Comment by mabbo
6 years ago
I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed.
Ads are a business, and they are Google's business. They are how they make money. And like all businesses, they are competitive. Tracking is a way to make more money off online advertising. By removing tracking from their competitors while keeping it for themselves, Google stand to make a lot of money off this change.
Their motivations are not honest, but they're pushing them as if this is the high road. It isn't. It's the dirty low road of dominating the online ad business, made possible by their dominance in the browser market. And it's always been the end-goal of Chrome browser.
I think this is a common strategy of big players at any industry.
First, they do some dirty thing to gain a competitive edge when the industry is still new and unregulated. Later they develop an alternative way to achieve the same competitive edge, and then criticize other players for doing an old way, saying they should be "mature and responsible".
See also first world countries industrializing/modernizing & becoming rich/lifting people out of poverty using industrial techniques that pollute heavily, then "going green" and criticizing other players (India, China) for doing the same thing, saying they should be "mature and responsible".
Not really. "Going green" is a radical new concept for humanity that goes counter to all incentives and instincts and only recent developments have shown that painful measures are necessary. It was not a trick to get rich at other peoples expense.
India and China are suffering from their own pollution and have incentives to "go green" all by themselves, not because the West demands it.
Green technology is often high tech and tech that is accepted in Western markets and is helping to lift people out of poverty through market mechanism, not finger pointing.
Finally the first world got rich several generations ago. We are not related in any way, shape or form to any real or perceived sins of our grandfathers. Any such idea is old testament biblical theology.
"Going green" is a relatively new concept, even for Western countries. By 1960 the West was seriously polluting its environment, but also extremely affluent and highly developed. There was far more of a gap between the average American and someone in Asia or Africa compared to today. The West polluted the developing world in the same way it polluted the Hudson or Cuyahoga.
It's not really about pulling up the ladder, but a recognizing that growth doesn't have to mean completely destroying the planet. It's more about where the standards are set and what is socially acceptable or understood.
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They should be mature and responsible, the west should have been, too, and has a long way to go.
We both are probably distant cousins due to our relation through Ghengis Khan, but that doesn't mean I should be bitter that I can't make my fortune by pillaging half the world like my distant ancestor did to great effect. It might be easy to make a fortune pillaging, but that doesn't mean I deserve to pillage because someone else did (or does), and I think I am in the right in detesting the scattered bands of warlords left in this world who do make their living by pillaging.
Apples to oranges: unlike software ecosystems which come and go, we’ve only got a single real one!
Just yesterday I had to disable anti fingerprinting I'd enabled in Firefox because despite having a solid IP and and existing cookies to login to Google, it's security system rejected me, even after answering security questions. Turn off fingerprinting and I could log in.
So, this is a round about way of agreeing with the hidden dark patterns that Google are bringing to the web. It must stop.
I have to log into Gmail just to pass captchas. Every time I do it I die a little inside.
All the more reason to keep bad actors in containers isolated from the rest of your web browsing. Google can fingerprint me all they want if that gets their rocks off, all they'd see is my gmail inbox that they see anyway.
Much of such discussions demonize the company, but we need to look broader. Google is a public company and its shareholders, since they share the company, are also to be pointed out. Discouraging such behaviour is better done by the shareholders by dumping shares since Google could very well argue that if it didn't work to maximize ad revenue, it would not be operating according to fiduciary responsibility principles. (IANAL .. just thinking out loud)
That is such short term thinking.
Doing unethical things because "We had to so the shareholders would make money" is such a cop-out. I see it just the opposite way. You have a duty to do things ethically so that in the long run customers continue to want to use your product. So that governments don't start going after you for the unethical things you do. So that other businesses will trust you and continue to work with you.
Here's an example: Huawei. They've reached out to me saying they'll pay me more than my employer and my commute will be shorter. No effing way. I'm sure I could make them a lot of money, but they're history of unethical behaviour is an instant deal-breaker for me. Others will, sure, but in the market of labor they're going to have a reduced supply because I'm surely not alone in this attitude.
I'm with you on the shareholders being complicit in the behaviour (through ignorance or inaction in a lot of cases), but unfortunately I'd guess 90% of said shareholders wouldn't be aware of the scummy tactics Google have undertaken, similar to Microsoft I'd say, outside of the IT/HN realm.
It's unfortunate. Profit of their shares is the only thing a lot of people look at (and willfully ignore anything else unless it slaps them in the face/becomes a major mainstream media event).
"I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed."
Pretty sure that was their main reason for helping push https-everywhere. A good idea generally, but hurt every other entity trying to do tracking more than it hurt Google.
> while keeping them fully-armed.
That's sort of a fragile assumption though. I mean, yes, there's enough specificity in this number that it could be used (in combination with other fingerprinting techniques) to disambiguate a user. And yes, only Google would be capable of doing this. So it's abusable, in the same way that lots of software like this is abusable by the disributor. And that's worth pointing out and complaing about, sure.
But it's not tracking. It's not. It's a cookie that identifies the gross configuration of the browser. And Google claims that it's not being used for tracking.
So all the folks with the hyperbole about user tracking for advertising purposes need to come out with their evidence that Google is lying about this. Occam says that, no, it's probably just a misdesigned feature.
> Google claims that it's not being used for tracking
> Occam says that, no, it's probably just a misdesigned feature.
Allow me to introduce to you "mabbo's razor": If someone can make money by doing X and it's impossible for anyone to tell whether or not they are doing X, then they are probably doing X or else will as soon as you believe they won't.
While I agree with some of your comment, I feel like it’s harsh to paint the whole chrome enterprise with that brush. Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser and a lot of devoted devs have spent a lot of time working on it. There’s an advertising aspect that it’s right to call out, but I think on the whole it was done to make the internet better, because the internet is google’s business too.
EDIT I just wanted to point out that a load of people have poured their lives into making Google Chrome the amazing bit of software that it is and suggesting that the end-goal has been entirely about supplying ads does a great disservice to their personal contributions.
These aren't mutually exclusive things. The people working on Chrome were and are highly motivated, intelligent and passionate people, some of whom I call friends, who want to see the web become a better place. In that regard they have succeeded massively.
But by this point, Google has dropped billions of dollars on salaries for those developers to build Chrome (call it >500 devs, >$200k salaries, >10 years). Google is not a charity. They didn't build Chrome with the intent to lose money on it. Everything else Google made that wasn't profitable is gone now, and yet here Chrome stands. Because it is an indirect profit center.
And you've pointed out the real issue: Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser. 'Was'. But it did that! So what is it about now? Why would Google continue to pour money into it if they didn't expect to extract more money out of it in the future?
You can make the world better and make money while doing it. Ideally, that's what we all are doing.
It wasn’t some noble mission to free the world. Chrome was always about Google controlling the client side of the web to guarantee their advertising access to web users. The ability to extract additional data from the user was a nice bonus.
The way I see it, both of these can be (and most likely are) true. Intentions of the company aren't usually the same as intentions of individual contributors (or even whole teams). The Web is Google's business - the more stuff happens on the Web, the more money they can eventually make of it. Advertising is how they make most of that money, so this is what they're protecting. But beyond that, Chrome answered a real need and a lot of hard-working people made it into a best-in-class browser.
"Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser "
Chrome is about establishing more control over the web to further the business objectives of Google and Alphabet.
The problem with this belief of Google as some kind of 'benevolent actor' is a function of the new kind of branding they helped introduce, something that an entire generation of particularly young people are being duped by.
'Brand' used to be the image that companies presented - it was a decision, a marketing tactic, usually invented by agencies. Google was one of the first to change that, to effectively 'internalize' the brand so that they (staff, even leaders) really kind of believed their own kool-aid. There's an incredible aura of 'authenticity' to this; when leaders really believe their own schtick, it rings more powerfully. (This is an issue for another thread.)
But Google has proven that in the long run, they're just a regular company. I don't think they are bad actors, and in the big picture, they're better than most. But, they're just a self-interested entity: they will do whatever is in their power and which is also legal, to leverage their incumbency and stymie competition.
> The problem with this belief of Google as some kind of 'benevolent actor'
You put 'benevolent actor' in quotes as if the comment you are replying to contained that. It didn't.
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