Google had a brilliant advertising business with AdWords originally, where the ads were simply based on the search term and not a bunch of Orwellian surveillance on the person searching.
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.
The word advertising itself has been co-opted. It is like "freedom" or "justice" that is ambiguous and means one thing to advertisers and another to the public.
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"
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.
Insightful reasoning. The moat that Google built and maintains with privacy invasion is a legal moat rather than a business moat.
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.
My opinion is that the target ads is just a cover, the real reason they want to track users is to give more data to their in-house AI system that learns what people do once they reach certain page. This knowledge (what people will do) is what is important to them, rather than simply showing certain ads. For example, if Google knows the profit potential of certain actions, they will raise the ad cost on that property by the true value, instead of relying on non-targeted auctions.
> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much
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.
> 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
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 )
What research? Multiple companies which use these practices have grown from zero to trillion+ dollars in market cap, so I find it hard to believe the narrative that all of it is useless and ineffective.
Note that contextual ads still perform better than personalized ads on search results, given how you still don’t see eg. Spotify ads on search results for anything other than music.
Can someone point me in the right direction regarding the mentioned research? My feeling is still that google know what they are doing when it comes to ads.
I think that big corp must always grow (in earnings ) or various manager hierarchies start having problem.. sometimes this need forget to consider ethic , trust , monopoly , roots , ...
There’s a huge privacy battle on the horizon in tech. The initial scuffles are just the beginning. Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share. Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?).
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.
as an American skilled in computer science, I am literally aghast at what the mobile phone has done in barely fifteen years, degrading decades and in fact centuries of individual rights mores.
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.
I think in the future in order to stay private online, there's no way unless web traffic is decentralized off their servers.
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)
One thing I've been meaning to do for a while is try to use a 'hardcore' AOSP 'de-googled' Android rom, like ParanoidAndroid. I've no idea how much of a pain in the arse this will be. Heck, being rooted causes enough unexpected "why do you not work" moments for me. If anything, I feel Google has got more hostile to the privacy-conscious user over time.
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.
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.
I've had a string of Google phones going back to the Nexus 5x but, for the very reasons laid out in this article, my next phone will likely be from Apple. That will be my first Apple product.
Unfortunately, you will find iOS bad in different ways.
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.
You can use an Android phone without Google services. You don't even need root or a custom ROM for that — there's a "disable" button on the app details page of every Google app, including GSF. You can complete the initial setup fully offline, too. In case you do need Google services, but want to have a say about which and how, there's MicroG, an open-source implementation of some of the most used ones like GCM (push messaging).
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.
Apple may protect you from Google and Facebook but it won't protect you from itself. iOS is completely closed and you can't verify if it respects your privacy. Don't trust Apple. Open source software is a fundamental requirement for privacy. GrapheneOS is one of the best alternatives.
Apple somehow found taking a privacy stance would be good for their profitability, and I hope that bet pays off. Between that and the M1, it's the first time in my life I've considered their products.
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 saw some people saying that this makes them want to switch towards iphones next.
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.
Same exact thinking here, plus apple devices being way expensive for not much gain over cheaper devices + not being able to install apps not from the app store + fully closed source OS is keeping me on the android team as well.
The difference is the "terms of service" on these things...something many, including many here, don't even bother reading. Apple specifically states they don't collect your data..which is why when there are times people find out that they have (like the time they were caught having real people listen in to Siri requests to see if they were accurate), all hell broke loose and there are several lawsuits about that very thing against Apple.
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!
I've considered switching to iPhone many many times mostly just for iMessage and Facetime. Every time I change my mind after just a few minutes of considering what switching to iOS entails.
Earlier this week there was a post regarding Google and its utilization of private health information. A number of Googlers came forward to describe how very seriously Google takes user privacy and keeping inappropriate data from being shared across silos. I got the overall impression of Googlers taking the position of “you guys don’t know how seriously we take peoples privacy.”
If any of those Googlers would please comment on how to square those statements with the featured article, I’d appreciate it.
What really devastated me was when I found out that even if you try to keep yourself private, you'll get exposed by your friends: Just by tracking that you are regularly close to others, for example meeting for a camping trip, you suddenly get camping advertisements - probably because your friends searched for something or booked the trip via Gmail or whatever. I don't really know how it works, but it's awfully scary.
I would love to have a control panel that lists who I'm sharing my location with. Not what apps. What people and companies, including secondary buyers. With an on/off toggle. And this list needs to include my cell phone carrier, the OS vendor, the hardware manufacturer and, perhaps even the government where there's no warrant. Then extend the model to other things... one can dream.
what bothers me is the normalization of collecting this data in the first place.
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.
Ran into this today logging into PayPal (the password-must-be-8-20-characters payment service) for the first time in a long time to buy a band t-shirt. After jumping through two different types of CAPTCHAs, now they require you share your phone number to log in. I contacted support via Twitter saying they have my email if they want to verify a login because I'm not comfortable with SIM jacking nor how data-mining is cross-referencing phone numbers (I can set up U2F or TOTP after initial verification). They said call them... which is still giving out your phone. I tried to use a Google Voice number, but I got an error about these types of numbers being blocked. To get a non-useless level of support, you must log in so it's either give up your data or no service for you. You shouldn't be required to give out your number to most online services.
I just feel bad for the indie band I couldn't support.
To this day, if I scroll off screen on Google Maps and then hit the "center view" button I get nagged to allow Google to use my phone to wardrive even when wi-fi is turned off. It would be nice if I could use Google products without audibly wishing violent misfortune on their executives.
Notably, when I decided to check my Android 11 privacy settings, first thing I noticed is that every setting page has a help icon at the top with an explanation what the settings are...except privacy, which is the only section with no help, and no explanation, and no 'report feedback' option
At the same time, Google think allways I'm in germany on work, because our company has just one large internet connection for all company users from the whole world. And google does not even let me change the country.
Surveillance capitalism will implode not because of its exceptionally bad karma but under the weight of its own economic stupidity. In the "Mystery of Capital" de Soto waxes lyrical about "why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else": Spoiler alert, it is due to conceiving and protecting private property. Spoiler alert II: that was once upon a time in the west and it is no more. If wealth is built on a system that secures property and if that applies to land, tangible assets, intellectual property etc it sure as hell also applies to digital "land", information flows, data sovereign business models, entrepreneurial agency and all the value that those can in principle support. In fact the panopticon "platform" system, conceived by sociopaths and inflicted on western societies by corrupt politicians is more feudalism than capitalism in outlook (Complete with the modern day serfs plying the rented clouds). To those individuals salivating to be part of this malevolent trillion dollar club: a trillion is sizable "value", I'll grant you that. But its nothing like the value that would be generated if society as a whole was empowered to be part of a digital economy. You can also throw in democracy and humanistic ideals as a bonus.
About two weeks ago I got an envelope in the mail from Google saying they were offering to pay $1000 per month to install a special router into your home that tracked everything regarding your internet usage. They disclosed everything they'd be tracking and said all the information recorded would be viewable by google. They even sent a $1 bill (I guess to prove they were serious). It was quite strange but really made me realize how invasive Google is planning to be in the future.
Amusingly, I've shared my location permanently with a couple close friends on Google Maps, and Google will not shut up about it, reminding me every month about it.
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."
This cant be just location either. Anything you'd think of as private. I wonder what the privacy implications of using something like DDG on an android phone is like. I'm fairly sure google are quite desperately keen to grab any and all data from anything visited using the DDG app. I don't see any way to stop Google from doing it either.
the only way to fix this is to make it so that any information about a person is owned by that person, regardless of who is storing it or how it was collected. companies should have to pay rent to the data owners every year.
the only exception should be information collected by the government with a court issued warrant.
[+] [-] QuadrupleA|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] m463|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dexen|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coliveira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwellnhof|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|4 years ago|reply
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 )
[+] [-] j0ba|4 years ago|reply
Maybe they are more than just an ad company?
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treeman79|4 years ago|reply
Short version. It works really well. Like absurdly well.
Massive fear if browsers started limited cookies. As that would destroy the cash cow.
[+] [-] urthor|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] judge2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fvv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JCM9|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mistrial9|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|4 years ago|reply
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)
[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
[+] [-] azalemeth|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foobiekr|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sunstone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howzitallworkeh|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grishka|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kache_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eingaeKaiy8ujie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|4 years ago|reply
I've had Nexus 4, 5, 6, and Pixel 1, 2, 3, and 4.
[+] [-] C-x_C-f|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abandonliberty|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notsureaboutpg|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] underscore_ku|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianmarq|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
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
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26901868
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25607386
[+] [-] schmorptron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoofballJones|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] Drew_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkades|4 years ago|reply
If any of those Googlers would please comment on how to square those statements with the featured article, I’d appreciate it.
[+] [-] grammers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indymike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rantwasp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chimen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toastal|4 years ago|reply
I just feel bad for the indie band I couldn't support.
[+] [-] causality0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirius87|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://e.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/e-state-of-d...
[+] [-] petee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _trampeltier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intellaughs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyeye|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpodgursky|4 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] dlsa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomohawk|4 years ago|reply
the only exception should be information collected by the government with a court issued warrant.