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Comment by neilv

8 hours ago

That questionable-sounding stunt by the media outlet wasn't comparable: Google/Alphabet knows much more about individuals than addresses, salary, and political donations.

Google/Alphabet knows quite a lot about your sentiments, what information you've seen, your relationships, who can get to you, who you can get to, your hopes and fears, your economic situation, your health conditions, assorted kompromat, your movements, etc.

Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.

But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks. Or perhaps he was going to have enough money and power that he wasn't personally threatened by private info that would threaten the less-wealthy.

We might learn this year, how well Google/Alphabet protects this treasure trove of surveillance state data, when that matters most.

22 comments

neilv

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jorts  5 hours ago

It was probably a decade ago and I recall using something within Google that would tell you about who they thought you were. It profiled me as a middle eastern middle aged man or something like that which was… way off.

  • sgc  5 hours ago

    If I were extremely cynical, I would suspect they might have intentionally falsified that response to make it seem like they were more naive than they actually were.

    • tga_d  3 hours ago

      I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.

      [0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...

      1 reply →

    • giancarlostoro  3 hours ago

      I think its their currently targeted ad demographic or whatever. Its probably a "meaningless" label to humans, but to the computer it makes more sense, he probably watches the same content / googles the same things as some random person who got that label originally, and then anyone else who matched it.

mindslight  7 hours ago

> Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.

> But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks

I feel that as the consumer surveillance industry took off, everyone from those OG Internet circles was presented with a choice - stick with the individualist hacker spirit, or turncoat and build systems of corporate control. The people who chose power ended up incredibly rich, while the people who chose freedom got to watch the world burn while saying I told you so.

(There were also a lot of fence sitters in the middle who chose power but assuaged their own egos with slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot)

  • neilv  6 hours ago

    Yes, I remember that period of conscious choice, and the fence-sitting or rationalizing.

    The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.

    The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.

    And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.

    And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).

    Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.