
A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities - jeremiahlee
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/does-google-meet-its-users-expectations-around-consumer-privacy-this-news-industry-research-says-no/
======
redwards510
I have a really hard time grokking their lead-in "Do you expect...?" What does
that mean exactly? Or more importantly, what does it mean to the respondents?

> "Do you expect Google to collect data about a person’s locations when a
> person is not using a Google platform or app?"

I have a feeling many people read that as "Do you want Google...." Saying "Do
you expect" feels like a cynical "Do you think Google will do something you
don't want them to do but are helpless to prevent, because they are a huge,
uncaring, profit-obsessed corporation?" in which case, all questions can be
answered "Yes" regardless of topic because the underlying cause is the same to
the respondent.

"Are you aware that Google does X" might be a less loaded way to ask these.

~~~
jonfw
I think asking "are you aware" is a different question. Most non-tech people
have barely done any research on this and probably have never even looked into
it.

You're sharing information and asking questions about it at the same time.
Sort of a cross-contamination IMO.

~~~
fixermark
Such cross-contamination, when done maliciously, is called "push-polling" and
is a known tactic for shaping political discourse by taking advantage of being
possibly the first to mention a topic in a person's field-of-view to paint
that topic in the worst possible light.

I don't think that's what's being done here, but it's interesting to note that
what you're seeing is definitely an issue regarding polls in general.

~~~
mandevil
Quite honestly, most things that receivers call "push polls" are not push
polls. They are honest attempts to figure out which lines of attack will
resonate better with the public at large. So you try several different attacks
on a relatively small sample, see what makes people respond most strongly, and
then scale up the attacks with paid media, speeches etc. Yes, most of these
will have to inform people of the bad stuff you are going to be attacking
over, but that's because if the general public was widely aware of the attack,
you wouldn't need to mention it- or at least not to pay pollsters to figure
out if it is a good attack.

The hallmarks of a push poll are that it makes no attempt to gauge your
response level, and that it tries to call far more people than a statistical
survey would need to do. The most famous case, in recent US history, would
have to be "John McCain's illegitimate Black baby"
([https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411))

~~~
dahart
Interesting use of the word "honest". If there's any agenda being pushed
during a survey _at all_ , then it's not an honest survey, statistically
speaking. An honest attempt to figure out a line of attack isn't an honest
poll.

So, any "survey" that is trying to sway or push opinions at all is a push poll
in my book, even if they're also collecting information & using the
information collected. You're trying to draw the line at one extreme, all push
and no poll, but I believe the term "push poll" has long been used by many
people for surveys that do both.

Since you can't influence the thing you're sampling and get an accurate sample
at the same time, don't you think the line actually needs to be at 100% poll
and 0% push, rather than requiring 0% polling before you can call it a push
poll?

~~~
kortilla
It’s an “honest” survey because the authors are using it to extract the data
they are looking for (the most effective trigger phrasing to use in speeches,
etc). It’s working as designed to provide useful information to the authors.

A push poll doesn’t provide information to authors. They don’t care about the
results.

~~~
dahart
> A push poll doesn’t provide information to authors. They don’t care about
> the results.

That's not necessarily true, there are polls in the middle, where the authors
attempt to both push agenda, and also collect information on whether the push
is working. I'm saying that any amount of pushing constitutes a push poll; the
defining characteristic is not whether the authors care about the results, but
whether they're attempting to influence the results.

Examples of what I'm talking about are even listed in the Wikipedia article on
push polling:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll)

If a poll is really asking whether a certain line of negative attack is going
to work better than another, and not attempting to influence the answer, not
attempting to sway the respondent, then yes that would be an "honest" survey
in some sense. However, there aren't actually many polls related to negative
campaigns that do this, and it's also very difficult to do without influencing
the respondent. Negative attack campaigns are rarely if ever interesting in
doing careful neutral statistics. You'd have to be scientific about it and
include controls as well as positive and neutral statements in addition to the
negative ones.

So, I still don't buy the original claim that most polls on negative lines of
attack aren't really push polls. They are push polls, but they might indeed be
softer pushes than other more extreme push polls.

~~~
mandevil
The difference, as so often, is scale. If you poll 500 people in a
congressional district and ask them what their reaction to Candidate X's
drinking problem is, that's an information gathering poll, not one intended to
sway a significant number of voters. It might not be "scientific", but it is
intended to gather information about broader voter sentiment to guide your
campaign strategy lines, because even changing 500 voters minds isn't going to
have much effect on the race. If you did asked the same questions, and even
made the same decisions based on the data, but did it to 100,000 voters then
it does start to look more like a hybrid or closer to the push-poll side of
things.

~~~
dahart
You're talking about the attack, not the poll.

I disagree strongly that scale has anything to do with it whether you call a
poll a push poll. Scale is irrelevant. Asking what you think about a
candidate's drinking problem is a push intended to communicate the idea that
the candidate has a drinking problem, without regard to context and without
discussion. You're right that it's not scientific. You're wrong that it's
neutral information gathering. It doesn't matter how many people you ask that
question. You can ask the same question to a single person and it's still a
push, or more commonly called, gossip or shade.

Your mistake here is assuming that a push poll needs to be influencing a
"significant" number of voters. It does not. Again, the _defining_
characteristic of a push poll is the push. Not the number of people surveyed,
not whether the pollers are collecting results, not whether they're looking
for an angle of attack versus attacking. If the poll is pushing an agenda, if
it's trying to cast doubt on a candidate, or trying to "inform" them of
something bad or good, then it's a push poll, and I think the WP page made
this pretty clear.

Several small scale push polls done in search of or in preparation for a large
scale attack are exactly the kind of poll that count as both push and poll.
Your example is demonstrating exactly the case where the pollers care about
the result, and they're pushing at the same time. The intent is to influence
the voter, and also measure how influenced the voter was. That's more of less
the definition of a push poll.

------
siffland
OK seriously, the other day at work we were talking about a coworker and one
of my other coworkers said, oh you mean Sam Elliot because the first coworker
looks like Sam Elliot from Roadhouse. Then there was a 15 minute discussion
about the film Roadhouse. I went home and on my youtube recommended videos to
watch was one about the movie Roadhouse. I only had my phone on my desk and my
work desktop has no internet access. Is this just coincidence¿

Just yesterday i watched Running Man on my Plex Player running on my raspberry
pi. Again I now have multiple Running Man videos in my youtube queue.

I hate it but feel so helpless about it. Maybe it is all coincidence and i am
just that lucky and should buy a lottery ticket. Does anyone else have this
stuff happen?

~~~
mruts
Are you suggesting your phone recorded you and your coworkers and then
suggested ads based on that?

Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I find that.. improbable? Not out of the
question, I guess, but still pretty improbable.

Maybe you could run some experiments and try and disprove the null hypothesis?

~~~
o10449366
It's been extensively tested and debunked by many, many people and yet it's a
myth that continues to perpetuate HN. The idea that these big companies or Big
Brother are streaming your phone microphone data 24/7 is a lot more romantic
than "the public wifi network I'm connected to is riddled with analytics."

~~~
cc439
The idea that your phone's microphone isn't constantly parsing speech into
text and then occasionally uploading certain keywords to whichever major
advertising platform (FB, Google, Amazon, etc) has an active app on the phone
doesn't seem so far fetched. We know Android and Apple phones are generally
always listening for their keyword phrase (Siri, Hey Google, etc) for voice-
based AI assistants and that their speech-to-text support is very robust.
Uploading a text log is very data efficient and becomes even more efficient if
it merely sends a positive for certain keywords it's told to listen for based
on the individual's demographic profile and advertiser's interest in said
demographics. I've had enough "coincidences" happen to believe this can be
explained otherwise.

~~~
Buge
We know for a fact that some phones are secretly listening and uploading
stuff.[1-4] It's done by spying apps. How do we know? Because there are tons
of researchers reverse engineering stuff trying to find this stuff. These
researchers are extremely hungry for a big find, for some big publicity.
They're searching very hard to find a big player doing it, but none of the big
players are doing it, so they only make small headlines with the small players
they find.

[1] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/hundreds-of-apps-are-using-
ult...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/hundreds-of-apps-are-using-ultrasonic-
sounds-to-track-your-ad-habits/)

[2]
[http://christian.wressnegger.info/content/projects/sidechann...](http://christian.wressnegger.info/content/projects/sidechannels/2017-eurosp.pdf)

[3]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-
app-tracking.html)

[4]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190309034942/https://recon.med...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190309034942/https://recon.meddle.mobi/papers/panoptispy18pets.pdf)

------
teekert
I do expect it and I feel dirty because of it. But I need my banking app and I
like my OnePlus3 and its camera. I run Lineage and I tried running without
play services but I also really like Office365, Teams especially. Also my
Banking App needs play services for notifications and NFC based paying, and I
don't want to just download some APK for that.

I know I can buy an iPhone but it costs about twice what my OP3 cost. I
strongly feel like this is my own choice and should vote with my wallet, and I
guess I did. I just feel dirty because of it.

------
treis
The numbers don't make sense:

>Do you expect Google to collect data about a person’s activities on Google
platforms?

>Do you expect Google to collect and merge data about a person’s search
activities with activities on its other applications?

The second got 10% more "yes" responses than the first, but answering "yes" to
the second question logically requires a "yes" to the first one.

~~~
scott_s
_People_ don't make sense. It's entirely possible for people to having
logically conflicting assumptions without realizing those assumptions
conflict. How people respond to questions is also influenced by how the
question is asked, and even the order the questions are asked. Making good
surveys are hard for that reason, as once you recognize logically inconsistent
trends, you have to figure out if the result is due to the survey itself, or
you truly revealed a quirk about how people think about the topic.

~~~
teej
In this case it’s just poor survey question design.

------
codedokode
Exactly. Main problem is that people treat a phone or computer as a tool that
serves their needs and might not realize that in fact it serves someone's else
needs. They cannot see the traffic their device sends to Google, they cannot
examine Google's comprehensive databases. Data collection remains unnoticed,
there are no icons and no warnings.

Opting out of data collection is inconvenient. When I need to log into Google
or any other large company service, I have to do it in a private tab. When I
want to run skype or slack, I have to create a separate OS account for them
because major linux distributions don't have any protections preventing slack
from reading my browser's history. Oh, and did you notice that Linux Slack app
opens a browser to log in? I guess the reason for it might be that they want
to store cookies in the browser and track the user across the Internet.

------
jonfw
How long until this starts to seriously hurt big tech companies? It can't be
too much longer now.

The dream is that the market will see this and can solve this problem without
need of government intervention. Do you all think that this is feasible? Or do
we need more legislation?

~~~
syn0byte
Does the free market care about how happy it's cows are? Do McDonald's
products suffer when cows are unhappy? Does Camberage Analytics give a crap
about what you like, does it affect their products?

Moo.

~~~
matz1
Which is good. It's sucks if i have to pay more for a burger because the cow
have to be happy.

------
ankit219
Maybe, if we popularize the part about data export enough, people will come to
realize the kind of things google tracks. I took one data dump last year and
unsurprisingly, since I had an android device, Google knew a lot about me. In
that order: Devices, Installs, Library (superset of all apps ever installed),
Order history, Purchase history, then all my contacts, even the ones I starred
on android, then every order I ever placed on anywhere and got a receipt in
gmail (it also stored it separately as purchases) with price, ticket number,
frequent flyer, merchant, and so on. I was expecting a bit of this so did not
feel creeped out, but if more people see it, they will be horrified. Granted,
this is when I stop google from recording the data whenever I can - search
history, location history, and so on.

Edit: Anecdote wise, Google has a more accurate list of all the addresses I
have ever lived at, than I do. They record the address of every physical
delivery at whichever place I asked my shipment to be delivered. I have lived
at 7-8 different homes (in three cities) in the past 6 years, and I dont have
those addresses on hand either. But yeah, google might.

------
jedberg
Consumers don't expect Google to track you yet are delighted when they search
for "haircut" and then click on a link on their computer and then have that
place show up on Google Maps on their phone as the recommended destination for
driving directions.

How do they think that happened?!

------
VectorLock
I just got a "Your March In Review" email from "Google Maps Timeline." I
wasn't surprised by it but I think for other people seeing it presenting you a
map with every place your phone has ever been will be very eye opening.

~~~
lkbm
They've been doing this for years for me. Did they just recently turn on
location services by default or something?

~~~
VectorLock
Not sure I've never seen these emails before but I've had location services on
for quite a long time-- the map shows at least 5 years of data.

------
VWWHFSfQ
Go to [https://myactivity.google.com](https://myactivity.google.com)

Now understand that is only what Google is collecting when you're explicitly
using _their_ services. Any apps or sites that use GA or any other Google SDKs
are also being collected and sent to Google and correlated back to your Google
identity. I discovered this when I found that Google knew every restaurant I
viewed on Seamless. Every Reddit post I saw.

------
KorematsuFred
Lol. And how do they expect Google to pay for their state of art free Email,
Docs, Drive, YouTube Video storage ?

Almost every job today from a Starbucks Barista to Uber driver depends on
Google doing its job well and collecting all the data it does. Ask people if
they still support data collection from Google.

As a small business owner are you happy if Google stops collecting private
data but you make 5% less revenue ? (Small businesses depend on Adsense and
other technologies to seek customers).

~~~
o10449366
They can continue to use advertising to fund their services without being
opaque about what exactly they're collecting and when. The two aren't mutually
exclusive and keeping services free isn't a compelling argument for breaches
of privacy.

Many people were surprised to find out Google was still tracking them even
when location services were turned off, but only because they buried the
option within the legal and TOS menu of their phone app instead of the
separate privacy and location section[0]. These dark patterns are what
surprise people.

[0]: [https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-
of...](https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-off/)

------
saagarjha
Some of the results presented aren't what I'd call a significant majority,
aside from the three in the middle of the article.

Edit: It seems the article title has been updated.

------
alkonaut
I _expect_ to be able to use Google Products and only pay for them with
cursory glances (no clicks) at ads beside search results targeted only by the
keywords I searched for and a geographic guesstimate.

I’d say they crossed the “don’t be evil” line when they show me a sponsored
link based on something than the current search.

------
johnchristopher
If whatsapp could grow by asking users for one dollar, couldn't the same be
achieved in the search engine space ? A dollar a month or a year to get my
private bubble search ? Or are the costs to run a search engine too high and
the ad industry is necessary to keep it afloat ?

~~~
sz4kerto
1) WhatsApp didn't make too much revenue out of those 1 dollars. Most people
never paid.

2) If you're willing to pay a dollar per month for search then you are much
more valuable to advertisers than most people, so 1 dollar won't be enough.

~~~
johnchristopher
> 1) WhatsApp didn't make too much revenue out of those 1 dollars. Most people
> never paid.

They made enough to be sustainable:
[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
finance/04091...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
finance/040915/how-whatsapp-makes-money.asp)

> 2) If you're willing to pay a dollar per month for search then you are much
> more valuable to advertisers than most people, so 1 dollar won't be enough.

No. It seems as a Google user I am worth more to them when I am tied to
advertisers [https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-
worth/](https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/) or
[https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/heres-much-google-
fa...](https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/heres-much-google-facebook-
really-think-youre-worth.html/)

I don't get your point though. I want to be valuable to people building a
search engine without adtech baked in, how much I am valuable right now to
advertisers doesn't matter.

------
throw2016
This is not because consumers are 'ignorant' or stupid but because of willful
deception and complete lack of transparency from Google. What do Google
engineers think when they design those deceptive 'improve user experience'
dialogs, are they thinking consumers are 'stupid' or are they being extremely
shady?

Android being designed to leak like a sieve and Google hoovering up your data
without transparency is NOT the users fault, its Google and its engineers
willfully engaging in unethical behavior in pursuit of profits. Its can't be
that educated people do not know or understand privacy is a basic human right,
and collecting and collating data is fundamentally shady and invasive
behavior.

Once the public understand the full extent of the collection, collation and
behavioral targeting in play and regulations start flowing these companies and
the engineers who built these systems are going to be tainted.

------
mc32
I think they could have added one more twin question to all for clarification.
Do you expect... and Do you want... (are pleased that, okay with)...

I think people expect them to take those kinds of liberties but would rather
they did not take those liberties.

------
miguelmota
It seems that those who respond that they don't expect Google to track their
activities are simply unaware of Google's business model of selling ad slots
based on people's activities.

~~~
wilde
That’s a little unfair. The AdWords business model doesn’t require
personalization. They could run straight keyword auctions. They don’t.

------
8bitsrule
I recently overheard someone say "They already know everything about me
anyway, so I decided I might as well sign up with them."

------
smadurange
From my experience, the broad opinion on this seems that people just don't
care. Sometimes I share with my colleagues what I learn about Google doing at
times (and these colleagues are software engineers) and what I get are

1\. It's free, why are you complaining 2\. There's no choice 3\. Google has
the best products (this was referring to Google docs stuff)

May be you guys can let me know what you think about those answers.

------
teekert
It would be nice if Google did it like Canonical (they make Ubuntu), show what
they send.

In fact I wonder, under the GDPR, is this not illegal? It's my data, I need to
be able to see it and approve what they do with it.

------
ct520
Makes sense. People voted for trump too

------
fxbl0i
How many of those consumers expect to keep using Google services for free?

~~~
JohnFen
I would be absolutely thrilled if, in exchange for not using Google services
at all, Google would stop spying on me. That's not an option, though.

~~~
sandov
In which ways would they keep spying on you?

If you install privacy badger, block their IP addresses on your hosts file,
don't use an Android phone(at least not a stock ROM), don't visit Google
sites, etc. I don't think they would be able to gather much info about you.

~~~
kortilla
Add:

Don’t use credit cards (they buy the transaction data)

Don’t let your contacts with Gmail addresses email you

Don’t let your contacts with android or ios setup to sync contacts add you as
a contact

~~~
sandov
Good points. I didn't know about the credit cards part.

I stand corrected.

------
wolco
We are one big movie away from everyone knowing. Too bad it would be killed
before reaching the masses.

~~~
fixermark
It was called "The Circle," it came out in 2017, and it did $40.7 million at
the box office on a budget of $18 million.

~~~
wolco
I was not aware. Sounds like it didn't reach critical mass

~~~
fixermark
I'm looking for numbers on tickets sold but I don't know how to get them
easily.

Honestly, part of the problem may be that audiences for movies self-select for
what they want to see, and there may be an upper bound on how many people you
can pull in for a psychological thriller. That seems to echo the issue with
online privacy in general---the hard first step is getting people to care, at
all.

