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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

"in short, many people lured by financial rewards may not fully take in what it means to have a company fully monitoring all your screen-based activity"

I would like to see this spelled out. What are the risks? Why is this any worse than being a Nielsen family back in the day?

It seems like the most likely thing to happen to the people who signed up for this is: nothing. They helped a tech company with their research and got paid. That's it.

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Nielson data is a very small very targeted piece of data. Nielson may be able to somewhat tell something about your family (so critically it is about a group of people instead of an individual person, which is a major difference).

Considering how most people use their phones, this basically gives Google all of your information. There is little to nothing they would not know about you. Worse is them being able to get information about other people (thanks to them messaging you, while you have this tracker running) without their consent.

That, however, doesn't address the question - why do you think people can't freely choose for themselves what they're doing with their data.

It's one thing to do a nastly covert data mining and another thing to go to a person and say "hey, I'll pay you to do A on THIS device with THIS app which you CLEARLY need to install and activate". One is dishonest, the other just seems like basic freedom in modern world?

I don't necessarily have an issue with people being able to choose. However I think there is an issue of actually understanding what is being done with your data.

But still doesn't address that it isn't just your data that is being gathered up from your phone. Your consenting to at least some data from the people you text and email being grabbed up and there is nothing they can do about it except not talk to you, assuming they were to even know.

But the point of this was market research. I highly doubt anybody gives a shit, even the uptight brigade here on hackernews, about whether company X knows I'm using company Y's app. It's not like FB wants to read your private texts. They want to know what apps you're using and how you spend your time so they can make their own products better.

> Nielson data is a very small very targeted piece of data

No it's not: https://computermobilepanel.nielsen.com/cmp/landingeng.jsp

> Why is this any worse than being a Nielsen family back in the day?

GP was specifically asking about "back in the day", the comparison should be about the volume of data between then and now

> GP was specifically asking about "back in the day"

You're quoting a different person, and clearly not, or they wouldn't be speculating on Nielsen's abilities in the present tense.

The underlying assumption seems to be that people are incapable, unable and too dumb to choose for themselves, if they want to give their habit data in exchange for direct payment. Apple needs to come and save them from themselves.

They’re also giving away data on everyone they interact with without these people consenting to it. This is not only dumb but a violation of law in Europe. So yes, saying that people are “incapable, unable and too dumb” to act responsible on their own agency is not something I would doubt. If not to “save them from themselves”, I appreciate it when Apple comes in to save my privacy from being violated by proxy.

Very much agreed, the friend-of-a-friend aspect of privacy is very rarely considered in these discussions.

This is my problem with many "privacy advocates" on the internet. It often feels like the end goal is not, to help consumers, or make it clearer what technology is doing, but to get rid of large tech companies on principle or maybe return the internet to the glory days of the the late 90's and early 00's, or just end consumerism in general. It just so happens that privacy is the most effective path to that goal.

Apple isn't specifically saving anyone here, they're specifically enforcing the terms of their Enterprise app distribution program.

If, however, you want to make a wider argument about whether or not it's reasonable for Apple to take a very opinionated view of how their main computing platform should apply security/privacy protections, you're very welcome to do so. I happen to greatly value the choices Apple has made for iOS, and I encourage everyone who disagrees, to go and use Android.

i don't believe the Nielsen boxes had microphones that monitored the conversation in the room.

But they could have!

See what I did there? It seems like confusing what a company could have done with what they did is a common rhetorical move these days.

It has been pointed out else where in the thread that they do have mics in them. It is possible that Nielsen is only looking for audio from TVs and Phones, but Google also wants general audio for speech recognition. But I'm not sure.

i stand corrected. thank you.

Nielsen captures drastically less, and less-specific information than any of these modern Internet-based ad networks.

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