I'm not a Google fan, but good for them. If they're able to produce value without invasive tracking, then it's a good thing for everyone who is interested in privacy. Apple's (official) intent was never to cripple companies, but rather to give users choice.
> "As a result of the data drought, many brands have shifted their ad spending to Google because its flagship search-ad business relies on customer intent"
This also goes directly against all the doomsayers who said there was no money in context-based advertisement.
The difference here is that Google makes their money on iOS mostly from searches in the browser (Google pays Apple >12B per year for this functionality to be promoted in the OS). When a user taps on an ad on a Google search in Safari, then makes a purchase on the advertiser’s website, that conversion is not defined as “cross-app tracking” so Google can record it and charge for it. When a user taps on an ad in Facebook and then is directed to the advertiser’s app to make a purchase, that is “cross-app tracking”, and Apple won’t allow that conversion to be recorded until after the user says yes to the prompt.
Also, if the user clicks an ad in the Apple store, then makes a purchase in an app, Apple will happily charge the advertiser for that conversion without ever showing the user a cross-app tracking permission prompt.
> If they're able to produce value without invasive tracking
This is completely backwards, no? Businesses want invasive tracking aka attributed ad spend. Apple's new rules prevent Instagram/FB and Snap ads from tracking / attributing properly. So those businesses just go to Google (Web, Android) to buy invasive tracking.
The interesting followup question is whether businesses will need to start making budgets for non-invasive iOS FB/snap ads to be able to reach people, or whether Search/Chrome history tracking on iOS is good enough.
Google have their flaws (I never trust any new product of theirs will last), but on the whole, I am happy using their products and services. I have got enough value out of Google search, Gmail and Google docs over the years to make the privacy trade-off worthwhile, personally.
Facebook and Instagram are products that make me more unhappy as I use them. According to Facebook's Internal research, I am not alone in that. The privacy trade-off is not worth the net negative value.
I’m with you. I understand the theoretical problems of Google’s business model, but I get great value from their products, and until such a point as I experience or perceive direct harm, I’m okay to roll with them.
(I deleted Instagram within of two weeks of joining, and Facebook many years ago.)
I think most people's objections to Google and Amazon are macro objections to harm their business does to the world, not the individual consumer.
I shop on Amazon like I eat steaks. I get individual value out of Amazon and the steak, but at macro scale, Amazon is harming other businesses, and my steaks increase carbon emissions (amongst other things).
I did buy a power supply for my laptop on lenovo.com recently, just because I had 0 confidence that if i bought it on amazon it wouldn't be a fake. I checked out the site for a local electronics retailer first, but apparently they also started allowing third party sellers on their platform. In any case, it ended up being half the amazon price anyway
Making my life difficult certainly isn't how to get me to use your direct retail site rather than Amazon.
My preferred boots have a catalogue number. It's printed inside the boots, it's printed on the box they come in, it has remained the same for many years and it clearly identifies the exact model of boots and foot size.
If you type that number in to the manufacturer's own retail web site they're confused, what can this possibly be? It's unclear to them apparently, maybe I want er... women's boots? [What even are women's boots? Answer: The same boots, but limited to small foot sizes. I actually have size 10 feet.]
When I type the same code into Amazon, unsurprisingly it matches a product advertised by a seller, because the sellers have a strong incentive to advertise codes that result in sales. I get the exact product I want, admittedly it still doesn't auto-select the correct size but at least I'm on a page showing the product I want, one drop-down away from buying my boots.
So, Amazon gets the sale and the manufacturer misses out on what's presumably a considerable gap between their wholesale price and the retail price I'd have paid on their own store.
> So, Amazon gets the sale and the manufacturer misses out on what's presumably a considerable gap between their wholesale price and the retail price I'd have paid on their own store.
So you are knowingly paying more than MSRP because you can’t be bothered with using keywords to search the manufacturer’s website instead? Weird. How often and how many boots are you buying that this would be worth the trade off?
They're not saying that. They're assuming that Amazon (or the seller on their platform) buys at a wholesale price below what the manufacturer charges as retail on their own website. So the manufacturer loses out on the difference if you buy from Amazon instead of direct. That's broadly going to be true whether the Amazon retail price ends up being higher or lower than the manufacturer's retail price.
The alternatives are much better. I try to cut out all middlemen and buy from the brand directly if possible, assuming that I will get the highest quality product / least chance of counterfeit that way.
Then I go to the big box stores’ websites that do not have 3rd party sellers or offer the ability to filter them out.
And then I might go to Amazon. Amazon prices are notoriously high for any liquid or household product bought regularly, Costco and Target and Walmart are way cheaper for those.
Maybe the harm increases prices overall, so you never know.
Take hassle free returns and credit card points. Both features look like pro-consumer policies but end up forcing all online retailers to bake the cost into their prices. At the end of the day consumers just get no choice on this cost.
> Same price / more + $6.50 in postage arriving in 4 days time
It’s unfortunate, because free postage is a complete myth that everyone now expects. A company the size of Amazon can afford to burn money for years and years until they’re at the point where they have their own logistics network and make the numbers work.
There are very few companies that can do that—or that should, really.
I had read an article that said Amazon requires sellers to offer them the lowest price and provide free shipping to get top position in search results. The consequence of this is that prices have now risen by the cost of free shipping.
Amazon.com really is shockingly, atrociously poor. They barely even bother searching your keywords, for example. Even Google does a better job of searching then the native search engine. It beggars belief that they leave such basic features like filters so broken. But yeah, they have unreal fulfilment times plus guaranteed money back if something goes wrong. They accomplish this by treating everybody else like dirt.
I replaced Google search with Brave and DDG, Google Docs is not so useful for me (bad support for math formulas) and Gmail is just a default service I use from a client
I don't happen to see much value in the product you mention. The main reason I use them is because of inertia and the need to jump through hoops with my Android phone to use alternatives.
And interestingly I see Facebook and Whatsapp as very valuable for keeping in contact with people I am physically far from.
I wanted to build a science paper research platform, and math support was big on the list, the outlineapp team had an open issue to support LaTeX. You might be interested in that as a docs replacement maybe
> They are pretty hard to avoid, being an effective monopoly.
Im confused by this claim. Is it really that difficult to avoid Google search? It seems to me that it just requires going to bing.com, or changing the default search in your browser.
Also, Brave Search uses its own index, not google results.
Agreed, they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word. They're just considerably better than their competition, and it's absurdly easy to choose whichever search service you like, so almost everyone chooses Google.
It's the same with facebook, nearly everyone else is already there, so if you want to connect to people that's where you go. They just hit critical mass first.
The word monopoly gets thrown around as though it just means 'big and bad'. It's wooly thinking that's polluting the debate by obscuring what's actually going on. Missing the mark like that just detracts focus from actual pertinent criticisms of the harm these companies actually do, or what needs to happen to resolve those issues.
>they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word.
you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company, or someone living in a bubble
> "google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out
> - google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation"
>you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company,...
Oooh, insulting my motivations. Nice move!
There's cartel like behaviour going on, no question, I said as much elsewhere on the thread, and that needs to be stamped on hard. It's part of the harm they are doing I referred to. That's not the same as any one of these companies being a monopoly.
Y'all needy to either be way more pedantic, or back off a bit, but staying at the level you're at is completely missing the point most people have taken to referring to with the word ’monopoly'.
There’s certainly some cartel-like behaviour going on, such as the recently uncovered collusion between Facebook and Google in the ad markets. That has to be stamped on.
I’m a little uneasy about Facebook owning WhatsApp, but I can’t see any concrete way they are able to use that to significantly exclude competition.
I just don’t see how Google is leveraging its other properties in significant ways to exclude say Bing or DDG. I use Google docs and gmail, but what has that got to do with whether I use Google search or Bing?
What anti-trust action do you think is needed, and what is it’s desired outcome? I don’t know what ‘breaking up Facebook ’ really means, except maybe making them sell WhatsApp. What would that achieve?
The essence of anti-trust is killing vertical integration, or at least keeping that integration from getting so deep it's harmful to the ability to maintain a healthy marketplace.
When you start to see all eggs start to get destined for one basket (Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft), and especially in Google's or Apple's case of buyout and extinguish, you have a problem.
Amazon is also right on top of that precarious position as well; sitting on top of and utilizing third-party sales data to front-run. It's not just about harm to the consumer, it's harm to the market as a whole.
The case of Tech in particular is fascinating, because what their service offerings enable is apparently highly destabilizing to the very authorities that would regulate them.
And no, Tech isn't the only sector on my sh*tlist. Media consolidation has gotten rather out of hand as well in my opinion. Walmart has also started to devastate the dairy industry for everyone but the industrial ops as well after buying out one of the big packaging outfits.
OK, I'll ask again. What action do you think needs to be taken, and how would it improve the market for users? How should be prevent these companies from being monopolies, accepting for a moment that they are.
I still don't know what "break up Google" or "Break up Facebook" actually means and how that would help. There are bits of them you could forcefully spin off, but so what?
Simple. You (a company) do one thing. You do not absorb other companies and extinguish them. Somebody else does the same thing you do, but a bit different? Want to merge? Bend over, cuz here comes the part where you have to painstakingly prove why you merging with them is good, and won't subject the market to crippling hyperoptimization forces.
Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.
Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum.
Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space.
Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list.
Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period.
The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase.
It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue.
The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting.
Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled.
I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility.
All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.
I get you on Amazon, they are abusing their function as a market platform for others and that needs cracking down on. That's not really anything to do with being a monopoly, it's just abuse, I suppose being dominant makes it easier to do it. That's not going to stop them dominating the market though, just stop them abusing that dominance.
How does spinning off google's non-search businesses address the dominance of Google search? I don't see how gmail or docs makes any difference to that. I don't see how making Youtube a separate company benefits youtube users.
How does spinning off Instagram and whatsApp from the facebook social network make any difference to anything? The facebook social network would still be dominant. It would make no difference to their ability to collude with google on ads, those are completely orthogonal issues.
I'm not saying these companies aren't dominant in their market segment. They should not be allowed to abuse that dominance through e.g. coluding on ad placement. Regulation and enforcement is needed. However nothing you have suggested would make any difference to the dominance of google search or of the facebook social network. I also don't see how it would benefit users.
Can anyone who buys the idea that google search is a monopoly, or that facebook social network is a monopoly, tell me how they would end those monopolies, why they would do it, and what the benefits would be?
With Google Search, your Ad dominance is tightly coupled to the effectiveness of the search engine. The actual effectiveness nowadays of Google Search as a finder of information is secondary to the brand recognition and that everyone reaches for it. Separating those two interests keeps the incentives aligned. Google search has been made strictly worse through the tight integration of the advertising functionality. The other issue with Google is the tendency to acquire and kill potential competitors. This inhibits a truly competitive marketplace. Yes, denormalization of market task introduces inefficiency in resource consumption, but increases systemic resilience and overall opportunity for gainful employment. It also creates career mobility, and prevents issues created by non-competes which have been well known to cripple or otherwise hobble skilled employees in rather small or highly consolidated industrial verticals.
YouTube? Society gains by not having a company ultimately accountable to the same exact people. The virtue of the Free Market is that regression to the mean makes sure the system remains healthy since you've got a larger sampling of capital allocators. When you start seeing the same faces over and over again leading most of the big names in Tech when you track the actual corporate hierarchy, you have a problem. We're also coming out of a period of huge pushing into n young people to get a college education to prepare them for dealing with non-trivial issues of balancing the nuances of a healthy business through whatever specialized vertical they have. You don't need more consolidation. That's the opposite of what you want unless you are literally trying to get entrepreneurial talent to pursue other directions; a task made more difficult by hyperoptimization contagion created by having to compete with overly consolidated market actors.
Spinning off WhatsApp and Instagram rips out large chunks of social graph from Facebook, or would if you enforced the split up to include a cleansing of their dataset of any data acquired through those acquisitions. To be clear, I am not a nice understanding trust buster. If you've attracted my attention to the point these companies have, this will hurt. I don't care how impractical or unfair it seems.
I've thought about this for quite a long time actually. Impractically so. It's not exactly something anyone ever comes and asks you about though.
I kinda wish more people would. Older I get the more fascinating these types of dynamic systems are to think through.
I like your point about reducing consolidation to increase variety in control and management. It’s an interesting point, but I’m not sure there’s any actual law they are breaking by just owning and running multiple businesses. I would have thought legally speaking they would need to perform some form of market abuse to justify enforcement. Yes there have been abuses and they should be held to account, but we have laws fur that already and breaking up companies doesn’t do anything to stop such abuses. Google and Facebook are separate businesses and the still colluded. It’s the abuse that’s illegal in such cases, not the ownership structure.
I dint see how you can split off Google search from advertising things. Would you split up a newspaper and the business function that sells ad space on it? How? I suppose ads do make it less useful, but honestly it’s still the best by far, even if some others are now mostly good enough.
I’m with you on preventing the buying and elimination of competitors, but there are already mechanisms to do that. All acquisitions have to go through regulatory review.
They can’t both be a monopoly in the same business. That would be a duopoly or a cartel.
However between the two of them they collectively control about 51% of the online advertising market. They’re the heavy hitters for sure, and do dominate some market segments, but is two companies each having about 25% of a market a monopoly? Google’s market share has been declining for 5 years. Amazon’s share is rising fast. Is a triopoly a thing? Even if it was, we don’t have one anyway.
Sure there is cartel like behaviour going on. That needs to stamped on hard. I’m not against action where it’s needed, I just see a lot of vague uninformed and inaccurate comment on this issue. Uninformed outrage is a dangerous combination.
I don't think this is relevant to my comment at all.
The first part of my comment ignores the existence of Brave Search, saying that it's not "hard to avoid" Google Search when all it takes to do so is changing your browser to point to Bing.
The second part of my comment that references Brave search was a response to the question of whether brave search uses Google under the hood.
I've been using Brave's new search engine for the last three weeks and it is extremely good. This is the first time a non-Google search engine has made it a week in my daily workflow (software development + own multiple businesses).
curious, I'm not a fan of organizing my own docs collection or being unable to collaborate on docs/share them via urls - I also dislike bespoke native apps for most tasks that are comfortable in the browser.
Have you found equivalent services to gmail and docs without the privacy risks? it wouldn't be too bad to spend a dollar or two a month for something with less privacy tradeoffs.
On the contrary, the anecdotes are what I find to be the most meaningful. The odd cases, edge cases, and the opinions of how people use a tool is what I find the most important. That’s where the value is of “why not?” It’s easy to generalize and assume that everyone is just like you. I’m glad we have folks sharing the differences.
Eh, I've got to say again that my experience is the opposite, so I guess everyone has different views on this!
I'll agree the Sync isn't as good as Google, but I find the Microsoft Office 365 apps so much better if you need to spend lots of time in them every day. I've used the google alternatives and there are always limitations you end up hitting (As an example, I was working in google docs the other day and was pretty surprised that I couldn't even choose a custom page size and in order to set a custom page size I had to download an add-in - this sort of thing means the products just don't feel as built-out as the Microsoft ones).
Never found an issue sharing things with clients - you just drop the files into a folder and send them a sharing link (and decide to allow them to edit or not).
If your core use case is collaboration, GSuite is the best option IMO.
If you have more of a desktop publishing mindset, the Microsoft suite has way more options.
Personally I have zero need for WordArt or custom page sizes, but rely on the collaboration features in docs to hammer out designs, share analyses, and put together presentations. Nothing I produce is meant to be printed out.
We use notion increasingly extensively, and also use G Suite.
It's a strange beast - you think it's for note-taking, but it's capable of so much more. It doesn't try to do the abstractions of the office productivity suite like Documents and Presentations.
Instead, it works with new abstractions, like 'Data Types' and 'Templates'. I could see this becoming the norm going forward - but you have to shift your thinking to their model.
Yeah, maybe I’m just dumb and can’t figure it out properly.
I dump files on my computer and they don’t end up on my colleagues laptop. So we end up resetting OneDrive on his Mac, which sometimes solves the issue.
I have shared links with clients but then they suddenly can’t access the folder any longer. So I share it again.
I agree that the apps are good, but only in the desktop version. The web apps have still a long way to go.
Yeah, OneDrive for Mac is where OneDrive for Windows was up until two or so years ago when they finally made it stable. They are apparently working on it, but when they haven't even been able to recompile for M1 I don't know when that work will appear.
> I have got enough value out of Google search, Gmail and Google docs over the years to make the privacy trade-off worthwhile, personally.
This statement assumes that Google services are of high quality because they exploit users' privacy. I don't think that trade-off is necessary. Google could offer its services with high quality and without violating users' privacy.
Many of Google services allow users to take advantage of data collection. For example I once received a notification along the lines of "based on your location and traffic, you should leave at 3pm to catch your 5pm flight". I did nothing, I just received my flight ticket on my Gmail account, Google algorithms did the rest.
This is just one example. I find personalized search and suggestions rather good, and I regularly use location history to remember where I was on a particular date. This is of course a byproduct of data collection for monetization purposes, but I like the fact that you can get something useful out of it.
Also, Google does a rather good job of not leaking your personal data. I am not talking about state actors level threats, but unlike with Facebook, it doesn't have a tendency to show pictures of you getting drunk to your boss.
Google's "plane ticket in the inbox" logic is extremely handy, but it's also not very clever. If a family member forwards me their itinerary so I can pick them up from the airport, for example, Google will still remind me that I have to depart soon, even though I'm just at home.
the problem is when governments ask google access to data which otherwise they could not obtain. in this recent case, the idea was to access gmail or google drive because that contains "unencrypted" whatsapp backs. so all the e2e and a thir party managed to be the achilees heel.
This would be true if Google is able to extract more value from behind your back privacy intrusions than they can extract from convincing people to pay some amount. This is reasonable because Google’s model detaches the consumer from the true cost they are paying, which will inevitably lead to higher costs paid.
To add to it, Google also have top notch security capabilities. Yes they have my data (privacy), but I know that my data is safe with them and will very very unlikely be hacked by/leaked to 3rd parties (security).
The problem I have with Google isn't that their products deliver value or not, it's that their products are obviously not free, and the cost is opaque to the consumer. But I do know the cost must be extremely high because they are extremely profitable and that profit must be coming from some place.
The business model of most Google products rely on their costs to be completely detached from the consumer. And this is extremely insidious and anti-competitive because a consumer has no idea what businesses are paying Google, the business has no idea what the consumer is getting in exchange, and the information balance is totally lop-sided (Google has it all).
The cost I'm talking about isn't just privacy (which is not the focal point here at all). The cost is that they exploit our data to create a one-sided marketplace where they can extract the highest value from merchants and consumers. This creates maximum value for Google and screws over competitors, consumers, and businesses. Even if you don't click on any Google ads, you are still paying for them because many business are forced to use them to survive given that Google has a massive share of the advertising business. The businesses you interact with simply mark up all costs, and you ultimately end up paying for them. It's anti-competitive because this detachment of the cost-benefit feedback loop means consumers are no longer making any conscious choice of Google product vs competitor product, because they think the Google product is free!
FB business model happens to be much the same way, except rather than free product to get your attention they just outright manipulate you for your attention which is more obviously anti-consumer.
The expected value of an ad conversion for a user is going to be positive or they wouldn’t have converted. Therefore the cost is not high, it is negative. So you don’t know the cost when you claim to know it.
Being the product doesn’t mean being the victim; I don’t pay for my friendships.
Google trades getting better at helping people for helping them and uses an auction system to decide what help slots get filled with offers of help.
The problem is not Google or advertising (for me). There is a trend among governments world wide to get your Google data when you are at the wrong time at the wrong place or searching the wrong thing at the wrong time.
That's the real danger. Not what kind of advertisement you prefer.
It's easy to be Google free though with the following alternatives:
1. Gmail: Vivadi Mail (free), Fastmail, Protonmail, Tutanota etc. (Best look for an IMAP provider to make migration easy).
2. Google Docs: LibreOffice (if you don't care about collaboration) or MS Office or Pages.
3. Google Search: Create custom search engines on your browser for IMDB, Wikipedia, StackOverfow, Reddit etc etc. And use Yandex for the rest as it conveniently offers a link to resume search with Bing, Yahoo or Google if you are not satisfied with their search result. (Note though that Yandex is just as intrusive as Google, but its biggest plus is that it is a non-US company. A major annoyance with it though is that it often prioritizes Russian language sites).
4. Android: Saifish OS is currently the best, though apps are lacking for it. Otherwise, "Google Free" Android forks are the next best option.
5. Chrome: Firefox (even though it is becoming just as shitty) or its forks. Vivaldi browser is a distant second.
I think alternatives are not relevant since single apps do not matter but ecosystem is what matters. For example this is how Google's ecosystem works(my personal experience): Google Search > Gmail > YouTube. I first started using Google Search then I started using Gmail and finally in order to create YouTube account I needed a Gmail account.
As far as I know, you've never needed to create a Gmail account for YouTube. You need a Google account, but those aren't necessarily Gmail ones. To create a non-Gmail Google account, just click on "use my current email address instead" in the account creation screen.
I didn't know that since I use Gmail since always but you get my point. More apps in family of apps more synergies. Here is what Google says about Google Account: "Sign in to your Google Account, and get the most out of all the Google services that you use. Your account helps you do more by personalising your Google experience and offering easy access to your most important information from anywhere."
Getting back to YouTube yea tbh it would be kind of anticompetitive if Google required exclusively Gmail to use YouTube. My bad.
This is purely from a pro-privacy perspective - it is better to not have all your personal data with one company. If I am using YouTube, it doesn't mean I also have to use Gmail or Google Doc.
Instead of pushing back on all Big Tech, I am seeing endless bickering about what dystopian company to follow.
Current state:
Apple and Google are the 'good' guys. Facebook and Microsoft are the 'bad' guys. Twitter is in the background at the moment. Tiktok is HN's absolute lovely darling. No one cares that its Chinese.
This keeps changing like a drunk game of russian roulette, mixed with some partisan politics, anti-billionairism, etc.
If it were year 2005, we would all be singing in unison to take down Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - have a startup spirit of optimism. I haven't seen that lately on HN.
That's because for many there is no consistent principle underlying their criticisms, they start with a list of companies they like/dislike or view as with/against them and work backwards.
They are all bad if people trade their personal/private information for "free" use of those services. The key part is let people know they are trading their personal data in exchange for "free" access to whatever free of charge service these companies offer.
I am fairly confident that the average user understands that their YouTube, FB, Insta etc usage is funded by targeted ads and doesn't really care. Sure they might not understand the full extent of the targeting but let them learn about factory farming, forced labour, the prison/military industrial complex and many other evils first. Maybe with information campaigns run via targeted ads :)
news.google.com makes me fairly said but i have to go out of my way to see that. although sometimes google forces to to see trending stories as to which i cringe especially when i really don't want to care about what bad things are happening on a particular days. it sounds selfish but if i could block all news sites i would
Nah they are overrated. Google docs is thoroughly mediocre the only plus is that it's free. And finally fed up enough with Google workspace that I'm moving off it. Their documentation is terrible. Gmail is good but will pay for a comparable replacement and then can finally wash my hands of this parasitic company
>> to make the privacy trade-off worthwhile, personally.
Maybe now. Maybe Today. But what about your privacy in the future? That data is now totally out of your control. Maybe you will feel differently in a few years. Maybe the laws will change and your past browsing history will be googleable by your ex wife. Data is forever. It should never be handed over solely on the basis of current promises.
I set up an email server on my VPS but I went back to using Gmail after a while because it's so damn convenient. It's one of the few things that I don't see myself ever giving up.
Nowadays I pretty much only use my email server to spam my friends with funny emails that appear to come from mcafee@belize.mansion
Zuckerberg doesn’t need to benefit peoples lives, he just needs to make not using his service socially destructive enough that you will use his service anyways.
Did you see how they intentionally added artificial delays to non AMP ads? Or bid up their own ads to exactly what they calculated was the most a customer was willing to pay instead of running a fair auction?
Have you actually weighed the value that you're getting out of Google services versus the privacy that you (and people) are trading off? Because I feel that people are blindly saying that and are overestimating the value. Let's see:
* Google Maps - great navigation and place accuracy, in exchange for your real-time geolocation and social media posts tagging places
* YouTube - free video hosting in exchange for your data being fed to ML algorithms, which make them billions; also now a great source of disinformation
* Google Photos - free image hosting also in exchange of your enabling of their billion-dollar ML-based businesses
I think I'm making the point in the above examples that they're making more money than what we're turning over, but please feel free to tell me--what other great value do we derive from Google products do we derive from our data?
The users are evaluating benefit vs. harm to themselves. For them, they can either use a free product or pay for a product that is far less useful to them that still collects the same data.
Yeah so the problem with that response is that you can say the exact same thing about Facebook, so it now doesn’t make sense that that’s being made as a point in favor of Google.
It explains why people use Google and Facebook. They're not stupid. Facebook can get away with much more abuse of its users and still provide net benefit because the users benefit from the network effect, which no competitor has tried to mitigate. Users of most Google products can migrate to competitors more easily.
Yes. Apple gets paid billions by Google - obviously Apple is not going to hurt Google - instead they are going on a privacy crusade against companies whose business they can hurt without any financial blowback.
I believe a big chunk (the majority?) of this comes from a fairly simple deal to set Google as the default search engine in Safari. Facebook doesn't have something similar to leverage, that I can think of at least.
The ad business is what matters right now. Meta is a startup pitch, a trillion dollar company pivoting from 2d screens to 3d, and the social network ad business is the runway to get there. It's absolutely nuts, but I wouldn't call it a distraction. I'm a bit shocked at how many people are handwaving it away as a distraction, really.
Their ad business is ran on other people's platforms, and they're beholden to their rules, like Apples.
"Metaverse" - whatever that's supposed to mean - is an attempt at creating a new platform that they control, where they don't have to follow Apple's rules.
The problem with it is that MS missed the mobile revolution that made people more free, but AR glasses need much more technical advancements for people to get rid of the mobile phone.
It is not enough to just take the corporate earnings of companies in the quater after the apple change and claim that every cent facebook / google made or did not make is due to this change.
Facebook should forget about the virtual crap and work on a search engine. move the search box to the center of the page and bam, you have hundreds of millions of web searches to milk.
Is there any evidence for these sorts of downstream effects from past privacy-friendly platform changes? I don't see evident ones that aren't confounded.
> As a result of the data drought, many brands have shifted their ad spending to Google because its flagship search-ad business relies on customer intent—users’ search terms immediately reveal what they are interested in—rather than data collected from app and web tracking.
It's too bad that the well of sneaky, user-stolen data had to dry up for the brands to move their dollars away from it.
> Google has no proven workaround. It was affected as everywhere else.
If everyone is forced to drop behavioral targeting in favor of contextual one, search ads is the king because users give ad networks with the most valuable context, search intent.
Also, Google owns the widest range of ads inventory including many O&O properties. If you no more depend on fancy technologies, it becomes a fight of pure ad network infrastructure. No one can compete with Google there.
