This is a good message to get out, and I wish it were more likely to make it into the hands of people who wouldn't otherwise get the message. I applaud the effort.
I'm disappointed with a few things about it, though, because:
- It makes it sound like Scott McCloud did this, but he didn't
- It unfortunately includes a political viewpoint that is irrelevant to the message
- It omits context on a few points to make them sound worse than they are, which is completely unnecessary, because the message is devastating without them
When you're speaking truth about a powerful and deceptive entity, you have to be absolutely factual and focused, and this isn't quite there.
The first three sections are worth showing to those who stubbornly insist on either trusting that these companies (all of them) will not abuse their access to their data or insisting they don't care about what those companies know about them. Section four - the 'social psychologist' starts the introduction of some political slant ('muslim, LGBTQIA+, democrat' portrayed as 'vulnerable' who might not get a job/credit card/health insurance policy, terms like 'fat shaming'), section five is just littered with 'progressive' tropes where Trump == evil and BLM == good. This is both a shame as well as stupid, it severely limits the credibility and potential reach of what would otherwise be a non-partisan description of the practices of that data-hog farm named Alphabet.
Scrap those sections and re-publish I'd say. If not, this is a lost cause, just more 'progressive' propaganda.
This is an area that I have a decent amount of experience with, because I've been working in Ads on the response to third-party cookies going away, and giving public feedback on various proposals to build new privacy-preserving APIs to support advertising. I don't think the comic is very accurate, and I'd be happy to talk about specific points you're interested in?
Can tech companies please return to building ... tech?
Leave behind all the peeking at user data and dark business models, and just do and sell what you're good at? Make hardware and software that users (and companies) can trust and build on? Products that are not tethered by the manufacturer for business strategic reasons? Thanks.
If not, perhaps there should be laws. Because if the market starts working against the interest of the consumer, then we have a problem.
People at large don't want to pay for software and would much rather take ads instead. Not a lot of people care that much about privacy either, so unless data collection has a direct consequence --that they are made aware of-- on something impactful like being rejected when trying to take out a loan or insurance because of it, they don't mind either.
So yes, you would have to look at laws to "fix" this, but you will find out that there is no way you will be able to get it passed in a democracy because almost no one wants to have to pay for social media, a web browser, search engines or other such commodity software.
> People at large don't want to pay for software and would much rather take ads instead.
But that’s not been the deal since the mid ‘00s. The deal is “ads, plus we build a model of you and rent access to that model for anyone who’ll pay, allowing them to manipulate your politics and world-view”.
That’s the deal. But they just call it “ads”.
> but you will find out that there is no way you will be able to get it passed in a democracy because almost no one wants to have to pay for social media, a web browser, search engines or other such commodity software.
I suspect that people do care about their data, their privacy and such. But tech is so hard, the effects so distant and the public’s ability to affect change so minimal that people guve in to the privacy breach. That’s quite different from “not caring”.
> People at large don't want to pay for software and would much rather take ads instead.
What the point of paying, when even a retail copy of the most common commercial OS still has ads for frickin' Candy Crush in the start menu? Not to mention an amount of telemetry that dwarfs what's described in OP's comic by multiple orders of magnitude? The best software is for free these days, any paid support is completely voluntary. Commercial software should be treated as abusive spyware unless it can prove otherwise.
(Writing this from a Linux laptop:) If you pay for Win10 enough, you get a Pro version without all this baloney, without forced updates and reboots, etc. An extra expense comparable to buying two or three large pizzas.
Still this extra expense turns away a huge number of customers :(
The telemetry is still there. And it's still a lot more pervasive than whatever Chrome does. (So, if you're running Firefox in Windows 10 or 11 and think you're preserving your privacy, think again.)
Paying for software used to be high-friction 20 years ago. By now, I can pay for software in multiple ways, with near-zero friction. Equally easily I can pay (and do pay) for software-based services, like Youtube, and a number of others.
But of course an ad-supported "free tier" is an easy way to try a service with zero obligations, and it will remain popular. Also, if for me $10/mo is not a big deal, for other folks this may be not so. Those who can't pay with money pay with what they've got, with attention and privacy. They might like to pay with money, but sometimes can't afford that. Count all the ad-supported free services you likely use (e.g. Google search, Twitter, Facebook,..), and at the rate at $10/mo they'd add up to a noticeable sum.
Software engineering is one of the few middle class jobs available these days. Understandably it's now packed with people desperately trying to live a specific lifestyle, buy a house, etc... rather than a passion for tech for tech's sake. (Not placing blame.)
That fact along with the average piece of consumer software having such low perceived value (try getting people to spend 99p on the app store) and consumer software has become this awful race to the bottom of lock-in and advertising. I suspect business software is much healthier for this reason.
Actually we have solved nearly all technical problems. Just look at how the HN content has (not) changed over the last 10 years and how many times you have read: "... is a solved problem"?
From the elite's point of view, the function of big tech companies nowadays is to keep the consuming masses in check. It doesn't matter if this means not executing anti-cartel laws.
Well if they don't chase getting as much money as possible they won't be able to pay people mid six (and sometimes low seven) figure salaries to developers. Or afford to become "philanthropic" billionaires.
Very, very nice, but to be more clear: it's not just Chrome.
The modern web is the surveillance web because the modern web is "an endpoint" for users (witch means a new mainframe dumb terminal, at a far higher price and complexity than the old ones) and someone else service, typically run on giants cloud datacenters.
To avoid that, and still have the modern level of life PLUS MANY MORE, we already have had a solution: the desktop computing. The first one on record the modern way AFAIK was the Xerox Star Office System, but even the older NLS (1968!!!) have networking, videoconferencing and screen sharing. YES, you read correctly. Dates are not wrong.
So what? So it's a real mess because since Xerox except for LispM and Plan 9 we do not have developed desktop computing anymore, so the old model might still be rediscovered, at least it still exists, but on actual iron, very badly designed even if far more powerful in mere horsepower terms, and with essentially no modern software. The last living vestige is Emacs, witch is VERY good but not enough evolved for actual end-users, so we need:
- public universities, paid enough by the government and government only, with a very effective separation from the private sector, to create a new old classic research not for short term business but for the society;
- enough years to write a modern desktop, which means around a decade because it's not just a matter of code, it's a matter to learn how classic systems works and design a new one, a thing most today devs do not know and have issue imaging, than time to develop it, to spread it etc.
The other option? Well... A small Canadian TV series (Continuum) recently gives a nice idea, perhaps mixed with a small French movie (Virtual Revolution) to see a more realistic one. Be prepared to a future where you will have to eat only if some IT giants gives food to you. Be prepared to live to work instead of working to live because yes, I'm not joking nor exaggerating, it's just a matter of observing the world today.
The comic. It was something to convey technical aspects of Chrome, now it is defiled by someones personal rants put into mouths of engineers who created it. I find it disgusting actually.
"Personal rant"? It is just describing in an easier to undertand way what a basic Chrome installation on any OS does out of the box. Why do you find it disgusting? Because it mocks the original Chrome comic? That's it?
It's definitely quite ranty. I didn't make it to the end. It really only makes sense if you take as axiomatic the assumption that ad targeting is very bad, but most people really don't agree with that. Ad targeting has been a fact of life since the earliest days of newspapers, radio and TV, it just wasn't particularly well targeted. Now it's much better targeted but where are the people actually hurt by it?
Discussions about adtech and privacy always have this kind of ultra-abstract feel to them, for that reason. Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete, specific harms due to better ad tech is nearly impossible, so the space gets ignored by all except middle class activist types who have to resort to ever more manipulative stunts (like this comic book "remix") to try and get attention, to convince people that this is what matters and not other issues.
Also, opposing advertising is kind of a luxury belief. It's reminiscent of the sort of champagne /r/antiwork socialists who earnestly ask, why do people have to work? These people would certainly blanche if suddenly asked to pay the full ad-free rates for all the services they enjoy, especially because the average person's internet experience is being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month by advertisers (I saw stats on this once, how much is being bid in the ad auctions on a per-person basis but you can also just work out crude averages from Google's revenue and guesstimated click traffic).
And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services, including those they maybe didn't even realize existed. Basically you'd need to replace broadcast brand-style ads with very specific "pull ads" where they're only seen by the people who need to see them. Which is ... exactly what search advertising is.
It works so well that we usually end up get ads for things we already bought and do not need anymore. Doh!
> These people would certainly blanche if suddenly asked to pay the full ad-free rates for all the services they enjoy, especially because the average person's internet experience is being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month by advertisers
Seeing that most of the web content is accessed through procrastination which is usually an addiction pattern. I tend to think forcing people to pay the real price would make them consider better if what they consume is really worth their time and money and would make everyone's life much better.
It is like modern transport. Most people use cars and plane for anything not because it is only faster, but because it is heavily subsidized to make them more affordable. In reality if we made people pay the real price for their transportation they would switch to more environment friendly alternative, better air, more liveable cities. Sure everything would be probably more expensive, less immediately accessible, but also immensely more enjoyable.
> And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services,
You can do search without advertising. Also mouth to mouth is a multimillenium old tech but but still works a lot better than what google has ever proposed.
> Discussions about adtech and privacy always have this kind of ultra-abstract feel to them, for that reason. Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete, specific harms due to better ad tech is nearly impossible, so the space gets ignored by all except middle class activist types who have to resort to ever more manipulative stunts (like this comic book "remix") to try and get attention, to convince people that this is what matters and not other issues.
I don't really want to this sounds like a reductio ad absurdum but really, this is like saying that you don't need to have written down privacy or free speech rights in a country which is truly democratic because it has been impossible "Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete specific harms". Under your point of view the GDPR is a completely useless law as well, because it protects the user from a phantom menace.
> And finally it's also somehow internally contradictory. What would it take to have a world free of annoying ads? Well, people would still need to find out about services, including those they maybe didn't even realize existed. Basically you'd need to replace broadcast brand-style ads with very specific "pull ads" where they're only seen by the people who need to see them. Which is ... exactly what search advertising is.
There is GIANT difference between advertising and tracking individuals en masse. I have no problem with billboard advertisement or passive one. I still don't like them and personally try to filter them out as much as possible (by paying for services directly or using adblockers) but I don't see them as a big moral issue. With tracking, it's a whole different story!
Also, most of the good things that tracking can give users, could nowadays be done on the edge, local to the user device, without reporting it back to the central servers.
> free speech rights in a country which is truly democratic because it has been impossible "Finding concrete, specific people who have suffered concrete specific harms"
It isn't though. It's trivially easy to find people who suffered concrete harms from lack of free speech protections, because they usually end up in prison or exile. Consider what happened to Manning or Snowden. Although most people would agree that it makes sense for there to be limits on free speech for people in the military, nonetheless, they suffered badly for speaking out. Look at the fate of Chinese activists who speak out. Or for a non-government take, look at the lives being wrecked by cancel culture run amok.
> Under your point of view the GDPR is a completely useless law as well, because it protects the user from a phantom menace.
GDPR is in fact a useless law in my view and I've expressed that many times. Partly because it's far, far too vague to be a law at all let alone one with such high penalties attached. But mostly because again, nobody cares. When actual Europeans are polled on what matters to them, internet "privacy" (let's assume for a moment that GDPR actually creates this) doesn't appear anywhere in the list at all:
"Europeans thought that the most important issues facing the EU at the moment of the survey were the environment and climate change (26%), rising prices, inflation, cost of living (24%) and immigration (22%). 41% of respondents mentioned prices, inflation, cost of living as one of the most important issues facing their country, before health (32%) and the economic situation (19%)."
Note: cost of living and rising prices are amongst their top concerns. What makes prices rise? Fining companies, imposing onerous regulation on them and preventing them from funding products via advertising.
> With tracking, it's a whole different story! Also, most of the good things that tracking can give users, could nowadays be done on the edge, local to the user device, without reporting it back to the central servers.
Again, "tracking" is a vague abstraction. There's no real harms being done here. Transient anonymous numbers that are linked to general categories of interest aren't tracking in the sense that a government agent following you down the street is, or even the NSA recording all your phone calls. The potential for abuse is just orders of magnitude lower, as evidence by the fact that you can't find people hurt by it. Compare to actual abusive tracking by governments, where people have been drone striked!
As for doing it all locally - maybe one day but ad fraud means you can't trust the client.
That word implies something was originally good and pure. Which seems an unusual take.
> I find it disgusting actually.
Why do you find it more disgusting than the behaviour it is calling out? I think there's a moral imperative to challenge bad behaviour and satire is an effective method.
Even the first page, it implies it is made by the original designer. It is disingenuous from the start. And actually i looked a few more pages, the quality of the content is quite bad.
If you click through the link to the website (instead of the PDF) it starts you off on the first page of the comic (not the introduction) with no indication that there are earlier pages. Which means it starts off sounding like it is something Scott McCloud wrote.
Oh I know all about this, but definitely I prefer reading about it not in this tasteless format and not from out of context half truths and injected propaganda.
So, if you're happy with all the ways your information is used against you, then I wish you the best of luck and eternal happiness in your endeavors and life.
Please consider the fact that anyone here can click on your name, look at your comment+submission history, and place a value on your arguments. It's actually a good exercise that puts in practice some of the claims made in the comic.
I think you should examine your feelings. Perhaps the reason you find this so uncomfortable is that it's revealing a truth you don't want to admit is true.
Disgusting? Because they mixed a comics style (which is usually associated with a happy childhood) with the most brutal of truths about surveillance capitalism?
This is quite dishonest. I thought this was from people that used to be on the Chrome team that have defected, but it's just an adaptation from a third party. This is explained in the PDF but not on the slides.
If you read DDG TOS (1) you'll see that they save your queries and are being somewhat disengunous about doing so (half-buried half-way down the page there's this gem):
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
I wonder how many folks that use DDG know this is taking place (or even bothered to read that far down the TOS).
+1 to this.
If you search for your name or IP address etc. they will save that query forever and there's no way you can delete this.
When we founded https://you.com we read other search engines' TOS and decided to give users a choice: to have some personalization or be completely private. In private mode, we do not store any queries or anything else about the user. You can find details about our privacy policy here:
https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at...
> I imagine you're well aware of all the harm they've been causing to society.
what harm to society? from where i’m standing they’re a huge net positive, they’ve enabled huge advances in society, they’ve enabled great collaboration across the whole planet and enabled us all to benefit from the one of the greatest inventions of humankind: the internet.
could they do better? sure. are they past their peak? maybe. but their past contributions are immense.
Can you prove that without Google we wouldn't have seen more advances in society? Perhaps people just jumped on the wrong bandwagon because they didn't know any better? Perhaps Google got big for the wrong reasons?
So much of the Meta hate in tech circles comes from same cope psychology of engineers thinking “if you build it they’ll come” and failing at acquisition.
Ads help SMBs and larger ones so much. Sure there’s issues here and there but meta has probably pushed GDP forward pretty hard and enabled awesome amounts of product discovery, and this is just on the ads side. Think of everything people have learned on FB/IG. I’ve met so many valuable people.
You make it sounds like google and meta invented the internet or made it so much better by itself. Sure they open sourced a few technologies and steered some evolutions but I don't see anything immensely relevant.
It doesn't seem very obvious that any of GrubHub, Ticketmaster, Yelp, eBay, Microsoft, Tesla, AirBnb, Amazon, Oracle are "morally superior" to work at than Google.
I think Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Palantir, Comcast, Juul, Uber, any defense contractor, Nestle, Philip Morris, etc are at least arguably less ethical work than even Meta, and get less flak just by being behind slightly less visible to users.
While there's many legitimate serious criticisms of both Meta and Google, I think many of the concerns are misdirected or overexaggerated. The omnibox thing mentioned in the comic is a pretty concrete example to me of a false criticism: the Chrome feature is that it fetches query suggestions for what you've typed so far, which means it's going to be sending what you've typed to a server. Firefox also does exactly same thing and continuously sends what you are typing to Google or Bing to fetch query suggestions, and I don't see people writing this same comic about how Firefox is somehow evil to implement such a feature.
I have both Firefox and Chrome on my phone and I just checked and it's literally exactly the same to turn it off: on Android Chrome it is Settings > Google Services > toggle button. They're even in almost the same position in the settings menus.
I believe the linked documentation is account wide including going to google.com in Microsoft Edge and then typing into the search box on the website. It's not surprising to me that turning off behavior on across your account in any context can't be done in browser settings.
> the Chrome feature is that it fetches query suggestions for what you've typed so far, which means it's going to be sending what you've typed to a server.
Sure, but it’s not just querying based on what you type in. It takes what you typed, adds it to the model of you built from your past searches and web history and tailors the results to match a mixture of
A) what it thinks today-you wants based on yesterday-you
B) what someone else is willing to pay to inset above the results of a)
It’s way less benign than you make out.
They also aggregate all the similar searches and correlate that over geography and demographics, and probably sell that. They can predict infection progress through a population from search terms.
Admittedly, that’s useful… but it also feels “underhand” in a way that simpler “product->fee->customer” relationships used to work.
I don't actually think that (a) is nefarious; I'm pretty sure any of the companies that I listed will personalize any server responses based on the user. If logging interactions with the product and personalizing based on that is an ethical concern at that level then I don't think you'll be able to justify working at any major web/app companies in general. I had a Bloomberg interview where the systems design question was to implement exactly "user logging for contextual personalization in other places".
I think most users genuinely do prefer to get personalized suggestions instead of irrelevant ones. Firefox is still doing this by default implies pretty strongly to me that the feature is a meaningful benefit to the product, and isn't just in Chrome as a covert data collection mechanism.
I don't believe that (b) is true for Google (paid placement in autocomplete). Google, for all it's flaws, does consistently mark Ads as Ads. I'm pretty sure smaller companies like Yelp and Uber are much more likely to be doing some "secretly paid placement" than Google (but I'd still presume any one of them is not).
> I think most users genuinely do prefer to get personalized suggestions instead of irrelevant ones. Firefox is still doing this by default implies pretty strongly to me that the feature is a meaningful benefit to the product, and isn't just in Chrome as a covert data collection mechanism.
You're probably right. I also muddled "search results" and "autocomplete suggestions".
Not that i disagree with your argument, but given the very competitive nature of corporate culture and the high rate of burnout, most people may feel better working for lower pay for less-sociopathic organizations (say, local non-profits or public IT services).
Also, i find it interesting to note how tech salaries have climbed in the past two decades, precisely as IT was more and more employed as a means of ruining peoples' lives (micro-management based on metrics, surveillance industry, IoT and other scams, centralized monopolies like Amazon, etc).
The price of keeping IT people complicit/quiet in the scheme has risen, but we as a privileged class of IT people should understand that we're precisely being paid for silence about the atrocities we help build. We are collaborators to an oppressive system, and if that's something that bothers you maybe you should consider alternatives.
I really don't see how you can argue with a straight face that Google is a net negative for society. There's more of an argument for Meta, but even then its mostly about social media in general then Facebook in particular.
I see you’re building software which entirely relies on the major tech companies search engines. If people didn’t work there, you couldn’t do what you’re doing. Can these companies (like most companies) do better? Of course. Perhaps by working there, people believe they can be that change?
The aim is not for everyone to quit these companies, but for enough people to refuse to build and maintain the harmful components of their systems so that these companies are forced to change. Regarding my projects, they'd be just as useful if Google and Meta would cease to exist tomorrow, but again, that isn't the point.
> Perhaps by working there, people believe they can be that change?
We're talking about highly intelligent people, at least some of them understand that the code they maintain sometimes performs actions that are illegal. They could lift their fingers from the keyboard when they recognize that something is not right. They could choose to not be complicit.
I rage-quit Google recently -- and my job search involves looking for places that are "doing good for the world", and there's lots of things I dislike about the company -- but this is just a bit hyperbolic.
There are far worse companies for the world than Google -- in the grand scheme of "harm done to humanity", Google pales in comparison to Exxon or BP or Phillip Morris or Lockheed-Martin or Dupont etc.
Facebook/Meta, that's potentially a separate discussion.
In any case if you feel like companies like Google are causing serious harm to the world then you need to have a deeper conversation about capitalism generally [which I encourage you to do]. Is it possible that the whole model of profit incentives as we have them now inevitably creates the things you're complaining about? Why attack engineers personally when in the end it's just "rational actors" acting like mice following the cheese?
PS totally aside from what harm Google might be doing to the world (again mild compared to the above named corporations), we probably should talk about what harm Google is doing to our industry.
>I imagine you're well aware of all the harm they've been causing to society.
Not everyone shares your viewpoint and values. If you think everyone thinks Google and Meta, or even the idea of personalization as being harmful to society, you have found yourself in a bubble.
The target audience for this doc seems to be people whose world view was shaped by the last two years of political messaging. Maybe the authors assume that most people working in tech fall into that category?
Chromium should be OK if you use either the Ungoogled-Chromium build or Iridium Browser. Both of these aim to clean up all dependencies on Google services from vanilla Chromium.
I used these and I think they are OK, but I'd still just go with Firefox as the simplest solution, particularly if you want to convince others (particularly those close to you) whether to switch browsers.
hard problem. people want to make money -> unethical decisions on a mass scale -> people want to build ethical stuff -> get no reward for that.
the incentive mechanism is broken in the world. I'm not completely anti-capitalist as it can be used for good, but the incentive mechanism is definitely one of the hardest problems I can think of.
or it is actually right, it's just when VC's are investing they expect huge returns from investments and start to squeeze all of the juice on max levels. So moderate capitalism works, but massive growth and unnatural world scale corporations are always evil?
I'm disappointed with a few things about it, though, because:
- It makes it sound like Scott McCloud did this, but he didn't
- It unfortunately includes a political viewpoint that is irrelevant to the message
- It omits context on a few points to make them sound worse than they are, which is completely unnecessary, because the message is devastating without them
When you're speaking truth about a powerful and deceptive entity, you have to be absolutely factual and focused, and this isn't quite there.