
Google and Facebook are watching our every move online - bsstoner
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/google-facebook-data-privacy-concerns-out-of-control-commentary.html
======
linsomniac
I feel like I'm in the minority, but I'm mostly ok with Google. I feel like
they are good stewards of my data (encrypting even internal traffic, severe
restrictions on who can get access to my data, doing useful things with that
data). I believe Facebook has similar policies in place.

I think their biggest sins are just being big. It makes them a larger target
(which probably necessitates them taking extreme protections, otherwise they
WOULD be taken down). Others that are much more concerning don't get attacked
simply because they are smaller. For example Lyft and Uber who have both been
found to have all sorts of personally identifiable information available to
random employees. Or various ISPs tracking of data flowing through it.

To me, the cost of being google's product, is outweighed by what they provide
me with. Search, news, music, assistant functions, "remember this day", "here
is your family growing up", e-mail, automation of e-mails into actionable
widgets... These things all are powered by Google knowing kind of a lot about
me.

I don't know of any alternative to Google for these services, that respects
privacy.

~~~
ryanianian
Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with
yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep
you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased
your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly.

I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not
be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

I don't know how much money in ad revenue I earn google, but I'd probably
happily pay it for a more transparent, less sketchy, and more commonly-aligned
product. (This would also give me recourse for all the times the google
services I rely on go down....)

~~~
jankeymeulen
2016 had $90B revenues and 1.5B 30d active users (for YouTube) so $60 per year
would be a good guess.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Googler but I just got these numbers from public
statements. No way I'm well paid enough to be able to see more detailed
numbers. :-D )

~~~
ucaetano
gSuite is exactly that: $5/month/user for the basic package, and does exactly
what the grandparent wants.

~~~
mr_spothawk
sure, it's nice to be outside of adverts... but using gSuite always feels like
pretending I'm not being farmed out to the gov't

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Zhyl
I read the opening paragraph and thought 'wow, this guy has clearly just taken
the release statement from Duckduckgo's privacy app announcement (or possibly
their much-upvoted AMA) and just copied and pasted some statistics.'

Then I saw the author.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
Well spotted, very funny.

Speaking of which, I recently moved to DDG and couldn't be happier.

Frankly the only thing I don't like about DDG is the name.

~~~
dnate
yes, DDG has been nothing bu bliss lately. I did 99% of my master thesis
research on there. And the other 1% I went to google for usually didn't turn
up anything useful either.

~~~
DavideNL
> And the other 1% I went to google

Next time, don't go to Google, but go to Startpage. They have the same results
as Google but they strip all the Google crap for more privacy.

You can search Startpage.com from _within_ duckduckgo by "searching" in
Duckduckgo for:

    
    
      !sp hackernews
    

:-)

------
resu_nimda
_Google and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly
sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble — an alternate
digital universe that controls what you see in their products, based on what
their algorithms think you are most likely to click on. These echo chambers
distort people 's reality, creating a myriad of unintended consequences such
as increasing societal polarization._

How is this any different from the pre- or sans-Google and Facebook world?
People have always lived in bubbles, always been funneled down a particular
path by their experiential influences. Without Google or Facebook, if you were
a white supremacist, it’s probably because you were influenced by white
supremacists and you would continue to surround yourself with them. If you
were someone who really strived to expose yourself to different ideas and
things outside your bubble, you can arguably do that easier than ever now.

This isn’t really to “exonerate” FB and Big G, but I think it’s worth asking
what impact they’ve really had on this basic facet of life.

~~~
Slansitartop
>> Google and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly
sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble

> How is this any different from the pre- or sans-Google and Facebook world?

Easy: the bubbles are tighter and harder to pierce. In the old days, you'd
have to get your information from the same news sources as everyone else, only
customized at a fairly coarse level (e.g. a city). That regularly pierced your
bubble and gave the community a common reference point. Now, many, _many_ more
people get all their information from individually-customized feeds that are
precisely matched to their biases and their bubble. There's so many fewer
common reference points which makes is harder for many people in the same
communities to even communicate.

tl;dr: it's an emergent qualitative difference caused by scale.

~~~
0xBABAD00C
> Easy: the bubbles are tighter and harder to pierce

Says who? It's absolutely the opposite in my experience, having lived in
various conservative societies most of my life. Bubbles are much more self-
imposed and easily breakable and modifiable now, than even say 30 years ago,
let alone 100.

------
trqx
A common behavior I witness, is people using ad/tracker blockers such as
ublock origin and/or umatrix and yet continue to consult websites that makes
use of those trackers. Worse, they link those sites to other people that might
not make use of those blockers. They don't think much of it, but ain't that
evil?

Most of the times they don't even notice anymore that trackers were blocked on
the page they consult.

Just look at links posted here on HN, most are of hostile websites.

I'd love to see a browser extension more radical: if it detects such third
party scripts or cookies it simply stop loading the page and display a message
explaining why instead.

Someone sends you a link to an article on cnn.com? Answer with this message
telling why you won't consult it.

Going further: the extension attempts to extract the content, strip it of
anything useless (some js libs works OK for such tasks), and share this
version with others using this extension.

~~~
Daycrawler
Why stopping going to the sites? The point of blockers is specifically to make
them harmless.

~~~
trqx
So they stop doing arm to others.

Once most websites understand it is not viable to attempt to mess with their
own visitors, browsers could block the remaining ones by default?

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rand0mthought
Funny, but Privacy Badger blocked 10 trackers in this article

~~~
zevv
My ghostery blocked 24

~~~
PuffinBlue
ublock didn't block anything. Then I realised that this site allows auto-
playing videos so at some point in the past I seem to have disabled JavaScript
on this site.

I wish it was easier to control JavaScript usage as the visitor. It's either
very complex or just 'turn it all off and go somewhere else if nothing works'.

Perhaps the second option is the 'correct' response though.

~~~
morganvachon
If you're using Firefox and you want to keep JavaScript enabled but stop auto-
playing videos, you can go into about:config and set _media.autoplay.enabled_
to _false_. I'm not sure if other browsers have a similar switch, but this
works in any current version of Firefox. It only affects HTML5 video
containers; Flash and Silverlight video containers may still auto-play.

~~~
Slansitartop
I do this, but also be prepared for video you expect to play to no work as
expected. For instance, a video might appear to be frozen or "loading" until
you click on it.

------
Fej
The metaphorical Pandora's box has been opened, and the contents aren't going
back in. Best we can hope for is practical legislation. The EU is ahead on
this one. Its GDPR is going to throw a massive wrench in these practices.

~~~
kasey_junk
I don't think that GDPR is going to disrupt the google/facebook dominance in
advertising nor curtail their collecting data about you. In fact, I believe
GDPR rewards their walled garden/integration strategy.

The most onerous and problematic parts of GDPR for adtech companies is the
acquisition of consent to share the data they gather with their partners. This
means that every barrier from publisher, to ad network, to advertiser needs to
be consented. Google/Facebook are themselves massive players at each of those
levels and therefore can skip that step.

We don't know what will happen in the future, but I suspect that
Google/Facebook will leverage their systems at both the publisher and
advertiser areas to put _more_ of the ecosystem into their systems.

This may be ok, consolidating your information into a couple of big players
that have an even more holistic view of you might be preferable to having
little views of you all over the internet. But its worse for advertisers and
publishers and I find it disconcerting.

* Disclaimer: I work on GDPR related topics, this is my opinion and not that of my employer

------
astro_robot
Honest question. I'm unsure what the danger is in letting these companies
acquire data on us. We get a lot of benefit from using their products for
free. Why should I care about giving my data to them as a cost of admission?

~~~
metalliqaz
The aggregation of data is extensive and the ubiquity of the net means the
data covers nearly every aspect of your life. Such information can be misused
in many ways. Unfortunately, those misuses don't really become clear until the
data set is already built, so there is no way to undo it. Even if Facebook or
Google don't exploit the data themselves, the data could be stolen by
criminals or seized by the government.

Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company
to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if
someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay
up?

Is that worth the price free access to your high-school friends' duckface
selfies?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company
to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if
someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay
up?

Once tabloid journalists start trying to infer embarrassing things about
politicians based on metadata we'll probably have some progress.

------
danjc
Surely the bullet at the top should read "Google and Facebook's impact on our
privacy cannot be overstated", not understated!

------
CodeSheikh
They provide free services. What do you expect? The data they have collected
is so lucrative for them that they would never offer Facebook, Gmail, Google
Search on a premium basis to daily consumer. I mean I would take premium
package if they guarantee that they will not parse my images, parse my emails,
parse my searches, connect dots among my social peers in order to help train
their AI bots. Which/whenever they will use in the future to come up with
better products or improve their existing products.

Sure there are problems associated with it. One of them is when malicious
players like foreign govts get hold of such data and use it to their
advantage.

------
tomc1985
Not only do we need to make them stop, we need to make them _purge_.

------
mnm1
Writing better articles than this is the way to stop Google/FB/advertising.
Educating people on how dangerous ads are and what the solutions are (uBlock
origin, turning off JS, VPNs, and hosts files etc.) is the main thing we can
do other than making such things the defaults in products like Firefox (which
doesn't even have such features built in yet, afaik). Once a large enough
percentage of the population is using such solutions, tracking will no longer
be a problem. If the argument is that most people won't want to deal with such
education or the solutions it proposes, then those people simply do not
deserve privacy or security. People that are too lazy/stupid to use computers
probably shouldn't without the supervision of someone competent anyway. Yes,
that includes the proverbial grandma--I don't let my mother use a computer I
haven't prepared for her, for example.

------
DaniFong
These guys are selling data to "advertisers" that are actually trolls trying
to subvert our democracy. They specifically target pain points and make things
unbearable online for people. They use their data to alter the subliminal
landscape. It made everyone at each other's throats.

------
ucaetano
Yes!

Disable 3rd party cookies, delete your Google & Facebook accounts, and done.

Easy peasy.

~~~
rectang
I use gmail and don't wish to give it up for now. I launch gmail in a site-
specific browser process so that my login is isolated. This makes it so that
in my main browser, I'm not logged into my Google account and they don't see
where I go. As a bonus, the "filter bubble" effect is diminished for my Google
searches.

That's not a reasonable approach for non-techies, but I thought it might
interest the HN audience.

~~~
gaius
_I 'm not logged into my Google account and they don't see where I go._

If they see activity from one IP to say search, then activity from the same IP
to visit the top result of that search, they don’t need a cookie to track you.

Anyone who shares an IP has seen ads actually targeting another member of
their household...

~~~
8ytecoder
Usually that's not a reliable way to identify a unique user. Given the
prevalence of NAT, re-using IPs by ISPs with DHCP, and a host of other
reasons. (That's not to say there aren't ways to fingerprint users across
devices and browsers.)

~~~
gaius
A service ISPs should offer as standard is regularly randomising your outbound
IP from their pool for all but a whitelist you specify. So you can have a
static IP for say you work firewall, but are harder to track otherwise

~~~
ams6110
Most ISPs are in bed with the advertisers and tracking. That's one reason I
don't use my ISP's DNS.

~~~
kasey_junk
Do you use googles?

------
marten-de-vries
The article seems to argue for a GDPR[1]-like equivalent in the US. It'll be
interesting to see how it is enforced in the EU. If applied as intended, it
could offer a more realistic alternative to the only other privacy-preserving
option at the moment: not using Google/Facebook/etc. 'noyb'[2] is planning to
help that along. I just hope we don't get another cookie-law like debacle.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation)
[2]: [https://noyb.eu/](https://noyb.eu/)

------
ielfkd
i think many orgs instead of suing google n such orgs if they simply use that
money to invest in good organizations which are open and respect an
individuals privacy that ll lead to a better world. it is not the law that is
going to protect the people it is money in the good people's hand that is
going to take us in a positive future. doing one good to cover up 18 other bad
things is not considered good.

------
evolve2k
Addressing root causes one key approach would be for someone to develop a
better alternative to google analytics. I'd hazard that the usefulness and
ease of use for webmasters to install analytics tracking via google analytics
is the number one reasons that 76% of sites include google tracking. Develop a
mass replacement for GA and you'll directly hut that number.

------
bogomipz
>"Google and Facebook's hidden trackers across the Internet,..."

Are these "hidden trackers" mentioned in the article just the normal beacons
or are they referring to something new?

Are these relevant if a person is not logged into neither FB or Google or if
someone has uBlock Origin/Privacy Badger installed?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Facebook, at least, is quite happy to build your shadow profile regardless of
whether you're logged in.

~~~
bogomipz
Right, they're buying those from 3rd party data brokers I believe. This is the
place where legislation is needed so people can own their own data. I would
love to see some clearing house that sends out requests to people saying
"Facebook or whomever is interested in acquiring your day" and you are given
the option of approving or denying.

~~~
lucb1e
> they're buying those from 3rd party data brokers I believe

Huh, why would they need to? The first time you load an element from Facebook
(be it a like button, comments or something else) you just get a unique cookie
and there's your Facebook profile. Now it's a waiting game until you log in
and they can connect it to a person, or you do something else that allows them
to identify you (maybe visiting friend's pages, and they already have WhatsApp
data so they know who talks with that specific set of people? Idk, there's
just so much data and so many options). Or they can never connect it to a
person but they can still show you good ads based on that browsing history.

~~~
bogomipz
>"Huh, why would they need to?"

Because by doing so they are able to compile additional information about
people, data that's not available to them via online tracking. See:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-
user...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-
everything-it-really-knows-about-them)

------
no_identd
How much would it cost to pay off every single Hollywood paparazzi to drive
over to Silicon Valley and focus their attention on the Google, Facebook &
Microsoft executives for a month?

------
basicplus2
I use One phone for phone calls and personal use providing a wifi hotspot to
another phone for Facebook and Google account.. I just wish I could get two
separate phones in one case

------
rapnie
imho the current web is broken.. it has become entirely dominated by
monopolists, which will only grow larger.. more dominating

we need: \- The Decentralized Web (as it was originally envisioned) \- Users
in full control of their own data \- Privacy-first approaches only \- Stricter
regulation (though tough to implement well)

~~~
IncRnd
> _we need: - The Decentralized Web (as it was originally envisioned) - Users
> in full control of their own data - Privacy-first approaches only - Stricter
> regulation (though tough to implement well)_

You have that now! Just stop giving your data to companies you don't want to
have it.

The people who never give their data away wonder at the people who give their
data away, then call for regulation.

~~~
rapnie
sure, we have it.. but we need to use it pervasively, en masse :)

and not giving your data away is _really_ hard for average user, when google
is so deeply engrained in the web

------
bb88
This isn't news. This has been well known for a while now.

------
mar77i
Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck...

~~~
mar77i
...go?

------
ielfkd
I hope duck duck go is not some google's back channel project just to have a
leg in contradicting initiatives.

