echevil

"Individually targeted ads" is intrinsically more relevant to the individual and leads to better click through rate. It is in the interest of both the company who run these ads and the user who see these ads (that they're much more likely to see something relevant and useful).

If an ad intends to confuse their audience to think they're purely informational material, they probably should not be shown to anyone. That's a completely different issue, and Facebook's ad censoring step is supposed to deal with that.

Maybe those who care that much about privacy should use a complete different set of products. I, for one, would be more than happy to let Facebook/Google/Netflix/Yelp to use my personal data to customize their product to serve better content, better ads and better everything to me. I'm much more upset about Yelp when they keep recommending restaurants that I apparently won't care about even I've been feeding them so much information by checking into restaurants I actually like. I'd be glad if they share that information with Google/Facebook, who are much more likely to have better recommendation algorithms.

I downloaded my Facebook history when they provided such a feature, and was completely unable to find anything interesting. Why would I care if they would protect my privacy or not. If protecting privacy leads to much worse user experience, I'd rather they don't

Even with recent criticisms there're really no sign that Google's business is anywhere close to dying (or shrunk at all). Their core products, the search engine, Google Map, Youtube, etc. are still best of its kind and no where close to be replaced. Yes some people are pissed off, but Google's user base is way beyond the tiny community that cares about HN, and many would continue to love Google's products.

> But Bloomberg is a serious news organization and they are holding strong on this story as well. So what to think?

When the articles published by those "serious news organizations" concerns China, disinformation / lack of evidence are really common place if you carefully examine their source. I used to do so from time to time but grew tired of that

Oh, it's Bloomberg again...

> What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance.

There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things. There are probably enough number of Chinese employees who would want to make such a product

> Reporters can't be this dumb.

What makes you think so

On the contrary, when the reports concern China, almost none of these media is trustworthy. I’ve been reading those articles in the past, and checking their original source of information or comparing reports/announcements from multipe sources, only to find that those reports are very often full of information from unreliable sources, misunderstanding or plain lies. Even when they report some truths, they can be very selective on the truths to report to reinforce their existing opinions. Reading those reports about China is very like reading Foxnews. I basically stopped reading those now.

Free media is nice, but articles are written by normal people. It’d be silly to trust whatever you can read

Yeah, moving out of Bay Area sounds more and more reasonable now. I wonder if salaries in Vancouver would match that in Seattle. Both of them are very interesting cities to move to

Like Taxi apps or food delivery apps, they need multiple types of users on the platform in new locations at the same time to provide reasonable user experience.

Why would you have faith in HN in the first place? :)

Even for poorest people in rural areas in China, it’s still possible that they’d pay 10k usd “bride money”. 10k is really considered to be a lot in China for such matters. A wedding could also cost a lot more than that. When they say “a small amount”, they mean it

Nah they’ll ask for way more than 10k USD if they think you’re rich :) it’s common that they’ll ask you to buy a house/apartment first

musical.ly never had the same level of success TikTok now has, and it probably hasn’t focused on monetization at the time it was sold. Plus Bytedance owns quite a few apps many of which are extremely popular

It means I have been using Google for 20 years! It changed lots of aspects of my life. Thank you Google!

Wealth inequality in US is not any better, under the policies of a democratic government

if you say so..

It does seem there’s little difference from what they’re trying to do in China then.

I’m not complaining. I love the feature!

They would still send your data to the government when there is a subpoena I suppose

There are a lot more they can track than the search history. Google maps app has a timeline feature that tracks every place I go :)

It’s not that hard to circumvent actually. Also in major tech companies in China, employees can just use company network to access websites blocked by the firewall. But if you provide that as a service to general public, it’d get shutdown when it get popular

Yeah, numbers of calls and emails being sent could be useful as features in fraud detection. I’m totally fine with Apple collecting that. Reliable spam filter for sms and phone calls are something I wanted for more than a decade.

I’m sure there are darker side of China that the government would love to hide and there are many parts of the society that’s disfunctional. That’s no secret in China, most people are aware about that. I’m sure my opinions are influenced by all the stuff I’ve read and seen, and I try to keep an open eye and have been traveling around the world. But no one has “god’s view”, most western media are also writing articles that supports their existing views. “Fake news” is no longer a new concept to the west and it indeed can distort people’s beliefs. Even when media report the truth, selecting what to report and choosing the tone can also influence people’s views to a great extent. When it comes to topics about China, the western media (and Chinese media as well, in a different way) can be quite extreme. I’m sure your opinions are also being influenced, it’s too hard not to be

Well, probably not for them if they actually exists.

I don't find myself on the right of everything, I also don't do stuff that's breaking the laws. I'm in favor since I believe the system has more benefit than its downside. Credit system provided by private companies just won't work as much.

That’s not how the system works, only what the western propaganda wants people to believe. I’m sure I won’t be punished because of saying i oppose that. It's only possible that I get some kind of punishment if I'm influential enough and engage in activities that deemed to be a threat to the government.

I'm speaking as a Chinese citizen who is totally in favor of this. Here's some perspective I can give:

"credit system" is far less established than countries like US, and private companies are generally much less trusted by the government and by the people (which is the opposite to the US). Some big private companies like Alibaba has started to create credit systems themselves, but the state owned banks and law enforcement would only use something backed by the government.

The "social credit system" it actually not that different from other credit systems excepted it is managed by government. It's really needed now given that there was a rising debt default problem -> Without a credit system, many people thought they can just delete the app where they borrowed money and get away with it. It became a crisis when a lot of this happened at the same time.

Surveillance is a separate topic. It's one of the technology advances that made law enforcement easier (like DNA samples are much more used nowadays in identifying criminals). There has been reports that criminals being captured with these new tools. It's something that western people fears a lot, so all the western reports focuses on the negative side of it and exaggerate it many times more.

As a Chinese citizen who lived in the US for a while, I'm totally in favor of this, and especially when I go back to China. We don't value "freedom" as much as most westerners, and the social credit system is there to make existing laws better enforced, so bad actors can really get punished as they should.

Paying employees better hourly rate, improve work conditions, and provide them chances for self-improvement. They could even hire homeless people and provide them temporary accommodation. There are tons of ways

> they were basically the abandonment of a lot of Maoist ideas in favor of something that was more in line with Western economic thought

That’s right. The government basically concluded communism isn’t going to happen any time soon and shifted focus back towards gradual economic growth, and chaned lots of policies like opening more and more markets to private companies, letting state owned companies run in the same way as private companies, etc. (Before then, everything was owned and ran by the government). 1978 was just the beginning of the series of economic reforms

What’s different from many western economies though, is that government is investing and driving a lot of these changes.