[extr]

Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you? Are advertisers following you around town? Bothering you at work? Hounding you in the loo? Personally it seems like my data has been stolen from just about every company I've ever given it to EXCEPT for Google.

[noman-land]

Just because this stalking happens invisibly in the guts of a Javascript file it doesn't make it any different than following me around every street I walk down and noting down everything I look at.

Here's the metaphor. Google offers free video cameras to any person who wants them. The cameras collect thousands of data points about every single person who enters their field of view. The cameras pick up every movement on the streets, in the shops. Every word uttered. They note all conversations and relationships. They send this data into a central database where every person gets a lifetime profile where they are uniquely identified and where all the aggregate data across all the free cameras in the world is collated and stored together.

Google now has a moment by moment timeline of everyone in the world, updating in real time.

Now, using this cache of information, anyone can bid for my attention in real time as I go about my life. While I'm at the bank (website). While I'm at the bar (website). While I'm at the grocery store (website). While I'm at the library (website). Around every corner is a digital billboard that's watching what my hands are doing, where my eyes are looking, what I'm saying. It knows my name, where I'm from, what I do, and who my family is, and it wants to sell me something.

This world is grotesque to me. It's about much more than data breaches.

I didn't even get into the government overreach capabilities such a dataset would enable, nay, tempt.

[pennybanks]

okay but you do realize they give you there products to use right. and you probably use them or at least use products that need them to function. thats the deal and i doubt anyone would rather it be for cash instead. i mean would you rather pay monthly for chrome or firefox? pay per google search. pay monthy for youtube. pay for android os. monthly for maps. hell google can stare at my naked ass all day for all i care id rather not pay for any of these things

[noman-land]

I think anyone, given the choice, would rather pay for something with costs that are clear and up front, not buried in an evolving ToS that boils the frog.

You're welcome to make this Faustian bargain for yourself, but you don't get to make it for the rest of us, and neither does Google.

[gharper]

> id rather not pay for any of these things

...and many of us would simply rather not use Google products if that's the deal they're offering. Hence, the original article link.

[extr]

So tl;dr the actual practical impact is just that you see more relevant ads when you’re visiting websites.

[lWaterboardCats]

I understand the argument of “what’s the practical impact”

Practical impact is important to recognize but the concept of potential impact, otherwise known as risk, is most certainly valid; having the most intimate details of your identity stored outside of your own control can have profound risks for any bad actor especially when our methods of securing our identities haven’t kept up with the pace of it being collected.

[noman-land]

No, the practical impact is the stalking, not what the fruits of that stalking are used for.

[mhuffman]

>Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you? Are advertisers following you around town? Bothering you at work? Hounding you in the loo?

They are doing all of those things if you have your phone with you! Unless you manually go about disabling notifications, turning off gps access for all apps, etc.

[godelski]

They do all these things even if you don't. Even if you don't have a google account. The degree in which they do is higher if you do, but that doesn't remove it, it just lessens it.

And it is worth noting that even turning off your GPS, you can still be followed. The very nature of how cell service works requires the ability to locate you, even if not to the same precision level (as aforementioned).

There are of course trade-offs and this nature does not mean the tech is bad. But it does mean that we need to be aware of how it is used and how it can be abused. It is okay for mistakes to happen, but we need to fix them and resolve them, not ignore them or underplay them. My larger fear is that we live in a cluttered house and all these conversations end up being "well that piece of paper on the ground isn't that bad. That doesn't mean I'm messy." Because that is true. But there's a million instances of that and the accumulation is what creates the messy/cluttered house, not any singular piece of trash. If we can't see the forest from the trees, we're doomed. Because most of the problems that exist in our modern world are through these larger complex chains of coupled interactions. Where singular events are not that bad, but the system is.

[belter]

> Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you?

It means you can a permanent, and non erasable, record of being arrested, even if you just happen to be near the same location a crime was committed:

"Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police" - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-loc...

Disclaimer: I am all for an effective and just law enforcement...

> Are advertisers following you around town?

Yes the are: "Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker" - https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...

Disclaimer: Never visited Epstein’s Island...

[godelski]

> Are advertisers following you around town?

Yes

> Bothering you at work?

Yes

> Hounding you in the loo?

If I'm taking a shit and open my phone. But also, sometimes at the urinal. I mean they put ads right in front of your face.

> Personally it seems like my data has been stolen from just about every company I've ever given it to EXCEPT for Google.

Google isn't in the business of selling ads, they are in the business of selling data. To make those ads more pervasive, targeted, and effective. A good ad goes unnoticed, it is often "native."

But to me, I just think about it this way. If some dude was following me around and writing down everything I do (maybe no the exact content of my words, but who I talk to, when, where I go, etc -- metadata), I'd be fucking pissed and call law enforcement for stalking. Now I don't understand why this is okay if the dude's name is Mark, Sundar, or Satya. I don't care that they're really good at hiding and that their note taking often goes unnoticed. I think it is creepy and immoral behavior.

And beyond that, I know what that data can do. Yes, it can be used to make a lot of useful things. I work in ML, data is POWERFUL. But a coin is a coin, and it can be spent on good things or bad things. Hell, there are even good ads. But the truth of the matter is that there are far too many abuses. More than I think is acceptable. I worry about growing abuse and the slow boiling of a frog[0]. The temperature (both metaphorical and literal) has risen all my life, I see no reason to think that it will cool down if we just continue business as usual. Each little instance of temperature rise may be small and not uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean that given enough time the temperature doesn't rise to a deadly point. I cannot stress this enough, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Evil is not (exclusively) created by evil men doing evil things. Evil is more often created by good men with good intentions. It is because the world is complex and because what we build and what we create takes on a life of its own, outside our hands, and outside what we imagined it could/would do. Ethan Zuckerman is not an evil man for creating something so universally hated, and he even created it with good intentions. But this is just the nature of the world and it means to be vigilant and careful. To be clear, it does not mean to stop progressing. But it does mean to be aware that the environment changes and that it is easy to get off track.

It's easy to point fingers at specific people, but I think it is more important to recognize the complexity of reality. Because if that isn't considered, you just create a vacuum for the same evil/abuse to rise again. And again, often by people who have no malintent. And that's the issue: the world is too fucking complex and we want it to be simple(er) and we will often try to bend over backwards to make it so, because we humans were not designed for this. But we are capable of processing it. So, will we?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog