[benreesman]

There are plenty of legitimate gripes with the consumer Internet megacorps. All of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more have done user-hostile and privacy hostile things. I was just taking them to task for their bullshit about AI ethics on the big language models yesterday.

But as someone working on my own Internet hyperbole problem, I’ll gently suggest that rabid-sounding hyperbole is just going to turn off the zillion employees at those companies who are also HN users and might be able to do something about it.

“Third-party cookies” === “spying”, a bit of a reach in 2022. “Grandma” knows about cookies now. It’s not an absurd argument, but it’s a bit extreme.

FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

[GekkePrutser]

I don't agree. Third party cookies exist almost entirely for the purpose of spying.

SSO is an exception but a minor one

[benreesman]

Reasons why cookies get dropped exist along a gradient. I like that Stripe knows who I am and only needs my CVV to buy something. I like that I can make a StackOverflow account with my GitHub. Within limits, I even like that the ads I see are relevant to me at least some of the time as opposed to the statistically roughly never that they would be without some basic demo stuff.

HN remembering that I'm logged in is unambiguously not spying. The Five Eyes dumping all my phone calls into a giant complex in Utah unambiguously is spying. Everything else is somewhere along that line.

Like most users on this forum, I have control over when and how I'm cookied and/or tracked bounded only by my "give a shit" factor, it's not technically advanced to send unwanted cookies to `/dev/null`.

Likewise, because I live in the US, all my basic demo information is a matter of public record because I've like, bought a house and interacted with the police and been born and stuff.

I know that the ad-supported Internet is extremely unpopular around here, but jump over to Reddit and people are flipping their shit that Netflix went from $10/month to $15 (or whatever it was): it's not hard to see why there's a certain skepticism that people will pay for Google in large numbers so it could be ad-free. I'd pay 50 or 100 bucks (or more) a month for Google because I'm a computer programmer and it saves me literally hours every day, but I'm demonstrably in the minority on that, and it would be a little narrow of me to project my preferences onto Internet users at large.

[GekkePrutser]

> HN remembering that I'm logged in is unambiguously not spying.

It also unambiguously doesn't require third party cookies :)

> Reasons why cookies get dropped exist along a gradient. I like that Stripe knows who I am and only needs my CVV to buy something. I like that I can make a StackOverflow account with my GitHub. Within limits, I even like that the ads I see are relevant to me at least some of the time as opposed to the statistically roughly never that they would be without some basic demo stuff.

A lot of these things don't need third party cookies. Stripe can remember who you are with a first party cookie if the page just refreshes to them.

But we do have a different viewpoint yes. I don't even see ads as I block them all and I never make exceptions. I never ever use the 'log in with <big tech company>' options and I avoid the services that don't bother to offer an alternative (eg pushbullet). But note that this is the SSO usecase I already mentioned. I do pay a membership for the sites I use a lot by the way.

I'd never pay for Google even if it were possible. But I'd pay for another search engine. I just lost trust in Google so badly that I'll never be able to come back from it. I've been trying kagi but it's not good enough for me yet.

[rvz]

> FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

All the free software and privacy activists needed was Edward Snowden to leak the illegal harvesting and collection of user data done by the NSA and with Big Tech helping along quietly with the PRISM project.

Ever since they were all caught in the act, they are now screaming about privacy all of a sudden as they pretend to care about it whilst they waste resources and burn up the planet with their broken deep learning models in tens of thousands of data centers on user data only for surveillance.

Little to nothing has changed. Despite these regulations, Big Tech is still getting bigger and pushing for more surveillance and aiding the existence of another digital dystopia.

[benreesman]

If that's the reason, why is it never ATT, or Verizon, or Comcast who are dramatically more implicated in ongoing cooperation with NSA/FVEY? Why is it never Palantir or Kratos or Pegasus whose business models are to explicitly market malware to the intelligence community? Why is it not Booz Allen Hamilton where Snowden worked when he took the files and is still chugging right along?

And why is the ultimate responsibility, which lies with the legislators and executives who put together these FISA kangaroo courts and NSL procedures, like a parenthetical on the way to blast Silicon Valley?

If, like me, you're deeply concerned about NSA/FVEY overreach, there are far, far more pressing issues, present day concerns than Google or Meta or Microsoft most likely having knuckled under to a bunch of NSLs rather than send their CEOs to Leavenworth in like 2009 or whatever when the Obama administration was collecting scalps from everyone with a datacenter who didn't play ball.

And what in God's name does the Federal government's energy policy have to do with it? You want clean energy (nuclear) take it up with the NRC and EPA.

[Apocryphon]

Everyone hates the telecom and cable providers. But that hate is wrapped up in complacency because 1) everyone knows they’re oligopolistic dinosaurs with terrible customer service and 2) they are fundamentally unshakable because they are utility companies.

Certainly we should call for them to be broken up too, but we already did it to AT&T once and it got better. And it seems a little old hat compared to the new FAANG big tech giants that have arisen in the current generation.