Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best. And per this article, those gains are clearly coming at the expense of user trust and goodwill, something not reflected in click thru rates and RPM.
Here's hoping we can get past all this invasive retargeting / surveillance / privacy-invading crap and get back to straightforward contextual ads, like car parts ads on a hot rod website - our world would be better for it, and maybe Google could restore a little of its rapidly fading goodwill.
Which research? From my experience, personalized ads perform ~50% better than non-personalized ads. This would also explain why Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail to keep their tracking infrastructure.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
Even if you write Brooklyn USA, there are 22 places called Brooklyn in the USA.
So now your search term is "Pizza in Brooklyn, NY, USA".
And now you want to search for the cost of a taxi... "Taxi prices in Brooklyn, NY, USA".
And now you want to know who won the baseball... "Who won the baseball, in USA". (Baseball means other things in other countries)
It's a staggering number of queries where the location changes the interpretation of what you're looking for, which changes the results.
Heck, I even get ads in the wrong language.
Hint: Instead of noticing that I’ve been doing manual labor recently, and inferring that I’m not a native English speaker, just use contextual targeting: show me ads in the same language as the content I’m watching.
Ad blockers are making the problems tracking-based much, much worse. Whatever signal is left after people block aggressively block trackers is actually just noise. Hopefully the market will see this and self-correct.
Why are your anecdotes relevant?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-research-shows-personalize...
https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/...
> Search ads get a much smaller lift from personalization.
Search itself has seen huge improvements from personalization. It's hard to imagine that the same shouldn't be the case for the ads shown for a particular query as with the results.
And what's the deal with "hard to imagine"? At some point it was hard to imagine we didnt have any witches. What the evidence?
But they still make money.
As in, they have a duty to breach ethics for profit as long as it's legal.
Stupid concept which I wish we could abolish but that's the way the economy is currently setup.
A company’s management has a duty to shareholders to work on behalf of the shareholders and not on behalf of their own well being. That usually means profit because that’s what most shareholders own the company for, not for charity. But there is no particular duty to maximize it at all costs. Damage to reputation and legal risk and the like are real concerns.
If anything, it’s the self-interested managers violating their duty who cut the most corners and burn goodwill, in the name of hitting short term goals and chasing their bonus.
It's not much, and there's certainly room for considering ethics. In fact, you can do nearly anything that isn't actively repurposing part of the business for the directors' own use. For example, one of the landmark cases affirmed the Chicago Cubs' right to leave tons of money on the table because their president believed that baseball was a "day-time sport" and wouldn't install lights for night games.
Companies absolutely can be good environmental stewards and pay their workers well in the interests of making money.Just like they can donate to charity while still doing proper fiduciary duty.
I think you will find both sorts of research, because it seems obvious that results will depend on what sort of web site you run and what sort of audience you have.
A competing ad service, naturally much smaller at first, would be hard pressed to replicate[1] even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the costs involved. Even more importantly, a competing ad service would be nigh unable to replicate even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the legal protections and regulatory oversight of privacy. It is much easier for a large, well established business to "continue as it always did" and get either a nod of understanding, or at worst a slap on the wrist from the regulators - than for a newer, smaller player to start doing anything shady. In the later case, stiff penalties and "making an example of" can be expected for variety of reasons - the new player tends to not be well connected in the regulatory circles, and tends to be less influential on the local economy either, thus there's little downside for slapping the new player hard.
This is yet another case where regulatory framework with somewhat arbitrary enforcement (relevant fines have wide ranges; judicial injunctions are optional and discretionary) entrenches and unfairly protects from competition the existing large market players.
--
[1] sadly, ability to replicate minute features is key to provide "bullet-point engineering" and getting sales to casual buyers who are easily impressed by long feature list - and to advanced buyers who are trying to squeeze every last bit of advantage from the service.
Maybe they are more than just an ad company?
I'm reminded of the vitamin water lawsuit
"Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Brands#vitaminwater
The point being that normal people think "advertising" means showing a picture of a car or cereal, and google thinks advertising is identifying the individual.
The real tragedy is people are woefully undereducated on the damage that over consumption of carbohydrates and sugars does to your body. So even when they do look at the label and see 13 grams of sugar per serving and 2.5 servings per bottle (the comparable bottle of Coke has 55g sugars so you don't have to search it) they’re helpless. And that seems, as far as I can glean, to be a giant corpo-political conspiracy because we had a lot of grains and corn syrup in the US and needed to make people believe it was okay to consume it all despite conflicting science. “A healthy (carbohydrate filled) breakfast (of Cheerios) is good for the heart kids.” So if anyone is to blame it’s essentially ourselves for letting capitalists control the narrative around what goes into a healthy diet and lacking the political wherewithal to develop dietary recommendations that are based in science and not big cereal marketing. There it is: advertising.
water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name.
People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.
To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable.
Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.
"Sprite" is psychologically manipulative but "VitaminWater" isn't?
OMG, pick a side.
Marketing is all manipulative tactics born out of a desire to push more product not help people be healthy. Assuming Coke is somehow responsible for our health is skirting personal responsibility and passing the blame no different than the “fast food makes you fat let’s tell McDonalds what type of oil to use but not the restaurant down the street which is twice as unhealthy” mentality. It’s downright irresponsible to operate under the assumption that a company’s marketing department is going to give you an unbiased wholesome view of reality. I don't see how pretending Coke is some angel of healthy drink knowledge and herald of good diets that fell from grace with vitaminwater because they neglected to mention in the title “oh btw there’s some sugar” so must be punished is anything other than blissful ignorance at best.
My visceral reaction to the absurdity of the trial is derived from what I perceive as lazy inconsistency in how we approach the ethics of advertising. Cherry picking VitaminWater, a drink where the facts are spelled out explicitly on the label on every bottle, of all things, feels more like an effort to dodge responsibility by attacking big soda than a true attempt to ask whether we should be allowing corporate propaganda to influence certain aspects of society. I really don't want the courts having an opinion on what makes a healthy diet. And I don’t want companies doing so either. It’s not a disagreement that we shouldn't try to stop manipulative marketing. It’s that I don't want any company anywhere trying to tell me what is healthy and what isn't when there is money to be made based on the message they present.
Essentially I believe all marketing is manipulative and we should do away with all of it of we truly want to build a smarter society.
we've bought into this notion that capitalism serves us because we choose what to buy.
if thats not really true - what game are we playing here?
32.5g of sugar per bottle, most of which is fructose.
All that said, the term vitamin is also entirely subjective. Nothing about "vitamin" to me ever implied "healthy". It simply implied "has vitamin". It's just all around absurd.
rice + sugar + crispy.
orange juice and added sugar.
I mean come on it works well.
Sometimes I worry that "X is unhealthy!" can make people eat an even worse diet.
You're right. We shouldn't allow marketing candy as food.
That isn't the definition of a reasonable consumer. Reasonable people don't have infinite time to second guess everything that people trusted to give them health information are saying. If they imply it's healthy and they're trusted to tell you whether it's healthy or not (i.e. they're trusted to publish nutritional information on their bottle), then a reasonable person should be able to trust the implication. We've all got too much to do to assume that someone is both misleading and telling the truth at the same time.
As for names, the could have called it Nigglepuff Drink. Nigglepuff Drink does not imply any untrue health claims and it is not associated with any f&b products.
I don't know what a reasonable consumer is then. The first thing I usually do when reaching for a new drink is glance at the nutrition label to make sure I'm not consuming 55 grams of sugar. It takes less than 10 seconds. I learned this from my mom, who was generally concerned as a parent about making sure her children were eating healthy. It's not rocket science.
I personally don't understand how Vitamin == Healthy. Maybe I'm N == 1, but the claim "has vitamins" which is what "vitamin" in the name implies to me is not, in fact, false. The leap from "has vitamins" to "is healthy to drink with abandon" is the problem here. Maybe if you could prove that the company knew the drink was unhealthy and deliberately fabricated the name so as to mislead their consumer base into making unhealthy choices, you might have a case?
But by this argument any instance of a name where somebody could plausibly make that type of jump must be regulated. If I was taught that fish are healthy because they have healthy fats then I could reasonably make the association that fish stix are healthy. Couldn't I?
Turns out that it's much quicker to scan the back of the label for Coca-Cola trademarks than it is to scour the nutritional information.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.
The Santaroga Barrier,
Frank Herbert, 1968
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ezrg8i/we_ha...
Short version. It works really well. Like absurdly well.
Massive fear if browsers started limited cookies. As that would destroy the cash cow.
I'd think this was the niche where it actually would perform.
The future of Google maps is actually as a recommendation engine. They are adding icons now that are suggested by Google, and advertising that way.
but at their present scale this small improvement would mean a lot of money, wouldn't it? Lots of businesses find that it is harder to get significant gains (i think they call that the 'law of diminishing returns'), however the stock market is demanding steady growth figures.
i guess location data is important for targeting of local services: you can't push an add for a specific restaurant to a person living in a different city; now if you know that he may be going to that city, then that's a slightly different thing.
I think the alternative to all this tracking would be to push more yellow page directories like DMOZ or jasmine directories, but I don't know if you could do that in practice. Another direction would be to push a directory of specialized search engines, like duckduckgo bang! operators (shameless plug: here is my directory of these https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html )
Meanwhile the likes of Apple and others are taking a stance of making it increasingly hard for Google and Facebook to do what they want to via updates now advertised as “features” that protect consumers. As these documents highlight Google knows consumers want this privacy and it scares the $&!& out of them. Interesting days ahead.
They are really bad at making money with anything that isn't advertising.
Google has proven over and over again that they don't value customer support or long term maintenance. They will get bored and sunset services you depend on, or switch off your entire business because some employee sent suspicious email on his gmail.
https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/gbh7p6/gcp_sus...
Google has realized that building up business to business support networks is a profitable approach.
Customers get nothing, because customers don't pay money. Customers are the product.
A few weeks ago, I submitted an incident with sample code and got a response back with code to implement a workaround, and the information related to the enhancement the engineer submitted so I could escalate if needed. They automatically transitioned support engineers in another geography at shift end without any drama or repetition from me. All within 12 hours.
Also, not sure where you get that is a guaranteed golden goose. Most companies that are in this space don't do well.
I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. While it's true that on the internet there's a loud privacy activist movement that's grown over the past few years, I don't think this movement reflects the true preferences of the silent majority. I think it's a self-serving moral panic.
Users benefit from the services that their information funds. It would be a mistake to incinerate trillions of dollars of institutional value on the say-so of a few strident and unrepresentative activist voices.
There's actually a pretty cool graph from Google from the court docs that says the opposite.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1tSEWYAAVHGY?format=jpg&name=...
Then why trick Google and Facebook them into doing that instead of making it opt-in?
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, in East Asia, there was a completely different series of social evolutions, such that a large majority of people are not bothered and in fact expect services tied to identity tied to finance. This conveniently is expressed by a government issued ID tied to a smart phone number tied to banking. There are exceptions but not the majority. This simple formula is repugnant to my US Western sense of social boundaries.
Investors are the ones that seem to have no problem with individuals giving up their privacy, while the people in question cross the gamut of social condition.
Well for one thing, at least in my experience, most credit card transaction data does not include granular information about the transaction (like the list of groceries you bought).
One thing about returning to relative wealth is how much stress it removes from 'weekly' shopping.
No, that information is collected as part of the "points" discount card and then sold to advertisers together with your credit card transation data.
Also, I know an engineer that was inside a monstrous grocery chain many years back. Back then the payment and loyalty systems were separated by technical measures and firing level policies. If you used a CC without a points card they were not able to associate it to any kind of account.
Obviously the CC processor could but they didn’t get a list of purchases.
i never logged it or provided any other information than my credit card swipe in the store but they tied it to the account i had on homedepot.com
The pervasive passive collection on a mobile phone is harder to internalize. “I carry a persistent, always on radio beacon that can record and transmit to arbitrary third parties all of my actions, searches, continual location, contacts both electronically and in person, and is tied directly to my identity (many countries require ID to obtain a SIM card)” is not how most non tech people would describe their mobile phone.
Yeah, being in tech, I wouldn't describe it like that either. It seems like so overboard that I would describe your post as misinformation/FUD.
It would be one thing if you rip off all my data but I am constantly seeing ads for cool things I would never have found otherwise and can't wait to buy. Instead the ads are always shit that I never even consider.
If things were not tailored I would probably randomly run across products that are just outside my current taste but at least spark some interest.
That is the real power behind a peer-to-peer system in my opinion: Offloading, and therefore removing the capabilities to track anything as a single node in the system.
The only issue is peer-to-peer transport encryption, which can be solved if done correctly.
Something like "statistically correct" DNS, or assets, or contents should've been the norm a long time ago. That's exactly what I'm striving for with my Tholian Stealth Browser [1]
(to clarify: I mean peer-to-peer as a networking concept, specifically as the opposite concept of a decentralized blockchain)
The question at this point (or rather in that specific moment) is what will lead to classifying malicious actors, and how these malicious actors can be identified permanently.
If it's a blocked IP: not a good solution. If it's a TLS certificate for said peer: probably better.
Fighting anti censorship mechanisms is really hard due to its statistically local-true nature. The buckets have to be carefully sorted and randomized with multiple geolocations, ISPs, and fully-encrypted network protocols - to the very least in order to make this work.
Apologies for the self-promotion but there is another way: https://www.mojeek.com/support/ads/
> it’s essentially a social/legal problem, not a technical one
And ironically, it's the tech companies who are getting away with it.
but yes, they should be required to get your unambiguous consent for data sharing separate from any other transaction, otherwise it shouldn’t be considered consent.
The authorities only have to look at the leaked information, contact you, and ask you to generate proof that you signed the contract.
IMO, you're wrong on this one. Things like Google fiber/car are not ways to diversify Google's revenue.
They are just more tools in their arsenal to keep collecting more data on users and improving their ads.
By offering things like Google fiber, they ensure more people get online and that's more data they can collect.
Same with FB. Terragraph and Aquila are/were just ways to get people online so more data can be collected and fed into "the machine"
1) Working out how they can milk even more money out of their magic cash cow of online advertising by providing more opportunities to serve ads (YouTube, Gmail, Maps)
2) Protecting their magic cash cow (ads) from external threats, the main threat being a loss of tracking (Chrome, Android, Fibre, Google Analytics, Ok Google, Maps). (As an aside, if you use Chrome and want to avoid this kind of behaviour, please consider swapping to a truly open source non-tracking browser)
3) Trying to find another magic cash cow before the first one runs out of milk (Eg Google Cloud, YouTube Red)
Some things will fall into multiple buckets, for example Google Maps and Gmail offers both an opportunity to further track users and serve them ads - double whammy!
I suspect Google Cars are more about category 3, although have no doubt that they will be mined for data as much as possible to serve categories 1 & 2. Agree with your point on fibre - it looks like that is an attempt to own even more of the tech stack to provide even more methods to track.
threatening behavior of the carriers and net neutrality
obtaining access rights to add fiber when new placement occurred
… not trying to build a viable new business.
Waymo (and basically all of X) is there to make google look sexy and to provide an exec playground than actual businesses. The Waymo team is the most competent team in the space and they know there is no business there this decade.
Google fiber is dead because deep packet inspection is dead.
The preemptive bad PR around snoopvertising and AT&T trying to compete made Google go, “oh yeah man ... we totally will not engage in deep packet inspection. Psh, stupid AT&T, what creeeps (ok guys shut it down!)”
The trouble with privacy as a product is that it's _very_ hard to verify it. Apple has basically said "Trust us, We're Okay" and smaller fry are even harder to verify.
For my purposes, that works out well, there are, within reason, replacements for all the basics. And now that I have done it for so long, I don't really know how having an android phone with google works. The niche is big enough that something like https://microg.org/ exists that implements some of the core libraries for using google, without using google code. This enable installing some things from the playstore if neccessary ( I have not had the need - but I understand I am in a tiny minority ) - and it made it possible to install some corona contact tracing apps without having to rely on the google implementation.
I am sure though, and I see it around me, that things won't continue exactly as before just without google, because of how deeply ingrained tracking everyone and everything all the time is.
I don't know how hardcore you wanna get, but you might also want to take a look here https://e.foundation/ , here https://lineageos.org and here https://f-droid.org
There's like - dozens of us
...and thank you for reminding me of ParanoidAndroid. I've not tried them in a while.
This isn't a bad thing. Society is built on trust. All it means is that there needs to be consequences for breaking that trust, to keep everyone honest.
I used paranoid android in the past and it definitely isn't privacy focused. The name makes it sound it's privacy focused but that's about it.
CalyxOS turned out to be about perfect for my use case, and I've been incredibly happy with it.
They have a flashing tool, which basically involved me plugging my phone into my laptop and running a script. Only thing I really needed to do was follow the prompts.
It's not as black and white as that. Other people will have different requirements and make different tradeoffs to you.
The PinePhone is great if you value freedom, privacy, and have the time and inclination to make it work for you. Most don't, and an iOS device is a good compromise if you value privacy over freedom to run your own code. It's not perfect, but it's better than Android.
But it doesn't matter. OS telemetry is the least of your problems. That much bigger threat is that of third-party apps on your phone. And the PinePhone does absolutely nothing whatsoever to deal with that threat, while iOS has a huge amount of security built to prevent this.
Huh?
Most mobile-optimized distros offer apps through Flatpak, which gives much stronger sandboxing protections than iOS through Bubblewrap. You can block access to the network, Bluetooth, filesystem (outside the app's sandbox), GPU, accelerometer, webcam, etc. Most distros also offer SELinux and AppArmor for protections outside the sandbox. Accessing stuff from outside the sandbox (like files) is done through portals, similar to the iOS "share" dialog or file-choosing modals.
For non-technical users, all of this is enabled by default. Programs like FlatSeal let them toggle permissions on and off. Technical users can override permissions, spoof fake information, and dive into SELinux rules.
With iOS, users can't block network access from specific apps, spoof sensor data, block GPU access, etc. You're only as private as Apple thinks you need to be.
The amount of spyware and trackers allowed into Debian in the first place is very close to zero.
Also it provides firejail. There is no need for flatpak.
I also think that sandboxing is still a worthwhile pursuit for many FLOSS packages, since many programs--from moddable games to web browsers--run untrusted code. It also mitigates damage done by some forms of user and developer error (can't accidentally wipe a homedir if you can't access it).
It's similar to the rationale for not logging in as root unless necessary.
It’s a hobby project as of yet (as even mentioned on the website). Hopefully once software matures there will come a pinephone 2 that will pack a more modern hardware and have full android app compatibility (there is no way around it, it is needed) that can be actually used as a daily driver.
> GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility
What does that mean? Is it a built-from-scratch OS with an Android compatability layer (like Blackberry 10), or is it just an indirect way of saying they’re based on Android (like Cyanognemod/Lineage OS)?
https://grapheneos.org/releases
All Google Pixel phones released to date receive vendor security updates for 3 years after the release date: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705
A Pixel 4a ($349 new) would cover you until August 2023, and a Pixel 4a (5G) ($499 new) would cover you until November 2023 with better performance. The Pixel 5 is not a particularly good value for the price. Used Pixel 3, 3a, and 4 devices (along with their XL counterparts) are less expensive options with vendor support timeframes that expire sooner. The Pixel 3 and 4 (non-XL) models have poor battery life, so choose an XL model if you opt for either of those.
For example: you cannot install NoScript, or anything like it, on an iOS browser. You must choose between "all JS on" or "all JS off", and third-party browsers like Firefox are crippled because Apple forces all iOS browsers to use their WebKit engine under the hood.
The myriad of Safari "content blocker" apps are also pretty dismal, and often expensive. So ad-blocking is difficult as well.
They're better about app tracking, but you might want to keep an Android phone handy if you enjoy browsing the web.
Web browsing in iOS is incredibly frustrating and privacy-unfriendly compared to Android. I recently bought an iPhone for the app tracking protection, but the difference between Safari and Firefox is like night and day.
Not really. Firefox Focus is free and does a great job. Nomorobo is a call filtering service and it's $20/year, and it also does a great job of blocking ads & other objects.
ka-block does a good job and it's free.
You can turn JS off, which is quite similar to allowing no scripts, but more pragmatically, 1Blocker is remarkable, give it a look as one part of a phone-wide strategy. [Note: from sibling comments, you hate 1Blocker. Even so.]
Consider the iOS management profile from NextDNS along with a good set of their filter options (minimally NextDNS + AdGuard), enabling 1Blocker and learning how to tailor it, and turning on Apple’s native anti-tracking — then with all three in place enjoy browsing the web with relatively less footprint.
You can't use an iPhone without Apple services, period. An Apple ID is a hard requirement to activate an iOS device, it literally won't let you past that screen without one. Even after you're done with that, you can only install apps from the app store, subject to that unfair, opaque approval process.
https://github.com/microg/UnifiedNlp
UnifiedNlp allows you to choose the backends your Android device uses to determine the location, without providing any data to Google. Options include:
- Mozilla Location Services: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.microg.nlp.backend.ichna...
- Apple Location Services: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.microg.nlp.backend.apple...
- OpenCellID (offline): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.gfd.gsmlocation/
- Radiocells.org (optionally offline): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.openbmap.unifiedNlp/
- Déjà Vu (offline cache using Wi-Fi and cellular data): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fitchfamily.android.deja...
The easiest way to use microG is to switch to an Android distribution that has it preinstalled:
- CalyxOS (supports Google Pixel 2 and later): https://calyxos.org
- LineageOS for microG (supports all devices supported by LineageOS): https://lineage.microg.org
- /e/ (some overlap with LineageOS, but also supports different devices): https://e.foundation
Do we mean "do thing to their computers"?
I've had Nexus 4, 5, 6, and Pixel 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Lots of answers here on how an enthusiast can circumvent these problems on Android. I'm not going to give my mom a pinephone or custom rom, and I'm happy that there's an accessible mainstream option.
I'm not gonna lie, I considered it for a moment too, like a year ago... But apple is now engaging in its own share of dark patterns and is now collecting data too. There have been multiple articles on the matter shared here even.
Thinking that apple is better than google for privacy (or, even if it is right now, that it will remain so for any reasonable amount of time) is... overly optimistic, at best.
Unless it chances paths, of course, which I don't see likely.
Here are the threads I'm aware of off the top of my head. What other threads should I look into?
- Apple's Cooperation with Authoritarian Governments[1]
- Apple reportedly dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained (2020)[2]
- Apple puts more adverts in App Store after ad-tracking ban[3]
- Apple to boost ads business as iPhone changes hurt Facebook[4]
- Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties[5]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644216
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25777207
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27051736
2. This is for iCLOUD backups. Yes, that's a problem. But you can turn off iCloud backups totally...and then use your computer to make the backup while tethered and THAT can be encrypted. If your security conscience, don't use iCloud back-up. Yes.
3. Adverts in the App Store aren't tracking you. They're adverts in the app store. I forget that when someone these days sees an ad, their face melts.
4. Again, Apple isn't sitting there looking over your shoulder watching everything you do for the ads. The ads are for the apps that are "free" and get revenue from the ads in their apps. Usually pushing people to pay the $1.99 for the app. Annoying, yes. On the level of Facebook or Google? Not even close. But keep an eye on this.
5. Apple took 3 years to fully cut ties with a supplier using child labor. Fully cut ties. They are no longer doing it...but took their sweet time. Again, hold their feet to the fire over this.
"c. However, Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and the executive in charge of iOS, feared that "iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones". (PX407, at '122.)"
Yeah, Apple doesn't really seem very consumer friendly as people in this thread suggest.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/09/epic-apple-no-imessage-...
Google says right up front, right in the open "hey, we're gonna look over your shoulder at EVERYTHING you do with your phone. Go ahead and switch off all those placebo buttons on the "privacy" tabs, but we'll still glean telemetry from you". Ok, they don't use those exact words, but they do state that's what they do. But even then, it's not enough for them so they dig more and more and more.
Apple gets their feet held to the flames all the time, especially now that they're leaning into the privacy. Will the convince anyone here? I doubt it. Everyone here are "experts" and they're not gonna let Apple fool them! No-sir-re!
If any of those Googlers would please comment on how to square those statements with the featured article, I’d appreciate it.
The thing Googlers and Xooglers alike seem absolutely unable to grapple with is that Google itself is a major privacy threat, and we don't want Google itself to have this information.
The fox is guarding the henhouse, and all the fox is doing is telling us it's protecting it from other foxes.
The article here talks about how google executives deliberately made privacy settings harder to find because the people were actually using them. The article also suggests, through court documents, that google coerced other manufacturers to do the same.
This is almost impossible by design. As mentioned before, every field on a protobuf is tagged for sensitivity, meaning right down to the bare disks there is privacy controls on data.
Engineers under orders to decrypt & copy data literally could not, without a delegated authority from senior people (some will be GDPR officers too), and there would need to be a staggering level of process failure just to get at the data for a few users.
Ultimately you have to decide if you trust Larry & Sergey, nobody else could make this happen. But insider risk just isn't going to happen from a company that treats user data like military treat classified documents.
Is Google like that? If so, then it is easy to square things. The parts of Google that handle health stuff could have completely different policies about handling private information than the parts that deal with smartphones.
No doubt google puts in heroic efforts to make sure that nothing that doesn't make them money gets access to your private data.
The mere presence of heroic efforts isn't enough.
Except they don't, they sell access to targeting based on that data. Google's entire valuation is based on the data they have on users, if others could come in and scoop it up, they would have an instant competitor. I think calling it 'privacy' is the wrong word - Google takes data security and access control seriously, and only Legal and a dozen engineers can actually access data (and even then, it'd be logged and looked into if it was out of the ordinary).
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/gsuite.google.com...
Yes, Google goes to immense lengths to protect user data in all its forms. That is security.
Privacy is orthogonal, and Google is well aware of the difference and how they complement each other.
You are completely wrong about Google's treatment of privacy.
There are plenty of companies that say they take privacy seriously. There are a handful that actually do. But smaller still is the number of those that have actually built what it takes to deliver on those promises, or re-engineered massive systems to deliver on privacy and transparency promises.
I suggest you look at any of Google's public privacy statements. There's no need to read between the lines.
First of all, the quote from Jack Menzel about figuring out home and work locations sounds 1) about typical for him and 2) exactly correct. If Google is giving you directions and popping up traffic along your route between home and work every day, it's pretty clear what's going on. There's nothing weird or unexpected going on there.
Second, the settings thing. I see this as two issues: one, multiple settings, and two, making the settings hard to find. For the first, both search and maps had their own settings (web whatever vs location/location history), and they didn't talk to each other. I'm sure the relevant VPs talked about relevant VP-things, which probably did not include the config page. Both were sure they had an option to turn location off (for their project), so that box was checked, and done. Yes, someone should have made sure there was a single button, not three, but the org chart was shipped instead.
The hard-to-find thing is harder. I, as a regular schlub engineer, think that sounds pretty sleazy, but I have no idea how true it is. If someone's A/B test said, oh user engagement was down on this arm, I can see that happening. It'd be a failure, but I can see that happening.
I guess at my level, it seems like all the people I'm working with take user privacy really seriously. If someone wants their data deleted, we go through a lot of hoops to make sure it's really gone. Any feature using user-data gets a privacy review and usually ends up requiring pretty strict differential privacy bounds.
This is a little unfair and possibly just ignorant, but my impression is that Google is far better at protecting user location info than the telecoms, who have more complete data from cell-tower triangulation and who are generally willing to sell that data to whoever, and yet they get a lot less attention for it.
some people are outraged, but hey if google does it, are you really surprised when someone else does it?
I have worked pretty hard to kick google out of my digital life. it’s hard but not impossible.
what apple is doing with their privacy schtick has probably raised the alert level to red on the Borg and on the Klingon ships. There probably is going to be an intense struggle following with more things like this coming out.
I just feel bad for the indie band I couldn't support.
[1] https://e.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/e-state-of-d...
Web & App Activity tracking keeps detailed logs of every search term you use, every time you install or open an app, the sites you visit, etc.
It’s one of the main reason I’ve been using Duckduckgo more and more.
I am currently in a foreign country. My English OS laptop with English browser has been logging in to gmail in English for years, and I ask Google search to show results in English for 5 years and EVERY TIME it tries to show the local language. Going to google.com is IGNORED, why??
Google engineers are paid $$$$$$$$ of dollars to implement THE MOST STUPID CODE I HAVE EVER HAD TO DEAL WITH AAAAARGH.
A motto is, by definition, marketing.
Even more generally, I worry about the trend on social media to value words so much more than actions.
The latter needs to be regulated.
I disagree that a motto is just marketing fluff. Especially in smaller companies, a mission statement can provide guidance that, in practical terms, acts as a tool for decision making for every employee in the organization (and to some extent, partners and clients)
But once they’re large enough where they could collapse the world economy if the CEO snorts a bad batch one day and decides to fire everyone, then that type of stuff is meaningless.
Culture is what you do.
It's especially useful at workplace to observe what people do and understand the politics. And at a different level observing how Google was acting more evil by the day made me completely switch over to the Apple ecosystem.
I get aggressive monthly warnings "Are you SURE you want to share your location with XX,YY,ZZ?". I wish there was a toggle where I could say "yes, I absolutely positively am OK with the privacy implications here, because I don't care very much; please forever stop bothering me."
Delta chat can do it for you.
the only exception should be information collected by the government with a court issued warrant.
If they go under because they can’t adapt, well tough luck. There will be tons of smart businesses, investors, and individuals eager to chase all the new opportunities the death of Google would create.
And since the evil business models are illegal, the ones that come next will (probably) not be evil like Google was. And if they are, more regulations!
For starters, this part:
> give away your product until there is no competition left, then you can do what you like.
The free market doesn't work without competition, and that's a blatantly anti-competitive practice. Just because a lot of SV companies do it, doesn't mean it's right.
But really I was referring to their data collection practices, and doing things like intentionally making it difficult for users to find privacy controls. No matter which way you look at it, that's harmful to consumers.
What monopoly did AirBnB tackle?
I’m guessing you’re suggesting PayPal went after Western Union? There are plenty of ways to exchange money though.
Would my point be better if I clarified the monopolies? Perhaps if we focus on national monopolies?
What VC money is going to challenge Facebook, Amazon or Google, or any area close to them?
https://financialpost.com/technology/inside-the-kill-zone-bi...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1EcuWQAQYD8R?format=png
And "breaking up toggles" was one strategy Google used to get people to share their location info
“This doesn’t sound like something we would want on the front page of the [New York Times].”
i turned off auto updates in the play store years ago after i got stuck with an app that had some bug in it, where it was working fine before the update. now i only update and app if something is broken or if i really need the new features it offers.
The problem here is that there are some apps that don't work without Google services, and those are the apps that you need the most: banking apps, payment apps, Uber, etc.
You couldn’t prevent location tracking unless you disabled the numerous switches in settings and turned off WiFi as well.
The real damning allegation is that location data collected from google maps/apps and non-google apps was siphoned to all other google products through something that is redacted in the court docs.
>"So there is no way to give a third party app your location and not Google? That doesn't sound like something we would want on the front page of the NYT
Additionally this process was deemed so critical to Google’s overall revenues because of something else that was also redacted.
https://www.azag.gov/media/interest/updated-redacted-google-...
Google has a financial incentive to violate your privacy, and all of it's products are designed to serve that goal. So everything that could stay on the device is designed to collect and send data to Google, for their purposes, while they tell you it's to benefit you.
It's a very distinct difference, and the entire design of their respective ecosystems reflects that.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect trusting another big tech company with my privacy with no material proof other than their word might have been foolish.
Whereas every location ping is seen by Google as an opportunity to attach data to your account, Apple Maps goes beyond not tying to your account, but regularly trying to make it difficult for them to tie the activity to any sort of cohesive profile entirely.
From Apple's site: "By enabling Location Services for your devices, you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services."
You might want to look up the meaning of the words partners and licensees.
"Location-Based Suggestions: The location of your iPhone will be sent to Apple to provide more relevant recommendations. If you turn off Location Services for location-based suggestions, your precise location will not be sent to Apple."
So...not sending your precise location. But sending something not precise. To Apple.
Few years back you could easily root your android device and get custom ROM installed. Now, only solution is use a feature phone without gps and wifi and have a separate device for connecting to internet.
IPhone is also a good alternative but I don't agree with thier walled garden development philosophy.
Edit: You pay a separate fee for using Microsoft windows but for Android thier is no separate fee hence the product reference. Downvoting won't change the fact.
Google or others pay to be the default app for maps / search etc on things like iPhone.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/google-...
Full price TVs from eg. Samsung comes with ads and spyware nowadays. I would say the saying has stopped being accurate. Also, phones are paid for.
There is precedent for this too. Amazon Kindles came (come?) with two options - one with ads and one without. The latter cost something like $20 more. That was good!
Having said that, I bought the one without ads and they increasingly, with software updates, devoted greater and greater screen space to the Amazon ebook store. I consider that to be an ad too (and arguably worse because of anti-competitiveness reasons).
The same surveillance capitalism runs on a multi-thousand dollar OLED panel.
I wouldn't say so. The saying states that not paying implies being the product. Your example shows that being the product does not imply not paying. The two are independent and can be true at the same time.