events they were interested in were being squelched and
misrepresented across social media. I personally recall Facebook's news
sidebar feature had a clear pro-Democrat bias in the editorialized titles they
wrote and presented above stories throughout 2016 (before they took it down).

~~~
microcolonel
> _It 's possible that it happened and simply backfired._

This is exactly what happened, from what I can tell, with the one caveat that
most of the bias likely came from the human staff they hired to editorialize
and moderate. The attempt was noticed, and it backfired spectacularly. If you
look at Facebook today, I think it's clear that they mostly don't do this
anymore. Facebook's users naturally spend more time and effort sharing and
interacting with conservative content than progressive content; thus, the top
stories on Facebook are usually from large conservative media (esp. The Daily
Wire).

------
ChrisAntaki
I looked at the "Google" page
([https://www.thecreepyline.com/programs/google-v2](https://www.thecreepyline.com/programs/google-v2))
and noticed it doesn't mention a few kind of important things.

(1) You can pause activity collection at
[https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols](https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols)

(2) You can delete activity here [https://myactivity.google.com/delete-
activity](https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity)

Also, does anyone know if Facebook offers interfaces like these?

~~~
polskibus
Would this unlearn the Google's ML models from my data?

~~~
UncleMeat
Would you ask somebody who had you in an A/B test to destroy the feature?

~~~
polskibus
Surely A/B does not require PII? In FB case-if the model's purpose is to
identify individuals then yes, it should be undone as requested.

------
xte
I see a different and worst thing: actually big of IT think to be they are
powerful enough to take over banking system and governments itself.

We all depend more and more on hw and sw build by more and more fewer subjects
bigger and bigger to a point of being become "platforms of the world".

See only casual outbreaks "Whatsapp down", the polemica between a Brazilian
judge and Facebook that lead to a temporary ban of WA and the consequent
citizen reaction. See only what you can do without connectivity or without few
big's clouds.

That's far more serious of mere "steering with aggregators" or mass profiling.

------
apatters
If the author of the site is reading this, I was unable to scroll down on
Firefox/Android.

~~~
eih
Not working in Chrome/Android either

------
dredmorbius
_The Creepy Line is written and directed by the filmmakers behind conservative
documentary Clinton Cash. It takes its title from Google executive Eric
Schmidt, who said in 2010 that Google’s job was to “get right up to the creepy
line and not cross it.” Schmidt has gotten no end of flack for that quote, and
it’s easy to point out that Google is, in fact, often very creepy. But The
Creepy Line makes a more specific, partisan argument. It claims that Google
(and Facebook, which the film refers to almost interchangeably) deliberately
manipulates its service to suppress conservative users and ideas, and — more
ambitiously — that Google tweaked its search algorithm to swing the 2016
election in Hillary Clinton’s favor._

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-
anti...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti-google-
facebook-conservative-censorship-documentary-review-right-wing)

------
ryacko
It is good that Amazon funded this documentary.

~~~
benibraz
Yeah, this is actually quite funny. You can also watch it on iTunes. Are
Amazon and Apple exceptions with respect to selling your information? (I'm
genuinely asking)

~~~
klohto
Apple’s whole stance is to protect your data. They don’t sell it.

 _Don’t know about Amazon but I think they use it for their own services only
as they’re not advertising company._ \---- EDIT: Brain fart, ignore

~~~
ipsum2
Amazon made $2 billion last quarter in advertisements. This is easily
searchable, but here's the first result I found:
[https://marketingland.com/analysts-say-amazons-
advertising-b...](https://marketingland.com/analysts-say-amazons-advertising-
business-will-surpass-aws-by-2021-245983)

As a comparison, Twitter made $758M in revenue last quarter.

------
giza182
How does the site know what sites you are logged into? Is there some sort of
guesswork involved?

~~~
ludston
There is some javascript that is connecting to around 40 different websites.
If you are logged into any of these sites already then they don't return a
login prompt so the site knows that you are logged in.

~~~
air7
That's not entirely accurate. Some trickery is involved...

Javascript in one site can't just access another website's content. That's the
Same Origin Policy. But what you can do is dynamically link to an image on
another website. You can't access its content, but you can know if it loaded
correctly. So if you find some image that is only accessible to a logged-in
user (non logged-in gets a redirect for example) you can determine logged in
status.

Another technique uses time measurements and non-image resources. Loading them
as an image will fail anyway, but if there is a substantial time difference in
the error response for logged-in vs not, it can be done that way too.

------
SlowRobotAhead
Obviously the true value of these companies is in the data they’ll never show
you, and there will be no documentary about.

While I might not learn much, the documentary format is really good for older
people to get a grasp on what FAANG might be doing.

------
hartator
I've trouble trusting the content when the website is so badly technically
made.

------
snek
if the author of the site is reading this, please remove the scrolljacking.

------
meh2frdf
Couldn’t watch the whole thing, was so naff, with grating ‘tension’ music,
simply ghastly! At times I actually thought it was a spoof.

------
jonas21
Did anyone who upvoted this actually watch the documentary or the trailer, or
do HNers just automatically upvote anything that's anti-Facebook and Google
these days?

The documentary is mostly right-wing conspiracy theories about how liberal
tech companies are trying to undermine democracy and favor Hillary Clinton.
Watch the trailer if you don't believe me. Or read this:
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-
anti...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878332/creepy-line-anti-google-
facebook-conservative-censorship-documentary-review-right-wing)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
That's a fair question. I've got a follow-up for you: do people actually watch
other people express diverse opinions or are they happy with just impeaching
the source, slandering the messenger, and moving on? It seems everywhere I go
online I get other people telling me how I should or shouldn't consume media
content based on the producer's political opinions.

I both upvoted the video link and your comment. I like people with different
opinions and worldviews.

Now I'll go watch the video.

~~~
creato
The verge article is detailed and pretty convincing that I don't need to
bother with this video. This isn't impeaching the source because of their
political opinions, it's impeaching the content because of its political
opinions.

> Taylor and the film’s writer Peter Schweizer say that they’re aware of
> issues affecting non-conservatives and simply wanted to focus on a single
> thread of the conversation. But that focus completely changes the argument.
> If conservatives are disproportionately suffering on Google and Facebook, an
> incident like Peterson getting locked out of Gmail looks like political
> warfare. If people across the social and political spectra are getting
> accounts suspended, YouTube videos demonetized, or stories de-ranked, it
> looks like bad service from a platform with a legitimately disconcerting
> amount of power.

> This distinction is probably obvious to many people. But The Creepy Line
> suggests that any seeming technical glitch or bad decision is a coordinated
> step in the master plan of Silicon Valley’s digital “kingmakers,” even when
> that’s far from the most obvious conclusion. It does things like insinuate
> that Google’s lack of a customer support hotline is inexplicable and
> suspicious, or claim that “very few people in the world have ever seen” an
> error page for google.com, so spotting one indicates that Google has cut off
> search access to punish a user for criticizing it. __It glosses over the
> fact that these kingmakers didn’t even get their favored candidate into the
> White House, although Taylor argues that Google only put “roughly 10 percent
> effort” into its manipulation efforts because it was confident Clinton was
> already winning. “That won’t happen again,” he says. __

edit: If this actually is funded by Amazon as someone speculated elsewhere in
this thread, it 's probably going to backfire spectacularly if this catches
on.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I honestly think you're missing the forest for the trees.

It doesn't matter the actual reason massive, subtle opinion changes occur.
Maybe it's the Russians. Maybe it's a liberal cabal. Maybe, as I suspect, most
of SV doesn't know what the hell they're doing and are just faking it the best
they can while they make bank. There is some effect occurring. Most reasonable
commentators agree on that.

Once that's settled, then there are a bunch of follow-on questions: how large
is it? How do we measure it? And so forth.

This video, assuming the worst slander you have is true, is an example of an
answer to the following question: how are the existing political power
structures perceiving this new effect?

That, in my mind, is as interesting as any of the rest of it. More so,
actually, since the perception of damage is a much bigger thing in most cases
than the damage itself.

This is going to get political, and in a hurry. I don't care which bunch of
political assholes are carrying the flag towards fixing it, but I want to know
how they perceive the problems involved and what they might do to fix things
if given the chance. This is too important to choose up teams and play the
usual stupid partisan games.

~~~
creato
Sorry, I don't buy it. If you (or the authors of this piece) want to have a
conversation about data harvesting, do that. Subtly entwining that with
conservative conspiracy theories isn't just an innocuous side thread of the
conversation. This is clearly an attempt to hijack the conversation about data
harvesting to amplify their totally unrelated message about supposed
suppression of conservative speech.

This is a case of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' going horribly wrong.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'll try again. And that's it.

You are concerned that this piece is wrong/misleading.

Ok. Great. Another person wrong on the internet.

Now, from a meta level, can you accept that the public discussion about data
harvesting, like everything else is going to be politicized? And would you
rather understand and engage people of all political persuasions by following
their arguments, or are you happy just being in teams?

I like understanding both sides, seeing where they are going. That way I can
have reasonable conversations with them.

Innocuous has nothing to do with anything. In fact, I'd argue that it's not
innocuous. It's important. That's why we need to understand it.

You realize, of course, that both sides look equally nutty to the other,
right? I'm watching it rain and friends of both political parties spin up the
most fantastical explanations for why it's raining. I find that fascinating. I
also need to talk to them about coming the hell in out of the rain, so I
choose to understand first, then be understood.

Nobody's trying to soft-pedal anything. There's no whitewashing here. The
perception is the reality. That's the way humans work. The causal, pseudo-
scientific part of things? Different conversation entirely. Stop mixing them
up.

~~~
vatueil
Listening to different political viewpoints can be good. I make sure to do so
myself on many occasions.

However, the criticisms regarding this film raised in other comments and
linked articles appear to be valid. It concerns me that you have repeatedly
dismissed these objections as "slander", even before watching the film
according to your own words.

You don't have to agree with someone's politics to work together on common
ground, of course. And a film with a message may be worth watching even or
especially if it challenges your views. But the film's agenda cannot be
concealed.

The Verge article, for example, made no bones about its political views but
also raised factual concerns about the film. It is also a fact, as others have
pointed out, that the writer and director of this film, M.A. Taylor, also
worked on political films such as _Hype: The Obama Effect_ (which detailed
"various questions about Barack Obama's past") and co-directed _Clinton Cash_
along with former Brietbart chairman Steve Bannon:
[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3379741/](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3379741/)

------
SmellyGeekBoy
The points-to-comments ratio of this post is massively out of whack with
everything else currently on the HN frontpage. Also anyone posting criticism
is instantly being heavily downvoted.

Something fishy is going on here.

------
jeromebaek
The website knows more about me than I do! I can't remember the last time I
logged in to Disqus or Blogger but apparently I'm logged in.

An app that notifies you the services you're currently logged in to, and
helping you log out immediately, would be a good idea.

~~~
metildaa
Containers on Firefox do this type of isolation without making you play login
whackamole. Each website you define gets its own little sandbox with no access
to other sandboxed cookies, unless you permit it.

------
microcolonel
This documentary makes the extraordinary claim that Google developed Chrome in
order to spy on users' browsing behaviour, which is more uncharitable than
necessary. I don't trust Google all that much, and I don't think you should
either, but that doesn't mean that everything they do is pure cynical
exploitation. Defeating these anti-features and misadventures doesn't require
a moral crusade, it only requires you to decide not to use the product, and to
tell them why through the feedback feature (though some things, like mass
gathering of location data, involve plenty of third parties who will probably
keep selling your data to Google whether or not you use Google's services
directly).

