Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total. Are you really suggesting that "large unbridled corporations" have proven through history that they will kill more than 240M people?

The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI. Is that what you are referring to, or something else?

Without wanting to start a political battle here, this is not behavior that is limited to political systems. Western democracies have inflicted their fair share of death and carnage as well, though because they are "our team" we tend to see our behavior as justified and the other teams' behaviors as unjustified.

Humans with sufficient power will always eliminate any potential threats to their power, and do what they feel is necessary to expediently reach their goals...once that course of action has been successfully justified. That justification happens via one of or a combination of two ways: 1) rhetoric, propaganda, coalition building, education, etc. (various means of influencing those that might present road blocks to accept the behavior), and/or 2) possessing sufficient power that challenging the behavior is not an option.

Once corporations are able to politically justify eliminating those that stand in their way, they will...all humans in history with sufficient power have done so, and that is never going to change. Many large corporations already have more wealth than half of the nation states on this planet. That is a lot of power. The cornerstones of future political justifications are happening in things like TPP effectively raising the corporation to the level of nation state in some regards.

It will happen, it is only a matter of time. Initially it will be the ability to capture and imprison those threats to their power, and eventually it will lead to war and killing. This is the nature of our species. It's not going to change.

So, yes. Anything in the name of profit.

Clearly anyone selling soul food is just as guilty of murder (hate crimes?) as the guy who shot up that church in Charleston. And don't get me started on those murderous Punjabis, putting ghee on everything...

Once you grant that the corporations are at least partly complicit, it's just a matter of multiplication. If the corporations can degrade enough people's quality-of-life, then in principle yes, they can ultimately have been Worse Than Hitler (TM).

So the question is actually, "To what extent have the corporations degraded people's lives?", and if you really must be binary, "Are the corporations Worse Than Hitler (TM)?". You are simply not addressing the actual question; you have answered the question, "Is murder equivalent to someone making a certain lifestyle choice?".

So again, I ask: if Hostess corporation is genocidal, is La Bouche d'or merely a serial killer?

I'm asking for a little more than just whether a corporation could in principle be worse than Hitler (the specific claim lordarminius made), I'm asking for an actual plausible mechanism by which that could happen.

Seems they got to you too. Or perhaps you're one of them.

Contrast to this post, which accuses of him of being "one of them", presumably part of a conspiracy to spread apologia for poor food choices on a hacker interest forum!

An absurd claim, insulting, illogical, of no service to the conversation, but remaining alive and upvoted. We can see further content-free insults in replies to this post. This is the first time I've seen a post killed for reasons that are obviously wrong. In addition, they are wrong in a dangerous way, killing mere rhetorical sarcasm while allowing actual insults, of negative worth, to run wild.

Moderators didn't touch his post. His post was downvoted by users, and flagged by users.

I'm not a mod, so I don't know this, but it's pretty clearly what happened.

If you think it shouldn't be dead you should click the timestamp and then click the [vouch] link.

The above japery is to demonstrate that to a large extent, your sarcasm misses the point.

Stopping with chemical assistance, the success rate rises to about 30%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_cessation

If you control people's access to information, you control people's minds, albeit indirectly. Its a simple philosophy that has kinda-sorta worked in China. You can get large scale approval from the public for pretty horrendous things like the US has done, simply by controlling what gets seen on cable news/mainstream media, etc. If Google is the gatekeeper of all information (so far it isn't), and they're ultimately controlled by the NSA or CIA, then we're screwed. So how many people has the US killed? How many of those wars could have been avoided if the public weren't fed lies?

And while obviously murder is worse than stalking, we don't really know where things will end up. We are in uncharted territory with the new information collection society we live in.

There is something as the walking dead, there really is. As Nietzsche said, the last man lives the longest... but the question probably is, do they actually live. People seem to become more timid and more neurotic, instead of more alive, more defenseless rather than more skillful, they suffer "information overload" rather than being more informed. That's just anecdotal, but I'm amazed at just how many weak and stuck up people I meet each day, and how young so many of them are. Between their parents being fools or having no time for them, and them being sprayed with the mental equivalent of fast food everywhere else, sometimes even reaching into the education systems -- all that does have an effect. You might say we're being gaslighted on a global scale.. and mixed, dishonest signals hurt even the strongest people, others they can drive positively insane.

And they are only emitted by the unhinged, too. Only broken people, or people in broken moments (same difference really, even though I speak of "types of people" I ultimately do mean types of behaviors and habits etc., I think everybody can theoretically change but it's easier and more satisfying to be self-righteous) want power for the sake of power, all rationalizations and neat excuses be damned, that's what is at the core of it and it matters, and they are slowly molding us in the image of the screaming, empty abyss that is their personality.

Would you rather live for 2 weeks as you, or for 50 years with very strong dementia? If you set aside how strongly I feel about this, that I have chips on my shoulder and pet peeves; do you at least see my point in principle?

For totalitarian systems, murder is not an end in itself. Making people, their individual agency, their unpredictable "spark", totally obsolete, by murder or other means, THAT is at the heart of it. And in that sense, we live in a world that is becoming so totalitarian it might not even afford us the honesty of murdering us.

The future is subtle damage, not necessarily heads-on-pikes evil.

Even if you like the politicians they have today it's still a serious issue. A huge step towards an Orwellian Nightmare.

https://sputniknews.com/us/20160912/1045214398/google-clinto...

NOTE: The site is an organization sponsored by Russia. But the researcher is well respected with a Ph.D. from Harvard. His 2015 paper was published in PNAS and reviewed by very respectful people. This article is a preview of his upcoming paper.

Where did you see this proven to be false???

It's sad how critics and whistleblowers have media blackout in USA and only can do it via Russian agencies or Al-Jazeera.

And he lacks basic understanding quite often. In one example, Google pulls a Hillary image instead of a Trump (or both) when referencing the 2016 election in a fact card. He doesn't even think that image is simply the first to appear on that page.

Heck, I type "next president" into Google right now and I get a fact card with Obama as the image and "5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win" by Michael Moore as the top result.

When the chairman of Google's board is directly funding a startup with the mission of electing Hillary Clinton, and a Alphabet subsidiary CEO is one of Hillary's former aides, and Google has an incredible shield from prosecution under the current government leadership, I think we can safely assume Google considers it important to it's interests to ensure she's elected.

The article often cited isn't really a solid proof of Google manipulating results, but that doesn't mean it's true that they aren't. And of course, with Google's search algorithm one of the most guarded secrets at the company, some of the only code that regular rank and file Googlers aren't allowed to see, even you, a Googler who's failing to disclose your bias here in these comments... can't prove otherwise.

Long as you can't do that, you're not really doing much to advance the conversation. Just being a paid shill for your employer.

The cool thing about linked logical fallacies as an argument point is that, like Bible verses you can find one to support every side of an argument.

There's no proof that Google is manipulating search results, and when anyone fabricates a new possible manipulation it is immediately debunked. And yet you still want me to prove the negative. I'm not asking for a key proof, I'm asking for any proof.

Given the clear relationship of corrupt influence in our government by Google (feel free to try and "debunk" this one, please), can you not accept that it is not just reasonable, but prudent to be skeptical of Google's search ranking motives?

I mean, your employer has literally actively gotten involved in overthrowing governments in collaboration with Hillary: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/google-built-tech-to-sup...

I personally am generally hesitant to factually state "Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton", because, as you said, I don't see conclusive evidence. But acting like people are wrong to be suspicious is not much better. If I were to make an educated guess as to whether or not they are, I'd be inclined to guess that they are. You work for a company that makes Comcast look positively cuddly by comparison.

The fact that some bad articles used bad evidence does not prove Google is not manipulating search results, it's merely the http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fallacy_fallacy at work.

1) Google posted about putting healthier snacks closer to eye level in employee kitchens.

2) Unsubstantiated claim that Google has a corrupt influence on the US Government.

3) Google Ideas helped create a visualization of Syrian officials who publically opposed the government for the newspaper Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/syriadefections...

Therefore, Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton.

It is difficult for me to believe that you take your own arguments seriously

"Unsubstantiated"? Do your own homework on how many Congressmen are in Google's pocket: http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/?q=Google+Inc&cx=01067790...

EDIT: Sorry, your company hid most of their donations under their shell corp this year: http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/?q=Alphabet&cx=0106779074...

Not to mention Google literally having bought out one of our previous FTC Commissioners, who was paid to fabricate "academic studies" that supported Google's legal positions, which Google then used as "independent" evidence of their claims. During his FTC term, the investigation of Google's conduct mysteriously disappeared, despite the staff at the FTC recommending a case proceed. (And almost every other civilized country has opened such a case against Google. Why's the US silent on the matter?)

You work for a criminal organization that uses deception and manipulation as basic operational currency. And you expect me to take your arguments seriously?

As to your other points, I'll refer you to my original post.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#E...

It's hard to see why this particular thing is going to make any bigger change than those that have happened over the last 3 generations. Or those to come from other reasons: bio-engineering, implants, VR, AI etc.

Also, I'm unclear why you seem to assume this change is bad?

In a future where these technologies are ubiquitous, the person who has to go off the grid for perfectly sane reasons---domestic abuse, witness protection, leaving behind a past that makes one a pariah---will find it that much more difficult. Not only will they no longer have access to the convenience of services that have tuned around their interests and desires---address books that know their work and home, voice recognition that knows what they sound like, personal assistants that can pull useful / valuable information out of the soup of the Internet and surface it to their benefit, etc.---the lack of these technologies in someone's presence will mark them as someone "with a past."

There's the potential that people will look at you a little funny in the future if you have a smartphone with voice recognition disabled, or you're always typing in addresses by hand to a self-driving car because it doesn't just know where you want to go today based on past habits.

I think the domestic abuse thing is bad, and I know Google has been burnt by that once before. But they fixed it once, and I'm not sure that it is something that is unfixable for any substantial reason.

Some people have always rejected technology, for both good and bad reasons. One can usually think of some very compelling case why a particular piece of technology is bad.

That still doesn't mean that the change is bad overall (indeed, the things the person is missing out on sound very useful). And nothing comes close to making it a "grave threat to humanity", or - like I said - a bigger change than something like implants, let alone CRISPR or AI.

I'd say "potential" is being charitable at this point. We're now in a world where prospective employers have been demanding access to candidates' social network profiles. We're now in a world where national governments seriously propose requiring anyone visiting their country to disclose all of their social network profiles in advance. Privacy-minded individuals have objected strongly to these kinds of practices, not least because of the inferences that might be drawn if someone didn't provide such details (honestly or otherwise).

With a little imagination it can become clear that so much data cannot be a good thing. Can the information be used to repress political opposition? Can it be used to enforce an agenda of say eugenics? Can a business be given undue advantage by promoting its "recommendations"? Can minorities and their views be suppressed?

In a few years with the maturing of AI to fine-tune the processes we will all think alike,behave alike, conform alike, to the wishes of our overlords who know who we are, where we are, what we eat,what illnesses we have who we f..k, what religion we practice, what books we read, and so on ...

Maybe that fellow Orwell was on to something.

See also fixermark and jtrip below

On one hand we have people claiming that filter bubbles lead to the collapse of civilization, and on the other we have that the same services will lead to conformity.

Based on current trends, it seems like the filter bubble problem is winning. So maybe an all-knowing AI Google would be what saves us? ;)

The alternative view of course is that there won't be one AI, there will be many. And they will compete to please people more so people are more likely to use their services.

If you want to go hyperbolic again, Brave New World is how it ends. Personally, I'm more than happy to trade information for services that work well.

Once you have all the relevant information about someone or some system, then you essentially control them. If I know everything about you, how can you ever hope to have an even footing with me?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

So yes, there is a trade off. But humans have been making trade-offs forever - civilization itself is one big compromise. Domesticating cattle meant human could not move as quickly and as fast as they used to. But they lived better and longer.

I don't see why information trade-offs are somehow different.

Google could provide most of those services without tracking individuals.

Because it is about power. We, as humanity, have plenty of experience with power trade-offs. We have so much experience with it that we have names for structures with centralized power, like "monarchy" and "dictatorship". Our experience with those trade-offs hasn't been particularly good. Maybe we should learn something from that.

I guess the idea is to stop assuming you know what the data will be used for. My office manager bought a book then several months later took a trip to NYC. She was pulled into a room and interviewed about it before they let her go, specifically mentioning the book, why she bought it, and asking why she was traveling to NYC.

Is this unreasonable use of data capture? I dunno. Seems okay, right? But it is an example of threat-assessment based on you bought a book. What if you instead had access to every email/text/web-search/webpage-i-have-accessed ever? Not to mention purchases. Of course credit cards are the same way.

Surely posting THIS thread is just as threat-indicating as buying a book, and even more telling because you have my words to back up your assertions. Ought I not have posted this HN post? Will it come back to haunt me? Computers don't forget. They'll never let me forget this post, or any other, and use it as justification for my future actions.

Examples only seem to weaken privacy conversations, since one inevitably internalizes "how likely am I to be caught by that?", but here goes anyway:

If I mention "Snowden" in a post on HackerNews/Reddit/email/Facebook ought I be denied a security clearance? I don't know, but the capability is there already. And of course you have to mention the cliché: If there were a Facebook in 1930, the collection of the Jewish people would've been trivial, and extraordinarily efficient. Heck, throw in today's public face recognition and you could net an entire population. You wouldn't even do it loudly. You'd just quietly identify nexus points in the community and start quietly working to discredit and weaken them. Help them lose their job, discredit them, have'm transferred to another city, hire a prostitute to help ruin their marriage... whatever it is that naughty folk do to get their way as quietly as possible.

I don't feel like these things are shocking, hard-to-execute, or so fabulously ficticious that one ought eye-roll at it. They're simply what any moral-less entity would do to stay alive/in-power/in-control.

An unexamined life isn't worth anything, and an examined life is not compatible with where we are currently heading. Imagine that story of the naked emperor without that child. For me that's like some kind of event horizon -- if everybody fell for it, and stayed stuck to it, there is no story there, no history, no people in it, nothing going on. There isn't even a "there" there, if there is no hope of it ever changing.

The emergence of the printing press and spread of knowledge, both official doctrine (the Bible), literature (Cervantes' Don Quixote was the first modern novel), ideas (Montaigne's Essays), scientific thoughts (Copernicus and Gallileo), and many, many pamphlets, shocked Europe for the next several hundred years. Keep in mind that a copy of Gutenberg's Bible, new, was the equivalent of about $4,500 based on one recent estimate I've seen -- expensive by modern standards, but previous, hand-written copies of books were the equivalent of handcrafted meticulous art-pieces. A scribe might be able to complete one or two books per year, and had to be fed, housed, clothed, etc., for this, as well as educated. Producing the vellum, inks, quills, etc., used, and candles (for any work beyond daylight hours) also has to be factored in. See: http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/how-long-di...

With the dawning of the industrial age in the early 1800s, mass literacy became a thing. In England, literacy rose from ~40% to near 90% over the course of the 19th century, through publicly-subsidised education, required for the new, highly-skilled factory jobs. Paper became cheap, and presses faster (a few thousand sheets per hour), enabling yet more dissemination of information. Among the consequences, mass movements of the public, independent of demagogues, pressing claims, including the Chartalist movement in the 1820s - 1830s in England, and the Year of Revolutions, 1848, throughout Europe and Central and South America, in which 50 nations saw substantial rebellions.

The early 20th century saw loudhailers, which enabled the voice of one person to reach the assembled ears of tens or hundreds of thousands of people at once. Transport (busses and trains) could assemble them. Radio allowed a single voice to reach, instantly, an entire nation at one time. And declining printing costs allowed single books or manifestos to be distributed en masss (Mein Kampf, Mao's Little Red Book, The Road to Serfdom, etc.), often subsidised by a propagandist. The rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and World War II, were a partial result, as was the spread of Maoist-Leninist Communism throughout China -- a difficult region to unify otherwise.

Television and mass advertising gave rise to live televised debates and speeches. Kennedy beat out Nixon in 1960 in large part due to the former's far better visual appeal on black-and-white television. Castro could keep all of Cuba tuned in to hours-long diatribes. Vietnam was litigated as much on American (now colour) televisions as in the jungles and rice paddies of south-east Asia. American technical competence was proved in real time via the Apollo Moon landings, and impeached by the Challenger explosion.

The corporatisation and commercialisation of media beginning in the late 1970s, but accellerating in the 1980s and 1990s, cheapened the product, silenced dissenters (particularly Noam Chomsky, though many others -- who've had little if any voice on either commercial or noncommercial television or radio), and enabled first right-wing talk radio, in part an outgrowth of what had long been a rural Christian revivalist movement in the US, then CNN's live, 24/7 cable news, and Fox.

The Internet gave voice to the voiceless, but more voice to the already empowered. Most particularly those who could act with impunity. Distortion, especially of political and economic discussion, from monied interests, Russia, China, Israel, and numerous fringe, crank, and terrorist groups, is manifest -- these are organisations which don't and won't play by the usual rules. Eyeballs-driven, advertising-supported Interent sites only feed this dynamic, one of the more substantive criticisms of an ad-based Internet I think can be made.

Francis Bacon gave us the phrase "knowledge is power" (actually "scientia potentia est"). With due respect, I believe the gentleman wrong: knowledge is a power multiplier. It amplifies the existing power differentials amongst parties.

It's also true that the ruling elite and popular movements have differing constitutions, capabilities, and weakensses. The former have organisation, capability, assets, and control, but suffer from vulnerability. The latter have resilience and adaptability, but little by way of organisation or even common interest. It's interesting to note that the idea of a popular revolution is a quite modern concept, dating largely to the 19th century. Previously, regime change was far more a matter of one oligarchy displacing another, though manipulations of mass sentiments might play a role.

For references: Edward Bernays (and Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self), Plato, William Ophuls, Marshall McLuhan, Jerry Mander, John Kenneth Galbraith, Joseph Nye, Neil Postman, Noam Chomsky, and of course, many others.

I'm not sure if Google's staggering incompetence in all things user-facing is a pro or a con, though. On the one hand, you could make the Stasi argument and say that people just think the company actually has meaningful information on them - but on the other hand it clearly has the potential of being even more dangerous, especially considering the fact that Google data is presumably being funneled straight into governmental intelligence as well.

Of course, I also don't walk around with everything turned on, checking in at every location, posting reviews about everything. I just conserve my battery life and use GPS only on the rare event I need to do a long distance trip or have to find someplace especially tricky.

Maybe it is different for the English?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os

Fun watch imo. There's also another session between them two.

Slavoj Žižek + Paul Holdengräber "Surveillance and whistleblowers" - International Authors' Stage Det Kongelige Bibliotek 71,767 views

Published on May 19, 2014

I'M WATCHING YOU PART 1 - part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZiFWZpYds

4:48 Danish pornography

5:40 There is no harmony in the univers

8:44 David Lynch and the crawling excess of life

11:17 God underestimated us

19:40 Why do people read Stephen Hawking?

21:14 Surveillance and whistleblowers

22:40 The most dangerous freedom

30:40 The necessity of vulgar humor

35:24 The public persona

37:45 The connection between Pussy Riot and Snowden

41:58 Never allow intellectuals in power

47:30 Julian Assange, a spy for the people

53:46 There are only two different kinds of persons in the world

56:38 Right wing wisdom

57:39 People only want the appearance of freedom

1:01:51 The complicity of liberal tolerant capitalism

1:07:42 The European dream

1:13:50 Unjustified paranoia

The Slovenian star philosopher Slavoj Žižek in the first of two conversations on surveillance with the popular and charismatic interviewer Paul Holdengräber, director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library.

The Black Diamond, The Royal Library, Copenhagen 18 May 2014

Video: http://www.videoakademiet.dk

"Senores y Senoras Nosotros tenemos mas influencia sobre sus hijos que tienes. Pero los queremos"

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we have more influence over your children than you do. But we love them."

Speaking of addiction. Youtube, and the internet in general can be very addicting for young children. I created smartmadre.com (beta only!) to help parents manage their children's internet addictions. The 2 core features are.

-Learning system that will deactivate your child's access to time wasting websites. In order to get internet access back, the child has to spend a few minutes earning points on readtheory.org, quizlet.com, khanacademy.org or typingclub.com etc..

-Optional youtube monitor allows parents to see in near real time what videos a child is watching and what ads youtube is showing your child.

Parents have a right to decide what content is not appropriate for their child. SmartMadre.com aims to provide affordable and simple to use tools so that parents don't need a computer science degree to control network traffic in their own home.

Rather, I consider the _collection_ of broad data, carefully used, to be almost pre-requisite to the advancement of our species. Whenever I imagine future technologies they're all based on better use of data. "That car over there has a broken taillight - send them a message." "Pick me a movie I'll be interested in in this moment." Or data mining my personal history to make note of conversation topics I wanted to follow up on; promises I made in the moment.

To some degree, society will (and already has) reset our privacy expectations; not everything we've held as protected need always be, at least in general. What we haven't done yet though is figure out how to enable useful collection and some level of relaxed privacy constraints without opening the door to potential abuse. Which is the risk I think you're worried about - it's not that Google is abusing the data they have _right now_, but that they eventually could, and that you find that risk more compelling than all the value they're delivering now. (Which, to be fair, I cannot say is incorrect). But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater - I want the promises of the future, and it's just a question of how we can safely get to them :).

And this is something just about everybody who has a big brother they both love and fear should pay attention to:

> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.

-- Hannah Arendt

(I do share data leakage and privacy concerns).

I use an Apple phone, so I can't comment on the mobile targeting scenarios re Google.

However, I have been using Google and its web services (email, search) for over 10 years now for both work and personal use. I have bought maybe 2 products as a result of their ads. After installing ad-blockers, I simply get no advertising now. None. Zero.

The same applies to Facebook. I use the mobile app almost exclusively and see no ads or simply ignore the promoted stuff. None of it seems to be location based. For example, I enjoy whisky but when I open the app in the middle of a whisky store, I get no ads or promoted links.

So where is all this data matching and targeted advertising? How effective is it if any person with a modicum of intelligence can take simple steps to avoid seeing all the annoying crap?

To me it seems that these companies, specially FB, are working on a foundation of sand -- the companies are built and run on the basis of "we can sell intelligent advertising" and the marketing execs fall for it and throw money at them without any measurable results. Google has a more solid use case (they searched for it, so show them an ad that is provably relevant) but Facebook....? Seems like a house of cards in the long run...even if they can implement merciless targeting they are afraid of doing so as it would result in backlash.

Meanwhile, the tech behemoths use this shifting sand to conjure money out of nowhere and continue fueling the computer industry -- with some good benefits re. facility to share stuff with people you want, hardware improvements, contributions to open source, advancements in AI, research, etc. I guess just enjoy it while it lasts...

The current state of things is a wet dream for for totalitarians in some ways, you can simply record everything now and then use whatever algorithms you like on it later. Some of the people who warned about the technology and our apathy even back then might say it's way too late now. The fact that we now say "Is it even a problem? Why worry about something that might not happen?" kinda shows something doubleplusungood is going on. Once the only thing between you and a totalitarian hell is how the wind blows, with no other recourse than hoping for the best... well, that's kind of a vacuum, nature abhors and is filling it.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"