The corollary of being privacy conscious is NOT being stupid. Folks may be privacy conscious and all power to them to navigate the web/mobile world by making respective choices. However, A LOT of folks are perfectly fine trading off their privacy with convenience and value-add that comes with sharing data with companies (that use the said data to provide better and customized experiences to them). Categorizing people who make these trade offs as less smart is missing the point - and probably cynical since you can't accept them.

One would argue that it’s only because they’ve nothing to lose at the time. I imagine sometimes all the smart motivated people who would never ever run for office or be a public figure of any sort because they’re afraid of their search or post history of their teens or 20s cropping up. I’ll bet it’s actually quite a massive amount. I’m certainly in that boat.

I don't feel dumber. I traded information to Google in exchange for convenience. Now maybe that wasn't worth it to you, but I'd avoid speaking for all of us. My smart phone makes me a functional member of society, that's worth a bit of privacy.

I don't think it is required to have a smartphone to be 'a functional member of society'.

For me it is. I have ADD and my phone is a God send for not forgetting things.

I can never go back to not having the worlds map/navigation in the palm of my hand. I would love to go back to a dumb phone if not for the very crucial feature for me.

What if you could have that convenience without trading information? Weather, stock prices, recipes, music, traffic, timers, shopping lists, etc. don't require sharing any of your personal information.

I'm interested in how you think weather or traffic (for example) would work. Would you download all weather and traffic for every location/road on earth? That's quite a lot of data.

Right, what if?

Someone needs to make it happen.

For free?

> My smart phone makes me a functional member of society

This statement leaves me speechless. A huge feeling of vertigo. Are we really there?

Only if we allow ad tech biz to dictate the definition of "functional member." So far they are winning. At one point my mom yelled at me for never checking Facebook, she genuinely thought I was being rude.

This a war of attrition. FOMO is powerful and most people eventually give in. The companies co-opt your friends and family against you. They don't even realize what is happening.

Would you prefer it if it gp had instead said "My computer makes me a functional member of society"?

For many people, the only computer they have is the smart phone, it's how they look for (and apply for jobs), do some banking, check emails and keep in touch with family, friends and colleagues.

Try to be less assuming. I have ADD. Calendars with reminders are an enormous value to me, or I would frequently miss meetings and deadlines.

If I could get a dumb phone with reasonable fast WiFi hotspot functionality I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.

It just doesn't seem to exist.

I know it's less convenient, but there's dedicated WiFi hotspot devices that exist.

I considered getting a "dumb phone" and one of these devices because in some cases a tablet-style internet-only plan + pay-as-you-go minutes for the odd time I use a phone would be cheaper than a bundled smartphone plan.

At this point saving the $10/month isn't worth the hassle to me though and now I use Slack on my phone so damn much it'd never work :\

Look at the new Nokia 'matrix phone' 8110. It is a dumb phone with some smart features and most notably 4G and WiFi hotspot functionality. At only 80 dollars or so. I am seriously considering getting one just as an experiment

Thank you very much.

Sounds exactly like what I'm looking for.

Symbian phones, sadly now dead (yes I don't miss Symbian C++, but the phone was great).

IIRC Nokia had one.

Not at all, those things are mutually exclusive. You can have a device that is useful and makes many facets of your life much better, but is also hurting other parts. You can still keep the former, and try to reduce the impacts of the latter.

If smartphones were completely useless, then we wouldn't actually need well-being features, we would just throw away our phones...

I'm going to keep blatantly promoting the Librem 5 [1], which is designed specifically to address these concerns (not affiliated with them, just a fan).

[1] https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

I'd be careful about promoting vapor as people tend to get annoyed when they don't get their product. If Purism ships, I doubt it will be anything decent. They are absurdly under capitalized for what they are trying to do. I'd love to be wrong but I'd happily bet 5 figs that I'm not.

Why do you say they're "absurdly" under-capitalized? They already make laptops. The phone's hardware seems fairly standard, no risky R&D gambles, and the software is Linux/OSS...

They re-badge laptops that someone else makes. It's not like they have their own factory in China. In this case they are not re-badging, they are building their own phone and phones are considerably harder to make. There are QA processes that require machines that cost >$1M. It puts them into a situation where they have to trust their manufacturer 100% and pray. Essential spent ~$100M making their phone and they had help from Foxconn and awesome industry connections. $2M isn't gonna cut it.

It is impossible to run Intel or AMD laptop without using their firmware blobs. Check Libreboot FAQ.

Only free thing at the moment is ARM, like Marvell CPUs.

Why not Android without the Google services, e.g. LineageOS or CopperheadOS? IMO, for the category it targets -- devices for users that have neither the skill nor desire to be their own sysadmin -- Android is technically superior to the usual GNU/Linux stack. GNU/Linux is moving in the right direction with sandboxed Flatpak apps, but Android is already there. Also, Android is a thoroughly mainstream platform. So if you don't want to be a free-software purist, you can run individual proprietary apps, as long as they're available outside the Play Store and don't require Google services. With a GNU/Linux system, unless it can run Android inside a container, you're basically limited to web applications for anything mainstream.

Android is thoroughly insecure, and proprietary apps do not generally work without Google services. Google has successfully convinced, for example, nearly all apps using location, to use Play Location Services instead of Android Location API. Apps tend to just crash out without Play Services.

Even Microsoft, which is Google's direct competitor for all of these services, hilariously depends on Play Services for nearly all of their Android apps. Office, Skype, etc. all will not run on an Android phone without Google.

I have a Windows Mobile phone these days, and for all the jokes about it being dead: I actually have a wider app selection than AOSP users. Android is a proprietary OS, and almost none of it's apps today are compatible with the open source version.

There's always the Amazon Appstore. And with an open-source Android variant, you could restrict apps that demand over-reaching permissions, including the Amazon Appstore itself.

The Amazon Appstore is trash, and many of the apps in it are out of date or outright nonfunctional. When I tried using Skype on my old Android phone, and it required Play Services, I was mystified because it was also available on Amazon.

As it turned out, the Amazon Appstore version was so out of date it just didn't work anymore.

There are 7 Billion people in this world. I've have come to accept I am simply not that important. I'm sure BigBrother has too.

Go ahead and be an unpaid data gathering tool that can be used by bigcorps, those with the right exploit or (even if they don't do now) when ToS changes and that company starts selling your information to the highest bidder.

They profit at your ignorance.

The fact that it will execute commands with your recorded voice should tell you there's a lot of exploits that can happen without your intervention.

If I want a device to start listening I'll go and push a button for it. The always listening stuff is way too big an vulnerability (like an unsecured API into your house).

> unpaid data gathering tool

I get free unlimited google searching, gmail, google maps in return. I would pay a hefty amount if they starting charging for those and am happy to trade the use of my fairly benign data usage patterns in return.

> starts selling your information to the highest bidder.

I am confident they will never ever sell my personal information (not population-level aggregates, but actual raw data with PII) because they will lose their only source of revenue and will soon go bankrupt if they did so.

Your Facebook data, annually, is worth about $12. Your Google data is probably not worth much more.

Most Google employees, if asked a few years ago, would've told you they were confident Google would never participate in something as unethical as the American drone program. They were wrong.

Corporations do not have a moral code, they operate on profits. They are effectively psychopaths, and any time you associate a corporation with human traits like ethics or morals, you have misjudged it.

And bear in mind: Corporations are not a singular person. You could believe the guy responsible for packing the Google Toolbar in every other installer you downloaded off the Internet will never betray you, but eventually Sundar Pichai will be replaced by someone else, and corporate focus can, and will, change.

Corporations do operate primarily based on profits (not entirely, but mostly).

You seem to be ignoring the fact that "profits" doesn't just mean how much money they can get today. It also means how much money they can get tomorrow, the next day, the next decade, the next century.

Things like consumer trust and confidence in the brand are extremely important to a company's long term profits. Yes, corporations are amoral, but you're not painting a very accurate picture when you compare them to psychopaths.

It's also not a generally accepted conclusion that the American drone program is unethical so I wouldn't use that as evidence of Google being unethical.

Anyone who believes the American drone program is not unethical has a seriously skewed moral compass, and I would not trust to be in the same room with.

Our drone program is a massive-scale assassination program with little to no concern for innocent fatalities. It's death toll upon innocent civilians far exceeds the September 11th attacks on our country that precipitated it's creation. And it has killed hundreds of children.

Our country has gotten enough bloodthirsty revenge.

First of all, people haven't even come to a consensus on when war itself is ethically justified. It shouldn't surprise anyone that drone warfare, a subset of something we can't come to an ethical consensus on, is a highly debated ethical issue.

It's very easy to justify our drone program from a utilitarian perspective. All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare. It's even easier if you count the lives of US soldiers as more important than civilians in war zones, and a lot of people agree with that.

I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to reading this 22 page paper [1] on the ethics of drone warfare. I read the abstract and the conclusion, which states that "much more nuanced and probing analysis of the moral dimension of remotely piloted aircraft operations is needed". Perhaps you will enjoy reading it as well.

edit: You've added some rather inflammatory language about killing children and civilians since I last saw your comment, so I thought I'd add this - it's pretty easy for anyone who's studied ethics to come up with situations in which killing hundreds of children can be justified with a common ethical framework. Ethics is not at all a black and white subject.

You're just trying to appeal to people's emotions instead of making an actual ethical argument.

"All you have to do is show that it has a lower civilian to target ratio than more conventional forms of warfare."

Well...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-peopl...

And...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

Your first source states in the headline that the drone strikes "kill innocents 90% of the time".

Then, in the body, it says the drone strikes "caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times".

An unintended target is not the same as an innocent, and it's misleading to use them interchangeably.

Your second source is better, but you haven't provided any data on the civilian-to-target ratio of more conventional methods. You can't have a meaningful comparison without that.

I am reasonably confident that conventional pilots kill civilians less than 9 out of 10 times.

Without data to back it up, your reasonable confidence doesn't help me much.

Which is frustrating, I wouldn't blink at paying that much for Facebook if it meant a genuine ad and tracking free experience. I want to be your customer, not your product.

IMHO Europe's GDPR should be mandating that companies are transparent about the value of the data collection and ads and allow users to pay the real cost instead to completely opt out.

I guess SV Google fan club is only now slowly realizing they aren't so different than the other corporations they bash against.

I exist, and I also need email. Seems like a win-win for me and google. Realistically, what are you afraid of? Like I said if someone wanted to listen to me it would be very boring.

If the only people who use private communications are those who need it, they'll be much easier to track, and that harms you indirectly.

I mean they can only track what I choose to share with them. They don't have some magic wand that breaks HTTPS.

Actually, they do. It's called Google Analytics, and it exists on a very large portion of the web.

TLS isn't going to help protect you when the site you're on is loaded with user tracking and analytics scripts anyway.

This is why Google's pushing HTTPS Everywhere so hard, just like net neutrality: It eliminates Google's competition in collecting and monetizing data about your viewing.

Google will claim that they make these moves because they care about your privacy, security, and freedom, but malicious tracking scripts they don't do anything about, because that would close off their own profit scheme.

Which competitors will be excluded by the increase in HTTPS? Which companies exactly are relying on the connections being unencrypted, and how are they able to monitor them?

And if Google's competitors are spying on HTTP rather than using tracking scripts, why does seemingly every page I visit load tracking scripts from a bunch of companies?

ISPs. HTTPS Everywhere and net neutrality laws are both endeavors designed to mitigate ISPs from providing ad networks and/or collecting data on Internet usage.

Of course, Google claims they do this for your benefit, but if it was for your benefit, they'd need to stop doing the same things with tracking scripts. This is how you can tell they are pushing these to reduce competition, not to increase your privacy.

I can't say I've ever seen Google claim HTTPS was intended to protect my privacy, but fair enough, I forgot that ISPs can do that in the US.

In one of the major announcements for Chrome, 'Moving towards a more secure web' (2016-09-08) [1], the Chrome Security Team writes:

"Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you."

The word 'modify' is a hyperlink to an article titled 'AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection' [2] (ironically, a non-HTTPS site).

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-... [2] http://webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advert...

This statement both ignores the tremendous effect smartphones have on you personally (as opposed to others being interested in you), and the tremendous effect tech platforms have on large scale groups of unimportant people.

Oh no doubt, and it does so intentionally. A voice assistant in my house effects me and only me. Therefore, I am ok with the privacy/convenience tradeoff because frankly IDK what Google thinks they know about me, but I google way too much random crap to ever put together a half-way decent profile about me and my interests.

The whole point of big data is finding patterns in large amounts of seemingly random information.

Maybe, but HFT have been working a long time to find a pattern in the markets. Human's are random and Sampling can only tell you so much especially when sampling bias is so easy to do accidentally

Humans can be spontaneous yes, but not exactly random. In aggregate, human behavior from online activities is predictable [0] according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in Everybody Lies.

0: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B01AFXZ2F4/R2TPT5454UEKL...

To Quote the link you just posted, "Secondly, it's usually quite hard to control for all possible variables that may reflect a Google search; for instance in concluding that racism contributes the most to a particular political behavior, it's very hard to tease out all other factors that also may do so, especially when you are talking about a heterogeneous collection of human beings. How can you know that you have corrected for every possible factor? Thirdly and finally, the "science" part of "data science" still lacks rigor in my opinion. For instance, a lot of the conclusions the book talks about are based on single studies which don't seem to be repeated. In some cases the sample sizes are large, but in other cases they are small. Plus, people's opinions can change over time, so it's important to pick the right time window in which to do the study. All this points to great responsibility on the part of data scientists to make sure that their results are rigorous and not too simplistic, before they are taken up by both politicians and the general public as blunt instruments to change social policies. This responsibility increases especially as these approaches become more widespread and cheaper to use, especially in the hands of non-specialists. When you are in possession of a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail." - Thank you for making my point for me.

You are not necessarily disagreeing with what I wrote about correlation, that humans are predictable in aggregate, which is the opposite of your point that humans are random (in aggregate).

The text you quoted is disagreeing with the author with respect to the use of correlations to explain causality, which we both know will lead nowhere if all confounding variables are not properly accounted for; something which is infeasible to do in the real world.

No, people are not "starting to figure out" anything here. That's just your and a small minority's opinion.