Until they start saving PII that is not necessary for their core business relationship with the user.
If your app is literally about self quantification and the user pays you to collect that data and keep it private? You might not even need to state it anywhere, although the safe thing is of course to list all the ways you do or do not collect data.
If your app is about self quantification and you monetize by selling user data or its aggregates... GDPR. If you use a third party data provider instead of hosting the data yourself: GDPR etc. Because user data might not be important to you, but it is to your users, so you probably shouldn't be allowed to YOLO handling it
> you probably shouldn't be allowed to YOLO handling it
Exactly. If a company doesn't care enough about its users to even tell them what they are doing with their data (or in some cases even know what they are doing with it) then the user can't expect that company to secure it or to provide a valuable service with it.
No, because continuity of civilization is nowhere in most people's decision making process. Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base.
> Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base.
I can see what you're saying for the first generation of people who go from Earth to Mars. I don't see that scenario for the majority of people eventually born there, and subsequent generations. Just like how I know relatively little of my European ancestors who came to the US, and I've never been there, and that's on the same planet with international travel relatively cheap compared to the first ones over. Some people will be born there and never leave or know anything other than Martian life except what they read or view on some video. Some will be able to travel back and forth. I don't think most will.
People on Earth will care about Earth, people on Mars will care about Mars.
Do you give up on US problems just because you have lost relatives in Europe? No. Do your lost relatives in Europe give up on European problems because a lost relative moved to the US? No. Neither of us has ever met them, but I can still confidently say "no" because that's just not how people work. We have plenty of things to worry about, a mars colony altering basic psychology shouldn't be one of them.
Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products? Giving people an opportunity to back out. E.g: Pay X per month to use Google and you get no ads or tracked. YouTube does something similar, but I guess they still track you.
I personally would still mostly use the free ad-supported version.
I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I wouldn't touch their free product anymore, if they sunsetted Premium. However, almost 35% of most videos I'm usually watching also contain sponsored ads and annoying self advertising for their channel (subscribe to the channel, click the bell icon, shady VPNs, online learning portals, etc)
How would regulation work here? I'm relying on Sponsorblock for now, but that doesn't work on Chromecast.
Right. And I don't think YouTube knows how to deal with that issue right now. They expected creators to be happy with just the money they earned from the ad revenue they passed through, but the creators found they could make more through sponsored content which is difficult problem for YouTube to tackle.
> Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products?
Youtube is a great example of that. I see post after post of people here bragging about using ad blockers on Youtube -- rather than pay. Nevermind that the creators on Youtube get screwed by this behavior. Most people on HN can afford to pay the monthly fee (easily!) But somehow they think ad blocking is more "moral".
It's ads or subscription fees or all these services go away. Pick one.
If you pay for it, YouTube will not stop collecting your interests, clicks, how long you spend hovering over each video, which comments you spend time reading, etc. They will continue to feed this data into their AI, making it smarter and building a more complete profile of you, which can then be used to manipulate your political views and change the world at large.
They'll just stop showing you ads, which we can accomplish for free via an adblocker. Many people are willing to pay a premium for actual privacy (see: Apple)
I pay for YouTube to get rid of the ads, although the ads I saw were actually really well targetted and I enjoyed most of them the first time around (!). The thing is the data that YouTube collects actually works for and against me - it is used for evil purposes, but it also works to make my experience on YouTube more enjoyable by recommending videos that I would like.
The problem is that subscribing to YT Premium requires a Google account (with valid personal data - fake details won't work for payment processing), where as "freeloading" with an ad-blocker allows you to stay more anonymous without even signing in (and clearing cookies every time).
Because solving that problem is like solving for global warming: at the end of the day (and conversation), the world uses a few gazillion tons of oil and other "bad" resources for Stuff™... which is depended on by a multi-level deep, exponentially large pile of even more Stuff™, and
- humanity is really, really, terribly bad at the kind of large-scale practical cohesion needed to actually go "okay we fix" and actually follow through, for as many dimensions as have developed over the past 100 years
- the only collective impetus that would scale to this sort of challenge would basically amount to a cult-following phenomena (see also: world history full of inexplicable mass deaths and rituals and whatnot that make no sense, and also generally suboptimal religious practices, as a result of cults).
IMO, humanity's ability to keep up with itself and chip/computer complexity kind of dovetail a bit: things were pretty hazy (ahem, okay, academic) in the 40s-50s, academic/industrial in the 60s-70s, reached a peak of industrial design/practicality around the 80s-90s, and basically "exploded in complexity" from the 90s on. Except things didn't really explode in complexity, they just exceeded our ability to "think small" and execute at the same time.
Looking at the Web, I remember reading an article recently that talked about how the Web standards (HTML5 (incl. video/image format support, network I/O, etc), JS (incl. "web stdlib"), CSS (incl. animation), SVG (incl. kitchen sink), etc etc (incl. etc)) are basically tens of thousands of pages long in total, and exceed the complexity of every other protocol, technical standard, file format, architecture specification, etc - in the world, possibly combined. The article made a point of comparison with the 3G cellular protocol being much simpler than the current Web.
And this is being paid for by... advertising.
Chrome is basically a technology that has the "implementation commitment", if you will (it's massive, it has the R&D pedal to the floor, it's constantly refactoring, it continuously pays out massive bug bounties, etc) of something too big to fail...
...all the while it's funded by, IMHO, what amounts to a really big tech bubble.
It's like, how will it crash? Something has never gotten this big before... and something has never gotten this big without anyone realizing, in particular. Chrome is just like, yeah, duh, it replaced the telephone ("my telephone exists to run Chrome"). It's a standard utility. Of course it isn't going anywhere.
It probably won't be the end of the world, since the Web is basically just a re-API-ification of desktop OSes, and apps on mobile OSes have enough traction to be a viable escape.
But for now, the entire Web is funded by, basically, hot air. I do wonder if that's part of the reason behind so many JavaScript frameworks - that awareness of existential impermanence, and much subtler sense of unsustainability.
IMHO, buying/using reusable shopping bags, or only using bamboo or metal straws, or buying a zero-emissions car, have much the same amount of impact as deliberately watching ads.
There is absolutely no action you can take, including paying for services, that will match the trillion-dollar advertising industry.
Nothing at all, not even if you were to become a billionaire. That is the problem of advertising.
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Consider the above a sort of "what if" / "is this right? how close is this?" / thought experiment, presented as though it were fact. (I tend to pose ideas to myself in this style, which I think is probably fairly common, but given the "people writing as though they're right on the internet" thing it seems useful to add something like this.)
Thanks for the mind-dump ;-) I appreciate answers that think on their feet!
I think the only thing I can ask you to consider is that, despite how bad fossil fuel use is, and despite how bad we've fucked up the environment using it, no-one can claim it wasn't actually useful (wasteful, short-sighted, wrong, polluting, possibly apocalyptic, whatever, but still physically useful).
Advertising isn't useful. It could be considered a perfectly renewable resource! It'll be viable as long as humans are around! Yay!, but it's not useful. It's actually actively harmful. The primary, secondary and residual effects of advertising could be summed and tallied and they would be shown to be a net negative. Those who are on the positive side of the calculation will have you look at their gains and swoon, but the negatives far outweigh the positives.
It's a fundamentally different question to dealing with global warming because global warming has externalities that we can't immediately control. Advertising has externalities that, given the chance, we could nullify within a generation, if not faster.
Naive question: If you preclude a politician from owning stocks, can't they execute such trades via an off-the-radar friend? And receive profits via "gifts".
I imagine this is already illegal? But isn't it harder to prove if done right?
> Whether they are separate issues or not depends on the company.
I don't understand this. At the end of the day they are separate things, probably you are saying a profit-seeking company is more likely to be unethical?
The fact that two things are usually correlated doesn't make them the same, right?
The issue is with your qualifier. Your implication is that what makes them unethical is the "profit-seeking", when is at best redundant (all companies are profit-seeking) and at worst misguided (boo-hoo, profit is bad)
What alternatives to ads do you suggest? I don't see donations or paid services as a viable alternative (especially for people in emerging markets -- will companies still have any incentives to chase these markets?).
The problem is not ads, the problem is with Ad Tech. The tracking, user data collection and exploitation in secondary markets. There are ethical ways to have a business that uses ads a source of income and does not require "ad tech".
This is one of the reasons that I like the Brave/BAT model so much. It shows that you can have an "ad-based" economy without having to have Surveillance Capitalism. People could take part of the rewards they receive from the ad network and use to pay for their social media service. That was one of my ideas behind communick. [0]
And anyway, even if we wanted to get rid of "ads" altogether: WhatsApp was a profitable, sustainable business just by charging $1/year from part of its userbase. Facebook bought them because they knew it could become a threat to their business model.
It's questionable, but I think the idea is that ad tech makes ads more valuable? Ie a user gets something relevant to them.
Maybe the future will be this personalization happens offline on the user's device.
Your example on WhatsApp buttresses my point I guess. With payment, businesses have to rely on part of their userbase. And we all know that segment largely comes from particular geographies. This knowledge largely affects a company's strategy.
Ads are not totally different -- CPC/CPM varies across markets. But maybe can be compensated by volume.
> I think the idea is that ad tech makes ads more valuable?
This is what they want us to believe. I am pretty sure that in some years we will look at this claims from ad tech in the way that we see today the mid-century claims from Big Tobacco about the benefits of smoking.
> Maybe the future will be this personalization happens offline on the user's device.
It's already part of the present. This is exactly how Brave does the ad-matching. To make it perfect the only thing that I think is missing is for the user to have a way to train their own matching model, or at least to provide some kind of feedback about the types of ads that are relevant to them.
> And we all know that segment largely comes from particular geographies.
I believe that most companies already operate on the assumption that they will provide the service globally and lower-income markets are subsidized by richer regions. That is certainly true for any product that depends on network effects.
And for the products that do not depend on network effects, then the segmentation is likely to be a good thing. A more diverse set of companies, trying to solve the specific problems of different markets - instead of pushing for one-size-fits-all plans from big Corporations - is good thing in my book.
> It's how some people tend to use them when they are not necessary or a simpler solution would have sufficed. This I believe was OP's point.
Yeah you are right, YAGNI is indeed not taken into account enough. However, blaming design patterns not only misses the whole point and shows a lack of understanding regarding what design patterns are and how/why they are used. In fact, I would go as far as claiming that complaining about design patterns is a symptom of limited technical knowledge and experience, and the bulk of the typical anti-design pattern cliches are just the defense mechanism kicking in within the spirit of the "fox and the grapes" fable.
I don't think other concerns are less important to "privacy" concerns.
Each restriction just makes certain ideas/project impossible or less ideal [1].
Honestly as an Android dev, I will prefer devices come with these restrictions by default. Then there should be a "I don't give a f*ck" button in the device developer options settings.
The option can be hidden behind 10 screens. Audit rails can be added. Anything but completely eliminating power-use in the name of privacy.
I mean, if you really want it today, there are places in the world you could go to that have little to no internet access.
Where people still communicate mostly in-person.
(I'm only half joking haha).
> Does Facebook really make anyone's life better?
I can only answer for myself. It made my life better:
1. At the start of my career, I got connections, jobs, etc from local groups.
2. I connected with old school mates I wouldn't have found other wise.
3. ...
My assumption is when people are not addicted or living/following fake lives on social media, there is a lot of benefits to it.
