
Google in $5bn lawsuit for tracking in 'private' mode - nreece
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52887340
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397045)

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clarry
> The search engine says the collection of search history, even in private
> viewing mode, helps site owners "better evaluate the performance of their
> content, products, marketing and more."

No shit sherlock, but who exactly uses private browsing mode to help site
owners to their private data?

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sneak
I believe that if a smaller company broke criminal wiretapping laws, the
individual people involved with the criminal activity would be going to
prison.

Why is Google, which cannot break the law, only being sued in a civil action?
Individual human people at Google broke criminal wiretapping laws.

(I know they’re not mutually exclusive, but I cannot see a future in which the
DoJ brings criminal conspiracy charges against Google PMs and SWEs/SREs.)

It’s almost as if once you hit a certain size, the penalty for a company’s
staff breaking federal laws becomes “the company writes a check for some
percentage of your ill-gotten gains” and not criminal prosecution/prison time.

~~~
shoo
> Here's my (admittedly whimsical) working hypothesis [...] The rot set in
> back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing
> corporations as de facto people. [...] Corporations do not share our
> priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who
> join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate
> their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate
> objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. [...] Collectively,
> corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating
> conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals [...] We are now
> living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-
> human entities with non-human goals. [...] In short, we are living in the
> aftermath of an alien invasion.

\-- [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/12/invaders...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html)

~~~
sneak
Recognizing corporations as legal persons, as far as I know, has no bearing
whatsoever on whether or not the people who work at those corporations can or
should be prosecuted, personally, when they break criminal law (at work or
otherwise).

Corporations cannot act, and thus cannot break the law. It is similar to how a
military or country cannot kill people: it simply employs murderers.

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panpanna
Question: does chrome privat mode automatically set the do-not-track flag?

If so, what are the legal implications if a site sees that and decides to
track you anyway?

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tylerhou
There are no legal implications of not respecting do not track. I don't know
definitively, but a search tells me many major companies (including Google)
don't respect Do Not Track.

In fact, Do Not Track can in itself be an extra datapoint websites can use to
track you, so it's best to leave it off.

~~~
panpanna
Yeah, but one might argue that do-not-track is a clear revocation of consent
wrt GDPR and CCPA.

