>Governments have guns, Google does not. I'm not saying we should ignore corporate surveillance but there is a big difference.
That's a misleading analogy. Problem is that Google/ebay/Microsoft/Silicon Valley cooperate closely with the law enforcement and employ a lot of former LEO people who still have close connections with law enforcement.
Check out some of the Yasha Levine's articles. He's one of the best investigative journalists when it comes to SiliconValley and surveillance.
For example, he's writing a book, Surveillance Valley, precisely on this topic. Check out this short blurb that debunks this notion about Google not policing people:
>Reveal how Silicon Valley polices our lives: There is a common misconception that no matter how much Silicon Valley companies spy on us, at least they don’t have the power to arrest and jail us. Truth is, they can and do. This book will investigate how the most progressive Internet companies — including eBay, Facebook and Google — engage in pro-active policing. For example: eBay’s massive private police alone has overseen thousands of arrests and convictions around the globe, and hands over complete criminal cases to government prosecutors “on a silver platter.”
No. It's not misleading at all. And your example illustrates the important distinction the OP made. These companies that you mentioned almost have to cooperate with the government because the government has the ultimate power to fine or even jail them, not to mention harass them or put them out of business, if they refuse to cooperate. They can't just walk away from this issue. This is why government power and the use of the gun has to be strictly controlled by the constitution. This is what the FEDs, et. al. are trying to circumvent. Our basic liberties such as Freedom of Speech, Assembly, etc. are empty words if the government attains the power to spy on all citizens en masse without out cause or warrant.
According to the article our behavior and therefore Freedom of Speech is being manipulated by these companies that in turn brings us full circle to the point that surveillance companies control our behavior and therefore our voting decisions and thus weapons.
If, however, companies can effectively influence who becomes the government, and if they also have close ties to those people then the distinction becomes a lot less useful.
Force is the ultimate form of influence against which there is only force to stand against it. I can stop using Google products tomorrow without the need for a gun or explanation.
The article is sowing some serious FUD. Everything is engaged in behavior modification. That's the basic point of products and services. Watch more/better/less/no TV. Exercise more. Eat healthier. Stand up at work. Reward yourself with a candy bar/bottle of wine/vacation.
I don't know. I'm not sold on fearing Google. The government I do fear.
Optimization of consumer behavior through endless A/B testing optimizes behavior in favor of the corporations, not the society or the individual. So one of my bigger worries is that these optimization strategies will lead society into a dead end local maximum where everyone is perfectly conditioned to consume for the good of the corporation, when we could have taken a different path resulting in a more egalitarian outcome.
Another worry is that through subtle manipulation of search result ordering, page load delays, news feed filtering, etc., Facebook, Google, et al. could influence politics and culture in counterproductive ways, even if only by algorithmic accident.
This is discussion that has happened in economics for a long time. I am still utterly inconvinced of the pure power of advertsing. Sure it has a big influence, but its not like google is so good that everybody is just a mindless zombi perfectly conditioned to buy whatever they show me. Even if that were the case, Im not clear why this would lead to less egalitarian outcome.
Your second point is in conflict with the first. If they want me to consume as much as possible, they have to show me what I want. If they want to influence broad culture they have to show me what they want me to see. If it is by algorithmic accident, then its like all cultural devlopment. Its all accidents, nobody planes the evolution of culuture, google, facebook and reddit have already changed culture and will continue to do so.
You points are a small worry, compared to something like the prospect of 1984.
> Force is the ultimate form of influence against which there is only force to stand against it
Gandhi would disagree with you.
The weakness of hard power is that it is expensive, blatant in application, and virtually guaranteed to create opposition. The strength of soft power is that it is indirect while being cheaper and less likely to create resentment. People are best manipulated through suggestion rather than coercion.
Hard power is ugly but at least it's obvious. Soft power can be just as ugly by being insidious.
Gandhi was a lucky guy because he was doing his opposition thing against a British Empire. Think for a couple of seconds what would have happened to Gandhi in the USSR. The British Empire had for a long time put itself in a position of bringing freedom and culture and when British trained Indians started to quote there own rhetoric back at them.
Gandhi had the extreme luck that WW1 and WW2 were happening effectively totally changing British culture, British power and so much more.
Soft power can be ugly and insidious but I still vastly prefer to deal with that then with a guy taking a baseball bat to my knie. If the worst problem liberals have to fight is the Google sort algorithm and the amazon recommendation engine then we are in a pretty good position.
Force isn't what keeps the US government in power, established norms do. If those norms were weaker, or if enough people were upset enough to upset the norms, you'd see how much force can do without all the softer stuff around it.
The ones having monopoly on violence are a much stronger force. There is indeed a constant balancing act between them and the masses, but at the end the sooner you accept that that is the real and ultimate power, the world and its inner working, across cultures, will become clear to you.
Are you suggesting google doesn't employ people with guns?
Are you suggesting google and the government are fundamentally separate entities? Are you suggesting the government does not have access to everything google has access to? And are you suggesting non-governmental agencies can't employ physical force? Like the groups of violent criminals used to destroy the pro-union movement many years ago or organized crime organizations to name a few examples? Are you suggesting if Google doesn't like someone it cannot outsource the violence to other organizations like the FBI by reporting appropriately? Are you suggesting all kinds of force are irrelevant compared to the most clumsy and inconsequential and most unimportant type of force used in our part of the world, physical force?
Because any of those suggestions, all of which you seem to imply by your statement I would take issue with. The last being the most important.
The platitudes suggesting anything a corporation does, no matter how powerful, is okay since it can't employ physical force, while anything the government does is wrong because it can are excellent fodder to trick children into accepting Libertarianism but are otherwise mostly ineffective.
Are you suggesting that people can't use alternative services just by typing a address into their browser? Or are you saying that if you dislike your goverment polices like unjust wars or surveillance state you don't have to pay taxes for them?
"children" uses ad hominem attacks. Force is great when the force is directed against dissenting views, but not so cool when your views are in the minority.
I know the concept very well. Of course their are advantages to using a service that everyone else is using, but it comes down to what you value more your privacy or the inconvenience of a smaller user group/paying a fee. I think the majority of people don't care about their privacy and would rather make that trade off right now. My core argument is that you still have a choice with free markets but with goverment if your views aren't the majority you are at the whims of group think.
> I think the majority of people don't care about their privacy and would rather make that trade off right now.
That depends on what you mean by that. I think most people care very much about the long-term effects that lack of privacy has on societies. They just are uninformed and therefore don't see those future costs, which is why they make a flawed tradeoff against their own interests.
> My core argument is that you still have a choice with free markets but with goverment if your views aren't the majority you are at the whims of group think.
So, if everyone is on facebook, what choice do you have in reaching an audience? If google started manipulating the opinions of the majority of society against your interests, what choice would you have? ...
>They just are uninformed and therefore don't see those future costs
Who is educating these people? organization who have an interest in keeping the masses ignorant to the effects of privacy.
>which is why they make a flawed tradeoff against their own interests.
this is a common argument it hear, do you not think it is elitist to think that you know better then the common people? Hell, maybe you do, but I bet 10,000 other people also think they know better too. I am going to trust 100 billion micro decisions everyday rather then some academic in an ivory tower who thinks they know the will of the people.
>if everyone is on facebook, what choice do you have in reaching an audience?
Come on, There are many more channels to reach your audience, you are on one right now. Hacker new knows nothing about me other then my username and password.
>If google started manipulating the opinions of the majority of society against your interests, what choice would you have?
duckduckgo, bing, reddit, facebook, TV, or Family people get create their opinions based on a huge number of inputs. The problem is that people want to be told they are right so they only consume things that reinforce their opinion (confirmation bias) but that is a whole other road.
> this is a common argument it hear, do you not think it is elitist to think that you know better then the common people? Hell, maybe you do, but I bet 10,000 other people also think they know better too. I am going to trust 100 billion micro decisions everyday rather then some academic in an ivory tower who thinks they know the will of the people.
What is your point? That people don't ever act against their own interest because of lack of information or understanding?
> Come on, There are many more channels to reach your audience, you are on one right now.
That wasn't the question. The question referred to a hypothetical situation. Stating that the hypothetical situation doesn't match reality doesn't answer the question.
> Hacker new knows nothing about me other then my username and password.
And your IP address and which comment threads you are interested in and which opinions you express and which comments you vote on in which way ... but I guess that's besides the point anyway.
> duckduckgo, bing, reddit, facebook, TV, or Family people get create their opinions based on a huge number of inputs. The problem is that people want to be told they are right so they only consume things that reinforce their opinion (confirmation bias) but that is a whole other road.
How is that a choice you have regarding other people being manipulated against your interests? I don't understand.
You don't know what they value most, only they do.
>That wasn't the question.
True, to much hypotheticals
>And your IP address and which comment threads you are interested in and which opinions you express and which comments you vote on in which way ... but I guess that's besides the point anyway.
Your right about that, but if I cover my tracks I give a lot less data then say a Facebook.
>How is that a choice you have regarding other people being manipulated against your interests?
You don't and you never will. People have been manipulating others since the the dawn of humanity. My point is that if people have choice they can take in many inputs and decide the best way to make decisions for themselves instead of being forced to use a service.
> You don't know what they value most, only they do.
But you very well can find out that people commonly proclaim inconsistent values, and that they often regret decisions they made earlier, and that that often coincides with having had inconsistent values.
It's just an empirical fact that if you look at how happy people (claim they) are, for example, people living in police states tend to be less happy than people living in free(ish) societies, while at the same time you still find many people who are very pro law-and-order. Now, I am not telling them whether they should prefer a police state or a free society, I just can empirically observe that people show support for politics that empirically leads to a society that the same people also empirically dislike.
I wish I had a time machine to change the decisions that I have made, but in that specific time and place with the information that I had at hand, I think I have made the right decisions. I think post people do. Cliché "Hindsight is 20/20"
The difference is not about who is more powerful. The difference is that I can choose to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. I cannot (barring extreme measures) choose to disobey the government.
Your friends are on google mail, maybe hidden behind their own domain. Your friends post stories and pictures involving you on G+. If you hang with them...and their android phones. You can get rid of them or you can accept being google data.
Yes. More generally, governments monopolize the use of force. Against corporate surveillance, there's at least a chance of resisting. Against governments, you put your life on the line.
Anyway, it's a thoughtful essay. But I'm a simple person, and I tend to prefer action to contemplation. Interfering with corporate surveillance starts with simple steps. You block tracking and ads. You harden browsers against fingerprinting. You use operating systems that respect your privacy. You compartmentalize your online activity enough that surveillance won't hurt you, using multiple devices and VMs, that connect via VPN services and Tor.
It's not simple, I admit. But it can be a fun game. For me, anyway. Most people still don't seem to care enough to bother. And I don't know what it would take to change that. So it goes.
Basically, people have to start telling other people that they are jerks for letting big corporations mine their most private conversations just to save $1 or $2 dollars per month. Obviously, this won't happen.
I forgot to mention that one obviously doesn't use Gmail or Facebook. Or at least, one only uses them for superficial stuff. And one has multiple personas, with non-overlapping social networks. Most of those are online-only. But some can be LARP, if you like.
It may be possible to use iOS anonymously. I have an anonymous Apple online account, and could presumably use it with used devices purchased for cash. Anyone know if that's doable?
I forgot to mention that one obviously doesn't use Gmail or Facebook.
Did you read the linked articles? The problem is that others use Google Mail and Facebook, so your e-mail/contact information end up at Google Mail/Facebook anyway.
The analysis of Benjamin Mako Hill shows this very aptly. Although he runs his own mail server, Google delivered 57% of the e-mails that he replied to. So, even though he does not use Google Mail at all, Google can scan/profile/whatever over half his e-mails.
OK, so Google knows a lot about Mirimir. And they see email that Mirimir sends to Gmail addresses. Except for mail lists, that's pretty much all encrypted. But there is the metadata, for sure.
However, I use other personas. I've had on the order of 100 email addresses, over the years. Most all now abandoned, of course. And I suspect that many of my correspondents have similar practices. That's not so easy to profile.
Except we've seen a few tools come up on HN that claim to reliably tie anonymous profiles together via stylistic analysis.
Is google doing the same? Most likely.
Is it reliable? Less clear, given the Google ads page that show what Google thinks it knows about you is often mistaken on age and gender. Perhaps it's more reliable singling out an individual than an age.
When it was doing the rounds a couple of years back plenty of people were commenting how often it got age and gender wrong. Sometimes it was widly inaccurate on interests too.
That's simply not true; they use the government's guns every time they file a lawsuit. While the government is the ultimate controller of that power, the economic and legal powers available to corporations depend on the enforcement of the state.
Yes but that is the hole point. Those of use who are primly concerned with government and not corporations want to create a government and a legal system were neither the state itself or somebody using the state has the wide ranging powers that a modern state has.
If the state simply does not have the ability to attack a country on the other side of the world, then no amount of bribing politicians can make it happen. When the state does not have backdoors into everything, their is no amount of political pressure that can make the state misuse that power.
I want to limit government power because they have the monopoly of force. Everything that Google is doing threw the government has to go threw the governments monopoly of force. We need to control the monopoly of force by the rule of law on the level of individual freedom.
The wrong way to go about it is to have a super powerful state that can easily regulate every aspect of what Google and co are doing and can tell them what to do because that is essentially Fascism.
> Governments have guns, Google does not.
(Some) Governments are elected by their citizens. Google Chiefs aren't.
The important part for me it is to create up to date laws - and enforce them - that protect citizens for mass surveillance, public or private, while allowing for useful use of data like for making easier to file taxes or to store your personal contacts.
The problem with corporation controlling the state is a old one and Google is not particularly scary in that regard.
The point still stands, if you can create a state that does not have waste powers in the first place, then neither the state by itself, nor a cooperation can use that power.
Claims like: you asked for it, it's your own fault, and on and on.
You know you're full of shit.
You're part of that same group of people who say: America, love it or leave it. You have the option to speak English or get the fuck out.
It's like hearing someone tell me that I can vote nuclear weapons out of existence. Like I can solve all my problems with my own little boycott! Oh really?
I've opted into mandatory JavaScript support, and opaque, minified JS which is required for so many sites to even work (cross-origin policies aside), and I can stop server-side exchanges of behavioral data, and I can just walk away from everything happening around me, and live in a cave, and I can opt into being a luddite instead?
I suppose I opted into the planes that fly overhead too. My omission of any actions against air traffic represent my token assent to having tons of aluminum circling overhead 24 hours a day. Right?
You know very well that their analytics product tracks everybody all across the Web (and techies are the only ones who know about noscript). And what do you do when you are forced to reply to Gmail emails because others who have no clue use it?
Joe the user has no clue about "all this technical stuff", how it works, what it is capable of, how it can be combined with data from other DBs, how it is really used by the corporate and governmental world and where all this is going, especially when AI will have advanced even more.
Surveillance is the primary reason for its use. It's the only way organizations would tolerate the cost-ineffectiveness of that working style.
Whether people can be conditioned for it is an interesting question. Naive young extroverts probably don't have much problem with it. Introverts of all stripes probably cannot be conditioned as easily since introverts are depleted of energy by social interaction.
One of my worst fears about our industry is that it will quickly become 100% open plan surveillance offices and 100% adoption of idiot time wasting Agile/Scrum/Kanban management process (which are yet another form of cost-ineffective surveillance).
Before he took down his blog, Michael O. Church had a great post warning about the "macho subordination" cultures that build up in these Panopticon-like work spaces. Young workers who don't know that the company is harming them via the surveillance culture will instead adopt a race to the bottom attitude in which people compete to be seen as most loyal by showing how much privacy and human dignity they are vocally willing to give up.
The state of physical working conditions in Silicon Valley is beyond deplorable, and the trend is quickly being copied even by large firms. And don't even think for a second that it's about money. Firms pay out the nose for idiotic, opulent showpiece offices, where rows of sweatshop-like engineering stations are just office eye candy, not means of production. When they are paying for fucking fountains, roof gardens, employee cafés, and on-site rock-climbing walls, you know the argument is not that open-plan saves money. They are just getting off on how much employees are happy to debase themselves to get foosball access or craft beer.
It tells me a lot about the integrity of Y Combinator when I see how many YC companies have deplorable surveillance and macho subordination work spaces, but that Paul Graham himself gained much notoriety for writing essays, like his pieces "Great Hackers" or "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule," which profoundly influenced me as a young programmer, that talk at length about the cost-effectiveness of providing people with protected, private, quiet space and time to get things done.
Modern YC companies, when contrasted against what Graham describes for almost a decade as good places to work, are a total farce (and the rest of the start-up world follows suit).
If they don't do it, someone else will. Sometimes it might be better to be a critical mind shaping what happens, than being a bystander.
What is absolutely necessary is an awareness for what is happening, ethical guidelines and probably even governmental control.
What scares me most are the techy self optimizers, with every step obedient to their fitness tracker (so far from knowing what they really want) and believing that tech will get us out just in time before life on earth collapses (well, humanity on earth, nature finds its way).
Perhaps surveillance capitalism is zero-sum. There's only so much buying power, and at least in the US, consumers are mostly spent out. In that situation, advertising just moves demand around; it does not increase it. So all this consumer data-mining and targeting may be a net lose, just a cost imposed by the market on all the companies using it.
> consumer data-mining and targeting may be a net lose
It is at net lose.
And our current society's concept of ever-increasing growth, based on ever-increasing consumption (aka "the latest iPhone is out, you must buy that now"), is very obviously not sustainable any longer. It was sustainable during the period when our resources seemed "unlimited" to us.
It is however not a lose to Google & Co. who continually gain power over governments all over the World.
It can definitely be a loss for the consumers who are being manipulated. If through advertising they are convinced to spend $100 on a doodad or device rather than $100 on something that will improve their long-term well-being, or not spending that $100 at all, they lose. Who wins? Advertisers. Search engines. Producers. All the while, each of them convincing themselves that they're doing such a great job meeting the needs of consumers.
Selling people chocolate might not be evil, but a sustained multi-year billion dollar campaign to put chocolate into the consciousness of the populace and have it normalized as part of a staple diet is borderline.
Just wait until they start selling your behavioral data for background checks, health insurance and credit ratings. Suddenly you are shut out of things and you don't even know why.
Interesting read. But the repeated notion that surveillance capitalists are only taking from the people by selling off the behavioral surplus omits that fact they they are providing services that those people want. Yes, appearing to be free is a subterfuge for many who don't understanding what they are giving away. But for many others they feel it is a fair exchange for services they really want.
The article is going much farther than just targeted advertising - it talks about predicting and manipulating behaviour in general, and about power, power in the political and personal, such as the question of who we are and our values.
In combination with the article I read just before, the one about statehood in no-man's land, there is also the question of sovereignty raised. If our behavior can be predicted and manipulated by supranational companies, how much is a democracy - a state - still worth? (Note that state actors could of course do the same, though hopefully there is at least a semblance of legitimization.)
This is a very high price to pay, in this described world, and I don't think most are able to even start judging fairness here, or even care enough to try and see.
I must admit I have no idea what you're talking about. If people behave in a predictable way then that's what they do though they are free to change, one trusts. Where is the evidence for manipulation (aside from that exhibited by all entrepreneurs from the market stall holder upwards) and to what end? Google exists by selling advertising on behalf of disparate traders; customers will therefore make choices which will change according to prevailing circumstances. Meanwhile billions of people make largely un-tracked purchases ex internet. Others are tracked and so what? Amazon and ABE Books know my tastes in literature and are welcome to push suggestions my way. If there are enough of us (like me), perhaps they'll conspire with a publisher to create a literary treasure replete with right of center (UK-style) politics, small state, free market, low tax ideas of the kind I favor. Of course I'll have no option but to buy it!
It's hard to know when services are really wanted. One measure that absolutely does not capture information about the service being wanted is sales. Pure sales information fails to control for the neurological process that generated the decision to buy, and takes an incorrectly agnostic position that the business has no social obligation to care how that buy signal was generated in the customer's brain.
There are all sorts of ways to induce an impulse in someone which, if given the opportunity to engage their higher level thinking processes, would be described as "unwanted." Most often, the victim of such manipulation is unaware and could even mistakenly report later that the choice was made solely of their own volition. Others may rationalize later that it was "wanted" even if they didn't "do the wanting" at the moment of purchase.
But the existence of priming, SEO tactics, in-app currency manipulations, pay-for-pain-release, bank overdraft fees and holds on deposits designed to cause such fees, etc. all represent dark patterns (which benefit from data and consumer prediction) that are by definition based on an open acknowledgement that customers will be doing things they unequivocally don't want to do.
There is no one set of decision-making processes that "is me." There's the lizard brain me that often makes choices that the homunculus me disapproves of, and a whole mess of competing interests, distractions, and irrationalities in between. The mistake of saying that a consumer purchase choice is a clean signal of wanting is that you don't know which "them" did the wanting, and which "them" is allowed to approve / disapprove of it.
My general belief is that we should be skeptical. When someone enters into a purchase behavior that is impacted by advertising phenomena or data-driven optimizations on the order of how fast their eye saccades sweep over a monitor, we should heavily discount the degree to which that signals a valid want, and instead view it as an instance where the person was grifted out of money for a thing they didn't choose to buy and then primed to back-fill their account of their choice with a rationalization that maintains their volition.
In a very real way, this means that the more sales certain organizations accrue, the more direct evidence we have that they are not wanted or value-creative.
It's similar to seeing a very successful loan shark and saying, "well, if the loan shark is successful it must be because people wanted the loans." No, psychological pressures were used to convince someone to bear a risk and make a type of purchase they didn't want. The success of the loan shark is a direct testament to the value they have destroyed.
<Large tech company> knows Everything about you and the threat of having all that information looming over peoples head ought to cause fear. If the data is leaked and mined, lives are harmed and sometimes irreparably. Clearly there is evidence of damages and I think a lawsuit makes sense. If you poison the air with mercury causing a significant chance of fetal brain damage, you get sued. Why should you not be sued if you leak information that leads to suicide, divorce, etc...?
Google has a lot of data on a lot of people, and as such, often they're the obvious single target.
But, it's useful to keep in mind that the aggregation of all data on a person, across all sources, is several orders of magnitude greater than what Google has. And, very recently, that larger set has been merged together.
Any writer that says something similar to Google or Apple are "the world’s most highly valued company" should be ignored. If they are going to twist the truth on this what ever else they say is unreliable.
There is no publicly traded company that is even close to the value of some non-publicly traded companies, ie Saudi Aramco.
That is like saying that the US Federal Reserve is a more valuable non-publicly traded company. The writer is implying that there is no public market to value that business. While Saudi Arabia mulls over bringing ~20% of Saudi Aramco public, this is still a far cry from the business having a proper market valuation on par with the likes of Apple or Google.
> Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.
> genuine needs
Capitalism reflects genuine greed, not genuine need.
"You’re giving them information; they sell your information."
This is a common misconception about Google, so one can understand why the authors came to this conclusion. It would be very interesting to see evidence to the contrary.
Not sure why you were downvoted, but Google is hardly the most creepy actor here. My top votes are for Facebook and ad retargeting.
One of the things people don't realize is how strict data hygene and log access inside Google is. Cross correlating data across major services in an attempt to demask individuals is a huge no-no and gets you fired.
Plus there is a ton of engineers and staff who deeply care about privacy. You don't push SSL to every endpoint if you don't care about privacy.
Governments have guns, Google does not. I'm not saying we should ignore corporate surveillance but there is a big difference.