Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by benreesman on Thursday June 27, 2019 @01:59PM (#20296885)

I admit that I inferred the proposed intent for grabbing maximum personal data, but if you’re interested in anecdotes from the trenches: no one below senior director level gets a couple million in stock for any other reason than they pushed CTR by a few basis points. What I was trying to say is that seen through the lens of mechanism design no one is incentivized to query the like button table because there’s no upside in it.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by jakobegger on Thursday June 27, 2019 @02:33PM (#20297216)

I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those megacorps are collecting terabytes of mostly useless data?

Then why is this data collected and archived in the first place?

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by benreesman on Thursday June 27, 2019 @02:51PM (#20297353)

I was never involved in those decisions but I suspect that when you’ve got a multi-dollar CPM and your biggest pain in the ass is pouring concrete and running power fast enough that a few PB of spinning disks are cheap enough that you hang onto it in case you ever find a way to make it useful.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by ViViDboarder on Thursday June 27, 2019 @03:26PM (#20297708)

That sounds logical. It’s also exactly the reason many of us don’t want to give up our information to these companies. There is absolute uncertainty as to how it will be used in the future.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by laughinghan on Thursday June 27, 2019 @08:01PM (#20300180)

Because it costs practically nothing. If the cost is zero and the expected value is greater than zero, then no matter how little value it has it's still rational to collect it.

The problem is that the individual bears a very small risk of something very bad happening: "consider the hypothetical case of a gay blogger in Moscow who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004, to keep a private diary. In 2007 LiveJournal is sold to a Russian company, and a few years later—to everyone's surpise—homophobia is elevated to state ideology. Now that blogger has to live with a dark pit of fear in his stomach."

https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

The individual of course gets no benefit from the small chance the company can monetize on this data trove. So even though chances are they aren't harmed at all by this data collection, arguably the expected value of the benefit/harm to the individual is negative (harmful). But that doesn't change the data collector's calculation, of course. That's why government regulation is necessary.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by avarun on Thursday June 27, 2019 @02:44PM (#20297300)

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying.

It's mostly all collected because it's easier for them to collect it than not to collect it, and nobody is stopping them from collecting it.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by EpicEng on Thursday June 27, 2019 @02:32PM (#20297192)

The fact that so much potentially sensitive data exists in a few repositories is in itself a bit foreboding. Who knows what companies will be able to glean from it one, five, or twenty years down the road?

My behavior on the web being tracked by corporations with little incentive to do right by me is worrisome.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by benreesman on Thursday June 27, 2019 @03:01PM (#20297444)

I’m more concerned that they’re designing the next version of the Web right under our noses than that they know what kind of sneakers I’m 8% more likely to buy.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by saagarjha on Thursday June 27, 2019 @03:33PM (#20297776)

However, I’m concerned that the data also allows them to see that I am 93% more likely to vote for a certain political candidate, 22% more likely to contract a chronic disease in the next ten years, and 16% more likely that I will have a friend that homosexual.

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by EpicEng on Thursday June 27, 2019 @04:54PM (#20298634)

I'm not thinking about ad delivery, I'm thinking about behavioral analysis. Knowing how a person thinks and acts can be a very useful weapon in the wrong hands, and FB and the like have done nothing to make me think their hands are the right ones (I don't think any are really.)

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Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side by owldimoon on Thursday June 27, 2019 @03:15PM (#20297592)

I'm not sure where to add this comment, but I just wanted to briefly say that I appreciate your contributions to this topic. Both in terms of content and tone/delivery. These seem like constructive and valuable comments to me, so thanks!

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