> Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?
"Google's 2013 third quarter profits were nearly $15 billion; that profit is the difference between how much our privacy is worth and the cost of the services we receive in exchange for it. " (Bruce Schneier => https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...)
That's a little much. Google could still make a hell of a lot of money with completely untargeted contextual ads, which don't require me to trade any "privacy" at all.
This is a great question raised by Capitalism, and the extreme lengths the United States has taken it to.
How do you define how much profit is enough?
If you're suggesting Google can still make "enough", shouldn't McDonald's pay their workers a few bucks more and still make billions? Shouldn't banks lower fees and still make trillions?
In our current world, the only amount of profit that is enough is "more", and that will be attained at all costs (i.e. employees living below the poverty line, banks destroying the global economy and in Google's case, we lose our privacy)
That's not what I meant. I was using the colloquial "little much" to suggest that Schneier's statement was too sweeping to be accurate. If the U.S. passed a law tomorrow that made user tracking and profiling on the web illegal, Google would still make plenty of money from AdWords.
>Google would still make plenty of money from AdWords.
Of course they would.
And McDonald's would still make plenty of money if they were forced to pay a decent wage, and banks would still make plenty of money if they were forced to be more responsible and lower fees.
But you don't see that happening, because the drive for more profit is all consuming, and it's the corporations that have the most influence in these laws.
I actually don't get this mentality. You are saying you would prefer to receive irrelevant ads? To me the worst thing about advertising is its lack of relevance most of the time. When ads are targeted I at least feel like I'm getting offered things that appeal to my tastes. I find that much less bothersome.
I recently bought a faucet from an online plumbing company. I now find my browsing bombarded with ads for the same kitchen faucet, from that same company.
Of course this is a technology shortcoming. It doesn't mean that targeted ads are inferior, they are just not perfect.
The idea is that you get targeted ads for things you are looking for. Not always the recommendation is perfect, that is bad for you, Google, Publishers and Advertisers. If you can fix that you might be into something big.
I agree completely. The underlying assumption of Schneier's comment is that advertising provides no value to the consumer, which is untrue. Google has made advertising incredibly valuable to the consumer (they're clicking the links, after all!) which is the chief reason they're so profitable.
twoodfin said contextual, not irrelevant. Instead of adapting the ads to the user, you can adapt the ads to the content of the page they're being inserted on. The ads remain relevant (often more relevant, since targeted ads have a tendency to show you what you already know) without having to mine your personal data.
For example, if you go to Hack-a-day, all the ads are relevant for their user base, even though they're fixed and not automatically assigned by Google's All-Seeing-Eye.
Google could show me the most targeted ads in the world and I still wouldn't click them. So the difference is between things that I'll never click, and things that I'll never click but that needlessly aggregate data about me. That's an easy choice.
Just a wild-ass-guess, but I bet the order of importance for factors driving Google's search ad revenue goes something like:
- Search terms (AdWords)
- IP geolocation
- Demographics (age, gender, income: derived or otherwise acquired)
- Search/browsing history
The line between the last two blurs a bit, since surely Google will try to fill in your demographic blanks based on your search and browsing patterns. But regardless, the first two they can do completely anonymously, and anyone who wants can likely escape the last two with the right browser settings or privacy extensions. Personally it doesn't bother me that much, since the results relevance I "trade" my privacy for has value for me as well as advertisers.
Google is not alone in using dark patterns -- Facebook got tons of growth by using dark patterns around privacy. Google is copying that strategy a few years too late. The age-groups that are leaving Facebook are doing so b/c they understand the dark pattern maze for what it is and don't want to deal with it.
Nobody leaves Facebook, it is just used differently. That's a big detail that only a few articles seem to get correct. Kids are still on Facebook, with grandma and mom and dad, but they also have a Tumblr account.
>Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?
They paid for that before without being annoying, Facebook pays for theirs by being less annoying than Google. (Wow, thinking about this just now who would've thought the day would come so soon that Facebook is less annoying than Google.)
They silently activated his account in the background. That doesn't really seem annoying to me. If he wasn't looking for it, or didn't want to become enraged by it, he probably could have just ignored/dismissed the alert and never known better. Right now complaining about G+ is like complaining about Facebook privacy a few months ago. It's low hanging fruit that anyone with a blog can complain about to seem enlightened.
Good thing Google didn't do that. The blog author says right up front he agreed to the new terms.
And they didn't sign him up for anything, they upgraded his account. Still a single account, still with a single company, still with the same cost, still with the same privacy policy, still with the same everything - except it does more, now, if he so chooses to use the extra features.
Let's not pretend that Google are acting out of altruism. The blog author says that he was agreeing term for Picasa, not G+. It doesn't matter that the service is "free", the expansive privacy policy may be the same, it just covers more of the users online activity without their direct consent.
So, if you're running a... time management tool, let's say it's just a todo list. Then you create another tool, a time tracker so you can log your hours on your todo items. You should force them to sign up for it in order to use it? Personally, even if the tools were made to be able to operate separately of each other, I would give the users of my first tool access to the second one and link the accounts.
G+ is just an extension of their offerings. Just because the tides of the internets have flowed against it doesn't mean that anything involving Google plus is practically rape.
Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?