> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum.
It's actually worth reading the article to the end, because otherwise you'd be missing the amazing final paragraph:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Ignoring the fact that this is not how it works - there are plenty of services where you pay and still are the product - the last sentence makes it clear that the author sees privacy as the problem, not tracking.
I don’t pay for bash yet I have plenty of excellent tooling in it thats free, and I’m not the product. Software can be released freely just like a poem can be. The people who develop popular software like one of the functions in bash I use for free probably aren’t hurting for work I’d imagine.
> The people who develop popular software like one of the functions in bash I use for free probably aren’t hurting for work I’d imagine.
I wouldn't assume that; I would donate what you can. I've been to two pay-what-you-can theater performances recently. How can I not give those people - who value every dime, who many others stiff, and where you know 100% goes to a worthy cause - more than the corporate productions, who couldn't care less about me or community and where the money goes to some billionaires and shareholders who couldn't care less about art and look forward to AI and cost-cutting layoffs. The last thing I want is the local artists, who do it for the art, to not see people's love and appreciation or to stop.
Around 5-10 years ago, IIRC the maintainer of a relatively well-known Linux distro moved home to (Minnesota?) because they had no health insurance and couldn't afford the Bay Area (or something like that, my memory is sketchy).
Also don't forget the sh-t-ton of abuse open source maintainers take.
Another way is to make it problematic for a commercial entity to provide high value services for free. Basically an anti-dumping law, but for digital goods.
The largely dominant browser is never "easily replaceable".
We could write PHD thesis about why, but we can take a meta look at it: there's reasons they became dominant in the first place, and those reasons need to disappear before it's easily replaceable (of course additional reasons will pile up the longer the browser stays dominant)
Maybe paying $10/mo for email or $199 once for a browser is a good thing. Maybe if people didn't feel like browsers and email and search were human rights that should be given to them freely, moral hazards be damned, the internet wouldn't be the clusterfuck that it is now?
There might be ways around the price issue. But if it really came down to that, I'd argue "there's no free lunch" should apply.
We already pay a price to have regulatory watchdogs intervene when companies cheat the market and or distort the rules and impact society as a whole, so it wouldn't be unprecedented either.
It's kind of funny to use that exact statement, but after you put profit seeking corporations in charge of our of our information you'll find they commonly find democracy 'not profitable enough' and will go about manipulating/controlling you via your own information to further increase their profits and control over you. I guess your option is becoming the cake to get ate.
Meanwhile over in "lets not cede all control to corporations" land, did we forget the the internet was actually funded by the government in the first place? Have we already tossed away ideas like the rural electrification project?
No matter how the internet was originally funded, most of the current infrastructure that gives us the speed and bandwidth we have today and the hardware was done by private companies.
Who is going to pay for the browser?
Do you really want the government controlling how you access information?
>Do you really want the government controlling how you access information?
You've already given that power to corporations, and corporations have far fewer regulations on actually performing said control (as in they are able to control you far more).
You are so deep into Reganomics "government is bad, corporations are good" that you don't realize these large (near) monopoly status corporations are effectively their own governments in amount of power and control they have.
It’s not reagonomics it’s just the opposite. Whatever party you align yourself with, just think of the power the other party would use to stifle speech that they don’t agree with.
I have a lot more power not to use Chrome or Android than not to be under the rule of a hostile government.
Whether it’s the religious right who are in control of one party or Tipper Gore going after rap music in the other party, do you really want the government controlling the web?
Reagonomics was about thinking the government is incompetent. I think the government is hostile.
> I have a lot more power not to use Chrome or Android than not to be under the rule of a hostile government
Yeah, you can choose between Google or Apple. Hooray.
It's practically impossible to avoid Google if you value having a social life. Enough people have tried.
> Reagonomics was about thinking the government is incompetent. I think the government is hostile.
Oh yeah great, so it's even worse than Reaganomics.
At least a government csn be kept in check by a construction and can be changed by elections.
On the other hand, corporations have no obligations towards you at all. It's the entire point of private enterprise that they can do what they want and don't owe any responsibility.
> At least a government csn be kept in check by a construction and can be changed by elections.
That’s cute in theory. But the way that the electoral college is designed, the Senate with two votes, gerrymandering etc that doesn’t work out too well in practice.
Democracy works fine if you’re in the majority - well not actually see all of the caveats above - but that doesn’t work if you are in the minority - any type of minority.
> It's the entire point of private enterprise that they can do what they want and don't owe any responsibility.
I could argue the same about law enforcement, imminent domain, civil forfeiture, and getting harassed because I “look suspicious”
If you don't petition your government to prevent monopolies, then you have just as little choice being under hostile companies. Of course I'm sure you think having the choice of Apple rather than Android completely makes up for this.
Enriching these large companies will ensure you live under a hostile government too. Once they are big enough to rent seek, they become the primary lobbying power, and you're back in the exact same position of being under a hostile government.
Next I expect to hear something out of you about private water companies and roads as the solution to all of our problems.
So instead I should let the government be in control? Without bringing in my own viewpoints. Just think about how the “other” party that you disagree with can and will abuse any power you give it.
> Once they are big enough to rent seek, they become the primary lobbying power, and you're back in the exact same position of being under a hostile government.
Can any of the corporations with power put people in jail or confiscate your property for disagreeing with them? Can they get you fired for teaching something that is “too woke”. Did you not see what the governor of Florida did with Disney because they had the nerve to disagree with him?
Are you really okay with giving government that power?
Show me the steps that would need to happen for Google to harass me for walking down the street because I don’t look like I belong in my own neighborhood.
You attempt to go to your local grocery store. They use 'Google Identity' which they are perfectly allowed to as a private business. You are accused of sending spam by Google (who the hells knows why, they never explain anything) and you are barred access.
Being the staunch libertarian you are, you leap over the public roadway afraid of catching communism if you touch it and go to the grocery store across the road. It turns out they are using 'Amazon Identity' and via an information sharing agreement with Google (private businesses can share information about you, right?), and you're also denied access to that store.
You'll go to another store, right.... Oops, turned out after we got rid of monopoly laws there are only two different stores in your community after consolidation of the industry. Luckily for you there is a toll road that you can take a 30 minute drive to another place that uses a different set of identifiers to let you in.
We busted monopolies and company stores years ago because businesses harassed and murdered people left and right!. Have you forgot the history of the Pinkertons, or are you just blindly ignorant of that part of US history?
> We busted monopolies and company stores years ago because businesses harassed and murdered people left and right!….
I’m sure I need to be more worried about Google murdering people than some yokels claiming they were doing a “citizens arrest” where the prosecutor covered up video taped evidence…
I like how you associate the police with the broadband part of the government like there all the same group.
Even better, we had your magical word where the police didn't exist in the past... It was not a pleasant place unless you were the strongman. The police state was just as bad back then, or bully state.
So you really think that a future President Desantis with his “War on Woke” wouldn’t love to leverage any power you give him to suppress speech he doesn’t agree with? He’s already doing that with Disney in Florida
I mean promoting a fundraiser still doesn't seem to make me a product, and Wikipedia is still pretty solvent regardless. Another example might be Linux software repositories.
>> If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product
> Ignoring the fact that this is not how it works - there are plenty of services where you pay and still are the product
That refutation of their statement is not how logic works. They made a !A -> B statement ("not pay" -> "you are product"). Your statement, ! (A -> !B), which is equivalent to B -> !A is orthogonal to their statement.
Google didn't write a press release that raises questions - insightful ones that I hardly ever see in other coverage - about their privacy practices and recommends competitors such as Firefox and Brave.
Give me a break. It is delusional to believe that corporations do not regularly float press releases to journalists, which then get recycled into articles, which sometimes include a tiny bit of original research.
I'm not sure if you aren't a native English speaker or are just being deliberately obtuse, but I wasn't asking for any consideration on your part. I was expressing disbelief at the apparent naivety of your previous comment where you started off by writing my post "passes for a comment" and then proceeded to argue this article is some kind of insightful work in the area of online privacy.
You never know what valuable things other people have to share, especially if you are curious and open to things you don't already think, if you give people a break; I am constantly surprised. What if we put aside the ridicule?
They raised the issue, which I hardly every see raised, that disabling the feature may not disable data collection. The gave compelling examples of both sides, rather than dismissing one or being inflammatory - the dental hygine example was great, a little personal. They clearly and efficiently spelled out the different modes. They brought up Firefox and the much more obscure Brave, and even more privacy-oriented browsers.
It was great. I'd give it to lay-people who were interested, and as a technical person I don't need to read more.
> the dental hygine example was great, a little personal.
It can be better solved with a calendar notification. No privacy violated and you can add your own information to your notification: you liked this toothbrush, your dentist recommended that toothbrush, you didn't like this store, blah blah.
Is there value in that? Sure. Does that mean that value must be extracted by a business? No.
I wouldn't use it myself, but I couldn't say what is 'better' for other people. Some will prefer Chrome helping them. Lots of people do things that I don't.
Regardless, that's a debate to have with Chrome devs. It's already in the browser and the article is reporting on the browser.
On the bright side, if something's gonna get your aunt to care about online privacy, it will be creepy and disgusting behaviour like an online advertiser based on the other side of the world keeping track of your mouth hygiene for your own convenience
I think it was rather obvious from the context of this thread that the quoted text indicates that the article linked is of very poor quality. It is not necessary to read the full article before knowing something is of poor quality which is trivially known by anyone who has started reading a book or article and then decided it was not worth their time.
I read the article that I suggested was better and I stand by that statement.
> I think it was rather obvious from the context of this thread that the quoted text indicates that the article linked is of very poor quality.
I read the article; it's actually one of the better pieces I've read in that domain (tech news for the general public) IMHO. People say those things (take-downs) about everything on HN. Don't trust the threads - why would you trust anonymous people writing one-sentence hot-take rants, some of whom probably also didn't read the article and are just repeating things.
The Internet tide isn't a reliable indicator of anything, any more than the tide at the beach.
I have my oral care products on subscribe and save. Automation does make my life better by offloading cognitive load. Such automation doesn’t require third party cookies but the article doesn’t make that claim.
The article seems pretty reasonable to me actually. It establishes what a cookie is, then contrasts that with what Chrome is doing, then explains the tradeoffs and Google’s claims, then gives the reader options to make their own choice.
But it's so obviously ideologically bent against privacy that it reads more like manufacturing consent than it does "giving the reader options to make their own choice."
Did we read the same article? It came across as very pro-privacy and anti-tracking to me. It’s well written in the sense that it explains the issue to a general audience without resorting to breathless scare mongering.
"We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence)
reads like so much sleeper propaganda for The Selfish Ledger style abuses.
I don't think any discussion of the trade-offs between privacy and tracking is complete unless the horrifying abuses of tracking are also discussed, like government contractors spying on people without cause.
> "We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence)
The last line of the article for me is different: “We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.” (Emphasis mine)
Which in context:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Is a very clear pro-privacy statement to me. This is our data and is owned by us and we should revolutionize how we think about that.
This isn't even a realistic use case of tracking. Nobody needs tracking cookies to get reminders about buying birthday cards.
Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details.
Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calendar.
Now you gave me an idea: We gonna launch a start-up working on an AI-based reminder calendar app. And in order to improve the invest... ahm, user experience we gonna track them across the web to enable our AI to propose futire reminders!
I don’t think the article makes the case that tracking cookies are required. It only claims that automated reminders can benefit people, which is far less controversial.
The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.
Those benefits don't require us being stalked around our entire online lives: the online store already knows when I bought a toothbrush¹. Unless they are trying to argue that telling every retailer on the planet when I last bought a toothbrush, or other healthcare products, is a good idea?!
Same for the birthday card if I bought one online. This example is even worse: potentially not just tracking my personal information but that of another person too, much like Facebook's “shadow profiles” for people who aren't even using the service themselves.
If I were a millionaire, and still as bitter at the world as I am while currently not being one, I might have a PI follow that writer for a bit, so I can helpfully send reminders, to illustrate how badly ill-conceived this take is…
> I might have a PI follow that writer for a bit, so I can helpfully send reminders, to illustrate how badly ill-conceived this take is…
That’s not a healthy fantasy. The “following” part is especially creepy. There’s a contact the author link on the site. If you care to contact her it’s just a couple clicks away. No reason to hire a stalker.
Why are you so angry at the author and not at the people who actually made Chrome do this?
I think that the point is to make the author understand exactly why it's creepy, so that next time they write something like this, they actually see the problem.
I'm not advocating this approach. But it's not entirely off base.
It’s way off base because it’s unacceptable in civilized society to pay stalkers to harass people to make a point. Do you seriously think it is ok to hire a PI to follow someone to “make a point”? I find that horrifying.
Further this is a pro-privacy article. The author seems to have a good grasp of the situation and has communicated it well to a general audience. It even concludes with how to turn the feature off and a call to reconsider how your data is being used.
- Therefore the behavior is ok to use on the author
It's not actually ok, but nobody actually did it either. They just made a snarky comment on the internet to make a point, which has a much lower bar than actually doing the thing.
Top two readings on my end are that this is either a person who really didn't want to write this article that was ordered to, or someone who is trying to be maximally defensive of google without actually lying (possibly someone with nostalgia for the 2000-2005 era when they were the internet's good guys).
That'll teach me¹ the folly of badly using irony and hyperbole on the Internet!
You have simultaneously completely missed and directly stated the point I was trying to make. Yes the following part is creepy, and that is exactly what the author is extolling the benefits of in an online context.
Maybe for you² or I the collection of personal & habit data poses little risk when³ it leaks out. My life is too boring and on the beaten track to have much juicy to hide! But there are people for whom the collection and subsequent leaking of data about their habits could be significantly harmful. I do not trust that this system is safe from un-de-personalisation. And from a more selfish & mercenary PoV, if Google are going to use my device to serve their business plan⁴, they aren't doing it for free.
--
[1] no, it won't, if I was going to learn the lesson I would have done so on one of several past occasions…
[2] I presume
[3] not if, when
[4] by blocking third party cookies in their browser and replacing with a system they control, they would gain an advantage over other ad-tech businesses
You need to re-read the article. The author does not extoll the benefits of the tracking Google is doing. It’s actually a pro-privacy article. At least read the final paragraph:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
You made some edits. It’s strange to me that you seem to be interpreting my position as somehow ok with what Google is doing. I am not ok with that. I don’t think the author of TFA is either.
I think an important point is the data that is sold by these aggregators are leveraged by PIs and will go to show how vulnerable this tech makes everyone. One should consider if they should promote something that they don't also want to be made a victim of.
These things don't change unless someone important becomes a victim, otherwise its just collateral damage.
Sure, the stalker fantasy might be a bit on the nose. Having someone follow you around in a 'physical' sense seems kinda creepy.
But; there is now the robot equivalent of a PI stalker in your browser. It's not a person, but it's still reporting all your browser activity. Except for the 'physical human', that seems like a pretty similar analogy, right? Because for me, it's equally creepy.
You can’t seriously consider an actual human being following you around to be the same as advertising tracking. Those aren’t the same and Google isn’t doing it to “prove a point”. The fantasy was clearly about intimidation in the real world of a real person.
You should really re-read the article. It does not support the change to Chrome or the tracking that Google does.
Chrome is not installed on any desktop computer system by default except for ChromeOS that has 3% market share. Everyone that uses Chrome, went out of their way to download it. I personally don’t use Chrome. But I am assuming your answer is - government should stop people from using their own free will?
For anyone born in the past 12-15 years, their first computing device would almost certainly not be a desktop computer. It would be a mobile device, and Chrome is omnipresent there.
Rather, if the authorities were to do anything, they would regulate to redress the imbalance and give back power to users to control how corporations use their data. There is no voluntary solution as it is, and the state says it exists to protect our rights.
I might even be so bold to say it is necessary because advertising is a mental health problem.
Additionally, the monopoly is enforced because of the manipulative brand recognition. Chrome = Google = The Internet in many people’s heads. It is difficult to break this hold without intervention, but if it could be done that would be great.
If people are using a computer , they are going to Edge and getting on the internet to download Chrome.
It’s a poor excuse that most people think Chrome is the internet. When they are connecting to the internet do you really think they think they are connecting to Google?
> Chrome is not installed on any desktop computer system by default except for ChromeOS that has 3% market share.
Chrome is installed by default on the handheld computer system most people use, with AFAIK over 50% market share. Given that unfortunately more and more people are using handheld computers as their main or even only computing device, this is very relevant.
> Everyone that uses Chrome, went out of their way to download it.
Wasn't one of the drivers for Chrome's popularity that it came bundled with other desktop software people downloaded and installed? These people didn't go out of their way to download and install Chrome, that decision was made for them by someone else.
> government should stop people from using their own free will?
I believe those who want government intervention want it on the browser manufacturer side, not on the user's side.
> Chrome is installed by default on the handheld computer system most people use, with AFAIK over 50% market share
And if that 50% (actually 40% in the US) didn’t have privacy invasive Chrome installed - they would still be running Android which is made by the same company.
A chromium-based browser is installed on every Windows desktop, which gives Google a huge market share under which to effectively and unilaterally dictate web standards
All the annoyed people in this thread, reading this post from their Google Chrome window.
And every time I mention this, I get a ton of excuses, from people that should know better, that they can't leave Google. Boo woo.
There might be exceptions, but to the large majority of other lazy tech users, this is on you. Enshittification doesn't happen in a vacuum. You are passive actors to a shittier web.
I'm annoyed from Firefox because Firefox is currently terrible and not implementing web components and PWAs the right way so they don't become a headless browser for other apps.
you only believe that because it was advertised, by the company who is the number one for advertisement, who would have though?
i workedv with JavaScript performance at a top10 alexa site when that was talked about. chrome and firefox (and ie, heh) were always close. but all the chrome promoters focused on the aspects chrome was better... which changed monthly btw. today chrome string concatenation was fast. tomorrow firefox using string array mergers, etc.
anyway, just created an account to point this wrong assumption out, even if it was posted as a joke. and i did have to solve a challenge (captcha) by the very advertising company we are talking about. sigh.
I have more tabs open on Firefox than chrome and Firefox is faster. Chrome is massively annoying because it unloads the tab all the time. It sucks that I have to use chrome for work.
They were, but in different directions. Poster 1 was sarcastically pointing out an advantage that people claim Chrome has. Poster 2 was pointing out that it isn’t even true.
Yeah, but at least it's not chrome or directly benefits google. If China came out with a web browser, I'd use it. Just to starve American spyware corporations of a tiny bit of data.
Consumer-side activism has never worked. Only through regulatory action will these parasitic advertisers and the harmful industries around it be thwarted.
You made me waste so much time thinking that this well known manifesto was some genius hacker thing but it turned out to be american extremism/terrorism.
I have yet to see an ad this clever! It's 2023 and the ads I'm served are for things I already recently purchased (and don't need to buy again) or similar to something I have recently purchased or a cheap knock-off of something I have recently purchased.
Only tangentially related, but the new hot shit i recently learned about is "conversational commerce", i.e. services that let companies spam their target markets on messengers like whatsapp in situations like the ones you describe, or when a certain product is back in stock etc..
i think it's an absolutely disgusting invasion of supposedly personal communication spaces. My ex "works" (cold messaging people on linkedin) for a startup that does this and i genuinely don't understand how otherwise lovely amazing people can throw their morals under the bus like that and willingly dedicate 40+ hours of their lives week after week to making the world a shittier place.
It isn't wrong. These things COULD be useful - just like a camera in your shower that warns you if you have a problematic-looking mole on your ass could be. We could do amazing things if not for bad actors.
But bad actors are a much harder problem than computer vision or AI or recommendation engines or just about anything else non-adversarial. It's why discovering climate change 50 years ago hasn't led to a solution since. It's why we can't just educate people out of misconceptions, we have to actively fight against people trying to keep them wrong and make them wronger (and it's why institutions have lost so much trust that this becomes possible).
The only defense against this is virtuous people in power, but our system has done an incredible job - somewhat intentionally - of making sure that they aren't. Investors aren't lining up to support someone who'll make 10% less profit to avoid some horrible externality.
This philosophy of thinking every opinion deserves and requires reasoned critique while maintaining decorum is worse than any rude words. The opinion expressed by the author does not deserve more than the two words they were generously afforded.
I don’t see how you can actually read the article with any care and think the author expressed an opinion. They aired a possible counter argument - “ Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well.” In two paragraphs in a much longer piece.
It’s sad that HN has become a place where there is only room for simplistic one sided rants. That actual journalism is met with angry swearing.
fuck off