Isn't it so strange that if you or I were to do these kinds of things to an individual it would be considered creepy cyber stalking but when companies do it they are rewarded?
No reason ad tech companies should have freedom to associate real world data with online data. This seems like the perfect candidate for a US state proposition.. no company engaged in online ad tech may combine or allow any other entity to marry online identities with real life.
Imagine if Google offered a retail solution advertised as “record who came in and out of your house”. They would offer a CCTV for free and run centralized face recognition on everybody visiting. They’d give you a bit of stats, but truly they would aggregate data on where people go and build shadow profiles (supposedly to facilitate ad targeting). And imagine 90% of households were using it.
That's not even the half of it. It's not only building a record of who came in and out, but what they did, where they went, what or who they "engaged" with in the house, and arbitrarily more granular information. And the person visiting your house, on average, has no clue any of this is happening.
You think installing cameras on your own property is stalking? Putting aside that this is legal nonsense, are you saying that the millions of private retail stores, offices, and houses that install security cameras are actually stalking and the majority of citizens that visit grocery stores are stalking victims?
I mean, maybe you do believe that, but it's a little ridiculous to freak out over something that most people do and are used to. At most, it's an extension of the status quo.
Edit: I suppose it's not that ridiculous if you think most of the world is evil, but I am genuinely curious if you believe that.
Individual businesses aren’t stalking anyone if their CCTVs are watching out for themselves. But as soon as there is a centralized company offering the service and gobbling all the data, and that company acts like Google does with regards to web tracking, then it’d be in some sense no better than stalking (or even worse, stalking at scale).
If it only obtains the data to provide you the service of knowing who comes in or out, and deletes the data as soon as it’s not needed anymore, there would be no question; but that’s not where profit is in a double-sided market.
Like ADT? Like a lot of security companies that offer monitoring solutions on behalf of clients, especially smaller businesses and individual homeowners?
"gobbling all the data" is vaguely scary while being totally meaningless. GTM data is fully managed by the client, Google contractually does not randomly spy on it. Many businesses would argue that they do delete user data after they don't need it anymore, but analytics is useful and therefore necessary for a fairly long time (many platforms have natural retention limits, usually a few years). Google themselves deletes user data on their first party products after 18 months by default (referring to things like Web & App activity and Location history) and users can set it as low as 3 months, approximately the same amount of time as security footage.
> You think installing cameras on your own property is stalking?
The moment that someone responded in bad faith was right here.
You know full well that we're talking about the companies that get the data from these devices and what they do with it, not the rubes that these companies trick into buying their stalking products.
You also know full well that ADT is in no way comparable to Google in this discussion given the order of magnitude difference in revenue between the two companies and the extensive integration between the intelligence community and Google.
Key difference is one’s revenue stream (do you profit by selling security system or through data accumulated from your customers).
> Google themselves deletes user data on their first party products after 18 months by default (referring to things like Web & App activity and Location history) and users can set it as low as 3 months, approximately the same amount of time as security footage.
Security footage is not the problem, after all you may want to look back a few days to see who was around at the time something went missing. The problem would be processing footage into data on where each individual goes, storing that and finding various ways to profit off of it. This is not necessary for the core value proposition, and in my opinion is ethically questionable.
Sure, if they don’t store it for long, and especially if they comply with GDPR, that would help. However, I’m not deeply familiar with this, but I suspect they can easily claim that they don’t store data on you and don’t need to delete it simply by storing it in a way not obviously connected to your identity—even if this connection is very easy to make at any point.
So this is only a problem if the person thinking of visiting their neighbors' or friends' house has an issue with it. Why can't I install such a system if I want to? Why does it matter that 90% of households use this system?
In fact, because 90% of households use this system, doesn't that mean society at large agrees that this is an OK thing to have? We all opt for wearing clothes only because society at large has agreed that wearing clothes is a requirement; there is no law of nature mandating this, and select small groups of people congregate in nudist colonies to escape from this societal requirement. Even on the non-private side, if I don't like clothes, why should I be forced to enter government buildings (for official government business such as court appearances) with them on? Surely society shouldn't be forced to make accomodations for me, just because I have a different opinion on these topics. If 90% of households did in fact use such a system, it would be the new normal because it's a nearly universal collective opinion on the technology. A society almost never caters to those that are the ultra-minority if it inconveniences the 90% or directly challenges the 90%'s own freedoms and choices when it comes to their lives, especially when that's in regards to something as low-impact as what sort of privacy visitors to a residence have while on that property.
Yes. Slavery was OK in the US for a long while. If things hadn't been done to get this changed in the US, it would still be seen as an OK thing to do, and in reality no higher power or law of nature would stop that, even in $current_year - evidenced by how worldwide modern slavery/forced labor is still going strong[0].
My point is that there is no correct moral compass, no general rule as to what behavior is good or evil and no arbitrator that will correct the wrongs humans are doing in the world. Society is only governed by itself, and thus a 'supermajority' of ideals is what will reign over the superminority in terms of law and general consensus. If society accepts and encourages one company to control an absolute record of human movement and presence, it's not going to be stopped and that majority isn't going to cater to the small portion of society that doesn't agree.
I find it hard to believe that no Persian Gulf countries made that list. I was under impression that most of the manual labour workforce in places like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait are slaves imported from the Indian subcontinent.
Not the guy you're responding to, but this trap question seemed like you either misunderstood their comment or are unintentionally putting words in their mouth.
Their comment explicitly subscribes to a form of ethical relativism [1], which argues that there is no universal concept of "morally right" or "morally wrong", and that morals are determined solely by the society judging them at that time.
[1] >Ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one's culture. That is, whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The same action may be morally right in one society but be morally wrong in another. For the ethical relativist, there are no universal moral standards -- standards that can be universally applied to all peoples at all times. The only moral standards against which a society's practices can be judged are its own. If ethical relativism is correct, there can be no common framework for resolving moral disputes or for reaching agreement on ethical matters among members of different societies.
It is not a particularly helpful take in an ethical debate (which this whole privacy thread is) outside of making a populist argument ("if everything thinks X is morally acceptable, then it is; who are you to say it's not?").
That said, I'm not sure I'd want to make the loaded comparison of equating "taking notes of who does what in your house" to slavery. One of these things is very clearly significantly worse than the other.
Right, I'm saying moral relativism ends up in inacceptable or at least widely not accepted answers as soon as you apply it to charged topics. It sounded to me like they were making a relativism argument, and I wanted to highlight this - to give them the opportunity to avoid saying that slavery is acceptable (even in the past) - while at the same time warning them against walking into this position unintentionally.
I'm not saying it should be unacceptable, relativism is an interesting position with some upsides, such as that the future, if relativist, will not judge us harshly for our undoubtedly manifold transgressions by their standard, but "slavery was okay actually" is still something that one should, if at all, say with deliberate intent, not as an accidental implication.
edit: To clarify my own view, I think that inasmuch as we now think that slavery was wrong, we have gained understanding - that slavery was just as wrong at the time, at least that it followed from moral precepts that were already believed, but this fact was obscured by the social and economic reality that people lived in. Evidence for this would be that people were already arriving at the view that slavery was wrong based on reasoning that matches, in hindsight, our own.
A good candidate for a similar moral mistake that we'd be making is, of course, the meat industry - meat is tasty and vegetarianism is effort. But I would expect the future to condemn meat-eating for the same reasons that vegetarians today condemn meat-eating, indicating moral progress (or at least technological progress reducing moral effort) rather than value drift.
I'm not sure that morality always works that way, to be clear, but I do think it works that way in these specific cases.
I'm gonna take an adversarial point of view here. Wrong is wrong, and the magnitudes aren't really comparable at the resolution of the individual. At the maximum, according to Statista, there were about 4mn slaves. There are about 5bn people online, out of what is projected to be 8bn. While there are certainly cultural boundaries, that 5bn almost certainly interfaces with Google. So taking a step back and looking at the magnitude implied by the scale, and the outsized power of Google in virtually every facet of society, I wonder if it really is stepping out of line. Keyword dragnets, indefensible tracking... What's next?
Purely numerically comparing it, assuming slavery counts as a life spent in suffering, and there's a 1:1000 factor, given a forty year life expectancy, Google must cause the equivalent of 14 slavery-equivalent-suffering-days or more to be worse.
How many days of back-breaking labor and abuse would you put in to get freedom from Google tracking for the rest of your life? For me at three days, it'd be arguable; three weeks would be a stretch. (Of course, I have no actual experience to compare.)
It's more like Target, Walmart, and Best Buy recording everything you do in the store (where your eyes go, what you say to your spouse, etc.) and then selling that information to random companies you've never interacted with, including each other.
Together, they can create a comprehensive log of everything you do outside (and inside!) your house and secretly sell it.
This isn't even an analogy. With Alexa and Google Home, we should expect that it's literally happening.
Why does selling the data matter? If it's fine to collect but not sell it, people would already be fine with Google Ads tracking as Google is solely in possession of that data and will never sell it, lest their competitors gain an edge by out-header-bidding Google (offering higher profit margins to sites) with Google's own user data.
It is somewhat galling for your private behavior to be monetized.
But you're right that the selling itself is not the core issue. The core issue is that it's being shared. The monetization is an incentive to share, and that's where the problem lies.
By contrast, think about your doctor: they can't legally sell your private data. If they share it with anyone, it is for the express purpose of helping you, their patient. No problem there! My doctor shares my data with their lab testing partners and cloud vendor, and it doesn't bother me at all.
Now imagine if my doctor could legally sell my data to anyone and make even more money from me. We know with 100% certainty that every hospital would sell that data far and wide.
This is what adtech firms are doing, just with (slightly) less sensitive data than my doctor has.
> By contrast, think about your doctor: they can't legally sell your private data.
This is not a reasonable comparison. You choose to tell the doctor private information because of patient-doctor confidentiality. The other type of “private information” is collected by observing you in public (e.g. in a Walmart).
> You choose to tell the doctor private information because of patient-doctor confidentiality. The other type of “private information” is collected by observing you in public (e.g. in a Walmart).
I think this distinction is irrelevant. The salient questions are:
- Is this information private and potentially damaging to me?
- Do I expect [third party] to have access to it?
This is especially important if [third party] can be a government. In the massive web of interconnected buyers/sellers of adtech data, there is no reason to expect that oppressive governments will be unable to get anything they want.
But to address your point:
I absolutely do not expect "observing in a public place" to include personal conversations and/or data about exactly what products my eyes land on.
And leave a webcam on the door of every single person I'm professionally engaged with, to record their visitors? Use it to understand where each of those persons spends all of their time, to the best of my capability? Learn who has what vices, and sell that information (or a service to employ it) to anyone who would take advantage?
I would love to leave all of the blinds on the windows in my home open all time, but I live in a neighborhood. The price I pay for privacy is the cost of the blinds and the action of closing them when I want privacy. When those blinds are closed, it is not in any way acceptable for anyone to come along and try to find a way to see around or through them, even if they're trying to sell something.
Nobody would be harmed in the above example any more than they would be by having their privacy violated online. Nobody is physically harmed, or had their property stolen. They wouldn't even be inconvenienced in any a way, so long as they are unaware of the intrusion.
Now for a personal experience that stuck with me and helped shaped my views on privacy:
Many years ago I walked in on my girlfriend in the bathroom, and she asked me to leave. I was going for something in the medicine cabinet and thinking she just didn't want me to see her on the toilet, I replied "I don't mind" and continued toward the cabinet. She exclaimed "But I do!".
Of course, she was right and I was wrong, because privacy is about respecting the individual's desire for it.
Hire a bunch of PIs to follow and publicly report on all the movements and actions of every exec you can manage at Google, Facebook, and smaller/shadier ad companies
Actual it would be more like a company recording what (physical) mail you read, when you read it, where you were when you read it, how long you read it, where you looked at on the paper, etc. You request data, they send it to you.
For example, ad blocking is more akin to paying someone to cut advertisements out of a magazine before you read it.
