Messages

16

General Discussion / Re: What are you doing now?

« on: February 11, 2014, 04:09:08 pm »

Happy to see the forum has yet to vanish (kudos iago).

It's not going anywhere. I even recently bought a SSL key and made everything encrypted!

17

General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 11, 2014, 12:21:36 am »

That's good to hear, but I can't help but feel it's too little, too late.  The damage from their previous enforcement of a real name policy has been already done.  I do remember reading that Vint Cerf had spoken out against the real name policy, so I'm inclined to believe what you say is true.

It's amusing to hear that internally there are complaints about the "Yes" and "Ask me later" YouTube thing.  I'm glad to see that Google employees feel free enough to openly voice their criticisms of absurd decisions like this.  However, the fact that they haven't gotten rid of this yet, makes me wary that Google still is pushing a real name policy to some degree.

Employees are *extremely* empowered to stand up and disagree. It's a really fantastic culture like that. There is a lot of reasoning behind the 'real names' stuff, which I can't really go into. Whether it was a good or bad decision is a matter of perspective, but the Internet at large certainly hated it, and they've responded, albeit slowly.

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General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 10, 2014, 01:49:08 pm »

Anyways, the shit that annoys me the most (recently) about Google is the obnoxiousness of their real name policy.

For what it's worth, there isn't really a "real name policy" anymore. This is the message, word-for-word, from the guy that heads that team (and shared with pemission): "We do require that you have a name on your account, but this isn't required to be your name. You can also use initials for your first or last name if you want. It's better if you pick a name that your friends know you by, so that they can find you, but that's entirely up to you."

19

General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 08, 2014, 01:54:51 pm »

There's also this:

http://www.google.com/policies/technologies/

And I've done countless training courses that go over those again and again and again.

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General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 08, 2014, 01:50:46 pm »

The problem I have is that the cost isn't well known. Nobody thinks about how the advertising agencies work, or how Google and Facebook make their money. And they certainly don't directly disclose their business practices to the users. Instead, users see free software and services thinking that they're free (and they're not). That's pretty deceptive.

Google is pretty open if you ask. Most people just don't care.

And by the way, Google is among many that buries its policies in lengthy legal jargon too. At least it makes users aware of policy changes.

https://www.google.com/privacy - linked on every page, written in plain English.

I can only speculate what kinds of information advertising agencies collect and how they use the data. Whether it can identify me as nslay, my Google ID, a cookie number, an IP address, or a behavior pattern is irrelevant. I don't like the idea that Google, for example, can build (and probably does) an almost complete profile of my web surfing history (since many sites host Google Ads). I personally don't want to be tracked and I am opted-in by default. I have to 1) know that I am being tracked (which is generally kept hidden), 2) Find a way to opt-out (if any).

You don't have to speculate. https://www.google.com/dashboard lists everything Google knows about you. As Sidoh said, it isn't a complete history or anything like that, it's simply the interests that it thinks you have. You can add/remove interests or opt out all together (like I do), after which they'll only give you generic ads for the site you're currently on without any behaviour-based metrics.

And again, as I pointed out: Anonymous data isn't necessarily anonymous. Once you cross reference data, you could, for example, build a statistical model and accurately predict the identities* of users. It's been done before and I imagine advertisers do this too (predicting someone's identity* by their web surfing behavior would be an interesting learning task).

Google defines personally identifiable data as the obvious stuff, plus the not-so-obvious stuff that can later tie back to the user, as you said. They're both considered PII, and they're both protected as carefully as possible and only used as outlined in the plain-english privacy policy.

You want my support for Google: Be upfront and direct about the costs and practices. Otherwise, I think you're a bunch of hypocrites to your own motto "don't be evil." Surely Larry Page and Schmidt have nothing to hide from us, the unsuspecting user ... right?

They are almost entirely transparent, barring, as Sidoh said, the "secret sauce" that would be harmful to release. But they aren't secretive about how they track people, how they choose ads, and the fact that they make money off ads.

21

General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 07, 2014, 02:19:02 am »

(e.g. Google Ads will track me when I visit sites that host Google Ads without my knowledge or consent and independent of whether I use Google services or not ... I would call this snooping).

I don't think that's true, depending on what you mean by 'snooping'. They might trigger that somebody has been there, but I don't think they keep information about you.

And Google's executive staff are outright hostile toward privacy.

How do you mean? I've only been there a month or two, but I haven't gotten that feeling at all.

22

General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 06, 2014, 12:25:40 pm »

LIES!  That link results in a 404 error!

Whoops! https://www.google.com/dashboard and http://google.com/dashboard work, but not the one I posted.

Anyways, the shit that annoys me the most (recently) about Google is the obnoxiousness of their real name policy.  I've stopped going to YouTube because every goddamn time it asks me whether I want to associated my real name or not with my YouTube account.  It does not respect my decision or privacy because I of course select NO, but it asks me to associated my real name every fucking login session (or something like that).  Ask me ONE TIME, and then don't ask me again unless I dig around into a profile settings/ option.  There have been a couple times where I have almost accidentally hit YES because it pops up when I'm not expecting it to... Very sleazy and sketch practice.

Yeah, a lot of people internally dislike that policy too. "yes or ask me later"

23

General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 04, 2014, 12:15:27 pm »

They don't let your control the really valuable data such as search history and location information. With Google giving away all it's cool tech, it has to pay the bills somehow!

I'm not entirely sure that that data's kept in a meaningful way (ie, linked to the user) for an extended period of time. I know that the ads and stuff you're served aren't based on the URLs you visited and the searches you made, but on your "interests" gleaned from those URLs and your current search/location.

I could go check the source, of course, but then I couldn't discuss it.

24

General Discussion / Re: Online advertising

« on: January 03, 2014, 03:04:53 pm »

The thing about Google is, you have pretty good control over what they collect and how they use it. https://google.com/dashboard will list all your data / account / linkages, you can find out what google has 'learned' about you based on where you visit, and you can modify / remove / tell it not to collect it at all. It actually thought I was interested in 'new jersey' before I disabled it, for some odd reason.

I'm not saying I *like* being tracked or ads or anything. I just think that as far as ad companies go, Google is in a position where they don't have to (or even want to) care a hell of a lot about you. They'll do their best to give both you and the ad creators the best possible experience, and allow you to customize it from there as you see fit.

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General Discussion / Online advertising

« on: January 02, 2014, 11:08:48 am »

Living in the Bay, working at the Google.

Wow, I'm surprised!  I didn't think you would leave Canada, or work at a huge monopoly corporation. It's probably a nice place to work though.

Yeah, I didn't think I'd leave Canada either, but here I am!

I wouldn't call it a 'monopoly'. On one hand, I feel bad that 99.9% of my salary comes from ad revenue; on the other hand, they're constantly changing the world for the better, and they have really good policies regading privacy (privacy is SUPER important to them, because people will jump on anything) and lock-in (it's important that every app lets you view, manage, and export all your data). So that's a plus, at least.

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General Discussion / Re: What are you doing now?

« on: January 02, 2014, 11:06:48 am »

Living in the Bay, working at the Google.

how is that techoligarchy life? do the regular folks hate you?

I keep reading articles in NYT, LATimes, CNN, etc that all explain how tech employees are ruining everything for the normal folks.

Explain?

Gentrification, rising housing costs, tech workers causing ordinary people to be evicted, blahblahblah.

People in San Francisco and Oakland are pissed off at tech workers, and have been protesting and stuff. They call tech companies worthless, but they use twitter to organize, and google maps for visualizations, and have @gmail.com email addresses on their signs. Clearly, tech companies are helpful!

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General Discussion / Re: What are you doing now?

« on: December 31, 2013, 01:03:52 pm »

Living in the Bay, working at the Google.

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[x86] Announcements / Re: OMG SSL!

« on: December 30, 2013, 11:55:52 pm »

Unless something goes horribly wrong, nobody ought to notice. I did it this afternoon, and besides a little bit of messing up configs, it was mostly seamless.

https://*.x86labs.org uses the same cert, but you'll get a certificate mismatch error. I figure the rest doesn't really matter. In fact, I should just forward x86labs.org to forum.x86labs.org anyway

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[x86] Announcements / OMG SSL!

« on: December 30, 2013, 08:05:17 pm »

I just bought a SSL cert for "forum.x86labs.org". You'll now be able to enjoy the privacy and security of SSL while we talk about all our shenanigans!

I'm also forcing everybody on SSL, cuz why not?

Let me know if you get any cert errors or have other issues!

30

General Discussion / Re: Colorado's Supermax Prison

« on: November 04, 2013, 05:35:23 am »

Drug cartel leaders - much like the booze running from organized crime during the 1920s - are a product of prohibition. Prohibition creates insane demand, and look where that's gotten us.

As a first step, legalization and treatment instead of prohibition and punishment needs to be explored.