
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance - anarbadalov
https://longreads.com/2019/09/05/how-google-discovered-the-value-of-surveillance/
======
throwsurveill
I think the surprising thing is that people are surprised.

It took basically until now for the bloom to come off the rose. Think about
that. For 20 years Google has been supposedly hiring the smartest guys in the
room and all it took was free food, some ball pits and slides, contributing
some tech to open source, and working on a handful of "moonshots" that haven't
gone anywhere to keep the sheen of innovation going. And it worked. For 20
years.

People have been saying Google is the new Microsoft for a few years but it
basically took until now for that to become consensus. Microsoft, who's been
on the back foot until recently, has recast themselves as the new Open Source
Champion, basically using the Google playbook from 20 years ago. And it's
working!

If you think about it Apple is the only company that hasn't changed. There's
never been a bait and switch. It's always been proprietary. It's always been
confident, others would say arrogant about its products. They've never tried
to cloak themselves with the mantle of open source. The only reason the tech
industry uses their products is because of its inherent qualities. No one had
to be tricked into liking them. And they've always been honest about this.

All the "privacy cranks" were right about Google. But from 2000 to about 2015
they were casually dismissed as fringe. People really bought the "Don't be
evil" slogan externally (and I'm sure internally as well). Before Facebook,
they mastered the art of doing something bad then walking it back with an
apology and some opt-out privacy setting that they knew no one would enable.
Privacy was always an afterthought (read Steven Levy's book about Google).

I'm glad everyone is seeing the light finally.

~~~
throwaway7771
I quit Google because I could no longer be a part of the dystopian nightmare
they envision as their version of the Nerd Paradise.

You have no idea how strong the reality distortion field is inside of that
bubble. Googlers are breathtakingly naive about how the line has been pushed
by the senior leadership in order to go from being mere billionaires to mega
billionaires.

And it's not that hard to see the mental model and economic conditions that
gave rise to this situation.

Assumption 1: Technology is a universal good.

Assumption 2: Centralization is the most efficient mode of operation. (this
follows directly from the mission to "Organize the world's information")

Assumption 3: A dumb mantra like "Don't be evil", like intentions matter, and
actions don't.

Assumption 4: A centralized data-driven computer system makes the best
decisions.

Assumption 5: If the market rewards it, it's moral.

Assumption 6: The more you know about people, the better you can manipulate
them (c.f. showing them "more relevant" ads)

Conclusion: Google knows best for everyone, its AI should run the whole world,
and since it has a crapton of money, it must be right.

Just pump that 25% year-over-year growth long enough, and you have a sprawling
multi-national entity that literally knows everything about everyone. What
they search for, what they buy, every website they ever visit, how long they
stay there, and how they interact with it, what they watch, what music they
like, who they talk to and what about, who they spend their time with, and
where, exactly, to the meter, they are every single second of every day, what
they look like, what they like to take pictures of, what their voice sounds
like, their credit history, criminal backgrounds, and soon, their DNA.

The world doesn't need Google to know this shit. I don't need Google to know
this shit about me in order for it to tell me what Katy Perry's second album
is named. For fuck sake, we need to stop this.

~~~
IX-103
The content of your response is so divergent than what I have heard from
people working at Google that I interact with, both personally and
professionally, that I find it difficult to believe you actually spent a
significant amount of time (if any) at Google.

1\. I've never heard anyone say or imply that technology is universally good.
I've heard people talk about how making information readily available and
accessible to all is good (though people disagree on how universally to apply
it).

2\. As far as centralization, from the things I've heard it seems that
centralization is considered bad. Everything needs to be distributed,
standardized, and redundant. Yes, they seem to like to keep things organized,
but apparently they'd rather do it in a heterogeneously distributed manner
(like each user request creates many internal requests to different functions
and then the result is stitched together).

3\. "Don't be evil" seems to be interpreted in the "Don't do evil things"
sense instead of "Don't be motivated by evil".

4\. I would say a "data-driven system" makes the best decision is the closest
I could find to your assumption, and I would tend to agree with them.

5\. I've never heard of anything like that. I have heard people mention things
that Google could do but doesn't since it is considered not good -- an example
of this is that there seems to be high level opposition to using browser
fingerprinting for getting around browser cookie blocking for advertising
(despite already having developed state of the art techniques that are used in
anti-abuse).

6\. This might be the closest assumption you have, actually, since it depends
on your definition of manipulation. If you ask me if fire is hot and I teach
you that fire is dangerously hot (and maybe also provide some example sets of
protective items and clothing you could use to work with fire to mitigate the
danger), I have likely manipulated you into not getting burned later. So sorry
that I'm so manipulative ;)

~~~
cameronbrown
> Everything needs to be distributed, standardized, and redundant.

Being distributed within a single company's data centres is still
centralisation.

------
brenden2
This is what keeps me up at night these days. Between information
gerrymandering, the quest for increased engagement, uncanny valleys, de-
platforming and so forth I wonder how it will affect our ability to avoid
misinformation, have original ideas, and not descend into some weird form of
chaos a la Idiocracy (2006).

If anyone is passionate about trying to find ways to treat people like
individual humans again, please reach out to me. I want to solve this problem
by creating a business that's sustainable and better than the Google/FB
approach.

~~~
java-man
I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, _on average_ ,
prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even
a moderate amount for a service.

One can see this in how quickly various products fall when a free alternative
exists. How many people buy an email client, for example?

~~~
sverige
MS Windows is the great exception to this, where not only do they collect an
inflated price for their software, they also spy on their users. So making
money on the product is no guarantee that a software vendor won't also invade
your privacy.

Apparently the key to success is to get corporate lock-in.

~~~
TeMPOraL
MS Windows builds on a very long history, which involves it positioning itself
as the default OS on PCs (price bundled with the price of equipment), which
led to a lot of software (games in particular) being written just for it. It
also strongly benefited for being free for a sizable population of the world -
by means of Microsoft not fighting rampant piracy of its systems.

------
cromwellian
A lot of inaccuracies and mixing up of categorically different things, one
sentence it’s talking about, from an implied early realization that search
data could used for machine learning and then implying it has something to do
with the Page Rank Algorithm. I think Rank Brain was one of the first uses of
ML as a signal for Google Search and that didn’t happen until 2015, 18 years
later.

It sort of reads as something trying to invent a top down narrative for what
was in reality a haphazard and unplanned for slow evolution of many pivots
over nearly two decades.

------
ryandrake
> The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital
> future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most
> critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an
> unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience.

We used to have fairly decent home automation products back then (wow, 20
years ago!) Even the cheap consumer X10 stuff at least worked and could even
be used without a LAN, let alone Internet. Since then, the products have
actually gotten worse in many ways. Sure, sensors are a little smaller now,
and some of the designs look less dorky. On the other hand, it seems
everything phones home (or elsewhere) now, stops working without Internet,
exposes you to a massively increased computer security risk, and/or is stuffed
with ads.

Look for a decent home security camera that _doesn 't_ 1\. Store video in the
cloud, 2. Send opaque binary data back to some server in China, 3. Require an
internet connection to set up, administer, or use, 4. Come with a giant EULA,
Terms of Use & Privacy Policy. They exist but you need to dig a bit to find
them.

I used to only think about keeping people out of my home LAN,
limiting/blocking incoming connections, preventing infiltration, having an
“Internet only” guest VLAN. Now it’s just as important to block outgoing
connections and prevent data exfiltration. You need a “no Internet” VLAN to
isolate your “smart” devices. I used to be terrified to see all the failed
login attempts on my internet-addressable SSH server. Now I’m terrified to see
all the outgoing connection attempts from all my various devices and
proprietary software.

A lightbulb shouldn’t need a Privacy Policy. We stopped improving the Aware
Home and instead added the Connected Home. Bad exchange.

~~~
mfer
The goal used to be academic and early innovators trying to improve the home.

The goal posts have changed. It's not about making huge companies lots of
money and helping them gain power and influence.

This isn't a technological shift as much as it's a goal shift.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's a good reason to reject those companies and encourage everyone else we
know to reject them too.

------
dswalter
I just finished the book; it's uneven, but incredible. Some of her conclusions
and how she frames the problem are arguable, but her presentation of the facts
and her underlying hypotheses about how the situation has arisen are
fascinating.

This passage, and really her whole summary of the history of Google, (which
goes beyond just this excerpt) are particularly compelling.

------
sedachv
If you want to help do something about Internet surveillance, donate to the
Electronic Privacy Information Center

[https://epic.org/](https://epic.org/)

If you cannot donate, subscribing to their newsletter is free, and I highly
recommend it.

------
tehjoker
I like how Google has been slowly making street names harder to see in maps,
which I presume is a behavioral nudge to make you rely more and more on their
turn by turn directions, which allows them increasingly direct control over
the motion of the physical world.

~~~
cowpig
I dunno, I think Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the
past decade (with a particularly precipitous drop after whatever refactor they
released in 2014 or so.

Google maps is

* Much, much slower

* Harder to read/understand, especially street names

* Much worse text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and have them understand

* Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection, which felt dangerous), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP

* Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans

Even if a little can be explained by a desire to control the world, I think
most is just the traditional corporate rot that happens to any successful
company.

Like Steve Jobs describes here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M)

------
dandare
Surveillance capitalism is a misnomer, a knee jerk reaction. At a glance,
online advertising generates somewhere between $83.0 billion in 2017 and
$220.38 billion in 2019, the exact number does not matter because it pales in
comparison with other industries. Even if we removed all targeting online
advertising would not disappear, so not all the worth is due to surveillance.
Online surveillance is bad, but it does not define the type of Capitalism we
live in.

~~~
pacala
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2019)

Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, Alibaba
Group, Tencent, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase.

6 surveillance corporations in top 10, 4 american and 2 chinese. If 6 out of
largest corporations in the world were oil companies, we'd call it oil
capitalism. If they were banks, we'd call it financial capitalism. It so
happens that our age is the age of surveillance capitalism.

~~~
cromwellian
Amazon makes most of their money from retail and cloud. Microsoft arguably
makes most of their money from sales of Windows, Office, and Azure.

If any form of advertising, even internal tracking and advertising, at all
denotes you as surveillance company, then Apple's iAd, and Store optimization
algorithms to try and maximize app sales would count.

Likewise, JPMorgan Chase, which probably knows a good deal more about your
personal finances than any of the tech companies, is also a surveillance
company.

We live in an era where defense contractors have caused the deaths of millions
of people, and Purdue farmer just made $30 billion hooking people on opioids
and reducing American life expectancy for the first time since 1918, where gun
manufacturers are feeding small arms violence all over the world, especially
in developing countries, and even hooking kids on smoking nicotine -- Juul --
is back.

And we're discussing how on HN horrible target advertising is, over and over
again. There's actually people's lives and healthy being literally destroyed
by regular old capitalism all around the world.

~~~
JohnFen
> If any form of advertising, even internal tracking and advertising, at all
> denotes you as surveillance company

I don't think it does. What makes you a surveillance company is if you
incorporate surveillance into your business model. By that measure, Google,
Facebook, and so forth are certainly surveillance companies.

You can do advertising without spying on people. Ad companies that behave this
way are not "surveillance companies", they're just ad companies.

~~~
cromwellian
Then why are Amazon and Microsoft counted among the 4 surveillance companies
the OP?

Also it is arguable if behavioral targeting meaningful increases revenue over
day, keyword targeting.

Are there any studies?

~~~
JohnFen
> Then why are Amazon and Microsoft counted among the 4 surveillance companies
> the OP?

Perhaps because they both have surveillance as part of their business models?

> Also it is arguable if behavioral targeting meaningful increases revenue
> over day, keyword targeting.

I never made any comment about the revenue impact of various forms of
advertising. I was merely stating the plain fact that advertising can be done
without spying on people, and an ad company that works this way would not
count as a "surveillance company".

~~~
cromwellian
> Perhaps because they both have surveillance as part of their business
> models?

The majority of Microsoft and Amazon's revenue doesn't come from advertising.
That was my point about Apple, which is, although their primary market is HW,
they are getting into services, and they did have iAds, and they are exploring
ads on the App Store.

Again, in MS's revenue breakdown, advertising is a rounding error. And Amazon
purchaser of ads.

~~~
JohnFen
> The majority of Microsoft and Amazon's revenue doesn't come from
> advertising.

I was talking about surveillance, not advertising specifically. Surveillance
is embedded deeply into both company's business models even if we ignore the
advertising side of their businesses.

Advertising and surveillance are two different things, and each can exist
without the other.

~~~
cromwellian
Why is surveillance embedded into MS's business model? For the vast majority
of Microsoft's existence, their products were sold even without a network
connection. Microsoft's business model is not based on data collection about
users.

Here's a breakdown from their last filing:

$15.0 billion revenues, 16.0% of the total, from the D&C Licensing segment.

$10.2 billion revenues, 10.9% of the total, from the Computing and Gaming
Hardware segment.

$7.5 billion revenues, 8.0% of the total, from the Phone Hardware segment.

$8.8 billion revenues, 9.4% of the total, from the D&C Other segment.

$41.0 billion revenues, 43.9% of the total, from the Commercial Licensing
segment.

$10.8 billion revenues, 11.6% of the total, from the Commercial Other segment.

The vast majority of their revenues, that is, their primary business model, is
licensing Windows and Office, running Azure, selling XBox. Bing, and other
online services that rely on "surveillance" are not a major part of their
bottom line.

If you're trying to claim they observe their customers and use it to optimize
their products, e.g. how Amazon displays results to you when you search for
something, well, Apple does that too. They track your App Store installs, i.e.
Surveil them, and use it to for what to show in the App Store.

As they shift to services, this behavior will only increase.

I mean, you can claim Google and Facebook are primarily based on data, but
Microsoft is quite obviously, a company whose entire history is mostly
consumer licensed OS, and enterprise/small business software, and most of
their products ran offline.

I don't have any love for Microsoft, but you seem to be deliberately trying to
make their business model about data, and it currently, is not.

~~~
JohnFen
> Why is surveillance embedded into MS's business model?

You'd have to ask Microsoft. I suspect it's mostly to reduce production costs.

> If you're trying to claim they observe their customers

Yes, that's what I'm saying. The problem with their behavior on this score is
that you can't make them stop without engaging in fairly extreme measures.

> Apple does that too

Yes, so?

> you seem to be deliberately trying to make their business model about data,
> and it currently, is not.

If it's not, then why are they so aggressive about collecting data about me
and my use of my machines? Why not let me stop that?

The only reason that makes any sense is because doing so is a core aspect of
their business model.

~~~
cromwellian
> The only reason that makes any sense is because doing so is a core aspect of
> their business model.

No, it's not the only reason to collect analytics. They are often used to QA,
product improvement, and knowing where to invest your time and effort in your
product.

Microsoft Word, for example, has become a super-bloated featuritis packed
product. If Word tracked how many times people used each feature for example,
they'd have a pretty good map of what they could deprecate or prune to create
a streamlined version for example.

Game companies use analytics often to figure out what game mechanics were fun
or interesting for people, and what features were wasted. Imagine you put a
lot of effort into a 'mini-game' mechanism inside of a game, and found that
people spent one minute in it and never touched it again.

Now, you could argue they could collect this data with differential privacy
techniques, and they should, but there's a difference between using data as
part of your business model, by selling a service that leverages said data
(e.g. ads), and using data to make better decisions.

Prior to "tech", companies still collected information on their customers as
much as they could to improve their business, they just did it the old fashion
way with annoying surveys that no one likes to fill out and which are
inaccurate.

~~~
JohnFen
> They are often used to QA, product improvement, and knowing where to invest
> your time and effort in your product.

Ah, I see where our disconnect is happening: all of those uses count as being
part of the business model to me.

In any case, I fully understand why telemetry is used. My objection is when
it's not possible to opt out of telemetry (having to opt in would be much
better, of course).

If someone is gathering data about me or my use of my machines without my
informed consent, that counts as spying. What purpose the data is being put to
is irrelevant (although it would be relevant to my decision about whether or
not I'm going to consent).

~~~
cromwellian
Most apps these days will say something like "collect anonymous usage
statistics to improve product quality" with an opt-in. Does that satisfy you?

Both Apple and Google are using differential privacy in different products to
do this, Chrome for example, collects telemetry via provable differential
privacy.

~~~
pacala
You can't make someone half-pregnant. You can't preserve privacy in "some
products". You've got to do it across the board. For example, Google is in the
business of tracking your location to sub-meter accuracy. Then corroborate
that information with everybody else to create a shadow social graph. They
don't need to ask users for their friend list, a la Facebook 2005, and that is
a reason why they gave up on building an explicit social network after Google
Plus faltered: they've got the data through a different channel. Whenever
Google pays lip service to privacy, it is because they have alternate,
possibly higher accuracy, privacy violating channels in place. In the specific
case of Chrome, it's likely they are concerned about the legal fallout from
Microsoft / Internet Explorer antitrust hearings.

