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0 pointspclmulqdq3y ago0 comments

The problem with your argument is that the same mechanisms that are used by government for broad-reaching surveillance are also used for legitimate government purposes. These are things like subpoenas and warrants, which are impossible to eliminate completely while keeping a functional court system.

You could try to argue that we should make sure that these are narrow in scope (that's already the rule despite the current practice), but that doesn't eliminate the problem completely: someone can already subpoena Amazon for "recordings taken in kylevedder's house between 4/22/2022 and 6/22/2022" related to an investigation, and they will get them. Even if you are not the target of the investigation, but they have reason to believe that the target may have visited you during that time period. Such a subpoena has not been tried in civil court yet, but it will likely be allowed. In an alternative world where tech companies don't track you, these subpoenas wouldn't work.

Google, Amazon, and other data collectors have a principal-agent problem with respect to data about you: while you would likely fight a subpoena for your location data tooth and nail, they don't care so much. They will often give up the data, and they won't even tell you they did.

The alternative business models are ad support without tracking and subscriptions. Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you. WolframAlpha is a search engine on a subscription model. Micro-subscriptions are already a thing (albeit invented/normalized after Google was invented), and it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products.

As far as this being bad for people, allowing companies to track you invasively is a little like not buying insurance. You won't care most of the time, but you may care a lot. Lots of people don't buy insurance, even though they should, because they severely underestimate tail risk. This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates (or single-payer healthcare), and car insurance mandates in some states all operate on this rationale. So should privacy legislation.

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kylevedder3y ago· 1 in thread

I don't see why you can't add guardrails to things like subpoenas -- it's not like they are allowed to engage in aggressive subpoenaing of non digital info without a due process procedure, just make the digital one more rigorous. The issue lies in the flawed execution of the current legal system, so fix that instead of taking a hatchet to big tech.

>Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you.

A very non trivial subset of their revenue is personalized ads, and I promise you they work pretty well; if you don't believe me I recommend taking a job on the ads team. This is a huge revenue hit, for a company that's consistently putting that money into product innovations as well as societally important moonshot projects, all in order to side step the issue of your concerns with the American justice system's subpoena process.

>it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products.

If you're a SWE you probably have coworkers raised in India. Ask them how likely they would have been able to afford such a subscription system and by extension how much worse their life would be if they didn't have access to Google. I would bet a substantial fraction of them would still be in India and not software engineers.

>This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates

We have healthcare mandates and social security because if a person has no money and is out in the street or gets health care and then can't pay, it's society's problem. If you get nailed by the government for doing something illegal due to invasive subpoenas, it's not only not society's problem, depending on your opinions on the role of the state this is a feature not a bug.

pclmulqdqOP3y ago

There are already guardrails in place on subpoenas. They are about as strong as they can be. That doesn't stop overreach, it doesn't stop corruption, and it doesn't stop people from being people when trying to get them and when granting them. The best way to stop abuses of a system is to remove the potential for abuse. Do you want to remove subpoena power from courts around the world? I don't - you kind of need it to prevent people from destroying and hiding evidence. The only thing that is left is helping people understand the harm that comes to their lives from giving intimate data up, and regulating its collection.

Also, privacy legislation does not need to "take a hatchet to big tech." It will just reduce profits for a few months while the ads team figures out how to work around it. I promise you they will do a really great job figuring it out. Some of the smartest people I know work on those ad models, and they will still be able to use things like location, web browser, and search query to find relevant ads.

Most of the people who can't afford a subscription fee (who, by the way, are not your Indian colleagues, who largely have come from rich or middle class families and can afford a subscription fee) are not worth serving ads to anyway. They don't have money to spend on stuff that you are advertising. I see no problem with offering a free tier with limited search capabilities, and a version with a subscription fee. Lots of SaaS does this. This is basically what Google does now with the ads: the high-value users (young rich people like the HN crowd) subsidize everyone else by having high ad impression prices.

By the way, I did work at G. I'm not convinced that personalization actually helps the bottom line at all for Amazon and Google search when you balance against the reduction in CTR due to latency (personalization prevents caching), and the added compute and engineering cost of personalization (since personalization prevents caching, you need a ton of additional servers and a lot of extra brains thinking about how to make them work). The idea of a search engine that produces personalized and highly specific search results feels like a local maximum to me in light of the costs and the research around CTR and web UX.

Unfortunately, that local maximum is currently so heavily entrenched in the market that it can strangle any competition. Google got its market share initially by having really fast search results that had the words in your query, and having no ads (and then later, a few clearly marked ads). This was in competition to web search providers that tried to offer personalized search results and highly relevant ads. Since then, they have become the thing that they proved was an inferior product, and they keep out upstart competitors through market power.

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