If I ran a newsletter, "selling data" would be me giving a 3rd party my mailing list. Profiting from the data would be me "selling eyeballs" from my list.
That is effectively what Google and Facebook do. They are in the eyeball selling industry, not email selling.
They create a medium the advertisers want to advertise into.
They "own the eyeballs," as it were. They create the newspaper that people read.
Google does not own the eyeballs, they are an aggregator but they loudly point out that users could switch. Let's acknowledge that users are not likely to switch away from Google websites, Android, etc. but it's as if Google snatched the newspaper and stuck advertising stickers all over it just before you read it in the morning.
Google owns the eyeballs on the places of the internet that have sold that space to google.
If I have a website and want to monetize it with ads, I'm giving that section of my page to Google. Who now rents the "tower" in my sidebar, and owns the eyeballs of my visitors. The advertisers don't get to own my data. I'm just exposing my audience to their products. If my audience decides that they want the advertised widget, they are then willingly giving their data to the advertiser when they purchase/sign up/whatever.
The only point I agree with you on (if this is what you meant) is how Google ranks search results based on the speed of the content, and who's content loads fastest for Google? AMP... owned by Google.
I think the browser is the equivalent of a newspaper.
It's just you can "open your newspaper" to pages defined by someone on the internet, as opposed to only getting the 30-to-50 pages put out by the newspaper company.
I think the pages within it can be Google, but there's a browser in between. If you use Chrome, then Google totally owns your eyeballs (according to my viewpoint).
But you are spot on with publishers opening up a "tower" on their page, and Google moving in and paying rent. And from that point on, Google is watching you.
Maybe the ISP owns the eyeballs? ISPs are often characterized as either a "content network" (such as Netflix) or an "eyeball network" (such as Comcast). And the networks sometimes fight because Comcast thinks they're the big, bad eyeball network. Netflix, of course, thinks they're the big, bad content network.
Google gives free reading glasses that allows you to read the newspaper. The problem is that they only work for the newspapers they like and the newspapers they like happen to have advertising stickers all over it.
Purportedly unrelated to that they have also told all the newspaper sellers to take a note of when and where you buy your newspaper, but they assure you that is completely unrelated to the advertising side of things.
That sounds like what TV, radio and newspaper ad space sells.
Google on the other hand is selling the data attached to those eye balls. You want Male eye balls, between the age of 18-35? You want eye balls from a certain state? city? county? How about college educated eye balls?
Knowing everything about your eye balls and monetizing that information is Google's real racket...that and fraudulent clicks (that is Google often sells fake eye balls).
If I pay you $5 to show an ad in front of a certain type of person and you come back and tell me that you did it I haven't really learned anything about that person. It seems hard to say that that is the same as selling people's data.
Because sure, Google knows a lot of people and they have a lot of ad space to fill which means they have a good chance at finding and reaching the demographics I asked for but I don’t get any of that information as part of my transaction with them.
If adtech wants to serve us "relevant" ads, that's fine but the intrusive spying has to stop. Plain old contextual ads should be more than enough for that purpose.
With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like. Are the people watching daytime soaps can be 18 or 80, it’s vague topic and time of day based filtering.
Google's guessing of your demographics is amusingly wrong sometimes (you can see the categories it puts you in).
> With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like
People with HBO have disposable incomes. People watching Nick or Disney channel are or have children, whose ages and genders can be further refined based on the shows in question. "You have a 8-11 year old daughter" is absolutely trivial to accurately glean from television, and is basically the single most valuable advertising demographic.
As to Disney watchers, my male collage roommate used to love those shows. At the extreme end MLP friendship is magic has a vastly wider following than the original target demographic.
They both correlate with demographic data, TV is swimply wildly inaccurate and not tied to a specific individual.
On TV, you can target so many demographics indirectly by buying ads on shows they like. Companies like Nielson have been reporting on the demographics watching shows for decades. You can also target geographically at least down to the county-ish level.
TV stations and Google both know who is watching what and selling access to their customers to advertisers. Google might be a bit more sophisticated than TV, but besides "retargeting" (following you around different sites) they use the same basic techniques and offer the same things to Advertisers
What? That's a difference in scale, not in kind.
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† Yes, I'm stretching the "proof" beyond its breaking point here.
It's a bit murky whether the amounts to being able to identify you. It's not clear how much advertisers care about identifying people who don't buy or how effective advertising actually is. And this data goes stale pretty quickly anyway.
So it comes down to, "well, it depends." None of this is comforting to people who don't want to be tracked. On the other hand I haven't heard anything credible about people being directly harmed by it? It seems more about the principle of the thing?
When the argument is that the privacy groups have a perverse interest in opposing a specific rule because of donations from tech companies, it seems pretty relevant that the tech companies already aren't actually violating that rule.
> Pointing out that ISPs are worse is really neither here nor there. Just because big tech isn't the worst does absolve them of criticism nor is a compelling argument for why we cannot talk about them lobbying for the law to allow them to continue to do what they're doing or even expand it.
But that isn't what they're talking about. They're talking about laws against selling user data, which the ISPs are doing (so there is a strong lobby against passing a law to prohibit it), but the tech companies generally aren't.
To prohibit what the tech companies are doing you would basically need a law against collecting user data, or something much more invasive and specific about what it could be used for than "don't sell it", and that's a whole different debate. Because then you run into problems like entrenching the incumbents by creating a complex regulatory environment that only huge tech companies can navigate. Which is why opponents try to tar them with "selling user data" instead, which is a lot easier to define and be opposed to, even though they aren't actually doing that.
> I'm not even going to try and address why we cannot have privacy because of "legitimate first amendment problem[s]" or because it would result in "law[s] against strong encryption." I don't consider those arguments to even pass the basic sniff test, they feel like throwing out every argument under the sun and seeing what sticks.
Political realities exist even when they're complicated and inconvenient. Mocking them doesn't make them go away.
> Collecting facts, presenting those facts, and putting a negative spin on it isn't "gotcha journalism" because the journalist didn't trick Google or Facebook into doing these things, they're simply telling the public that they did. In fact the term doesn't really to apply to journalism outside of interviews
The term originally dates from a time when "interviews" were a thing that happened after you actually agreed to be interviewed. Now the debate happens live on the internet and trolls get to ask their loaded questions in front of the public with the implication that you're guilty if you don't respond.
But the question is phrased so as to make an exonerating response impossible. It's the rhetorical equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife" -- have you stopped allowing tech company money to influence your policies? Respond right now, while the question is on the front page, or you're guilty.
You conveniently left out one of the two companies, and I wonder why you omitted that Facebook has actually been convicted of violating the rule.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/05/facebook-emai...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-le...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/faceb...
(There are more sources.)
> But that isn't what they're talking about. They're talking about laws against selling user data, which the ISPs are doing (so there is a strong lobby against passing a law to prohibit it), but the tech companies generally aren't.
Yes, Facebook totally got caught selling user data.
> To prohibit what the tech companies are doing you would basically need a law against collecting user data, or something much more invasive and specific about what it could be used for than "don't sell it", and that's a whole different debate. Because then you run into problems like entrenching the incumbents by creating a complex regulatory environment that only huge tech companies can navigate. Which is why opponents try to tar them with "selling user data" instead, which is a lot easier to define and be opposed to, even though they aren't actually doing that.
Such as... GDPR?
> Political realities exist even when they're complicated and inconvenient. Mocking them doesn't make them go away.
Totally agree.
> The term originally dates from a time when "interviews" were a thing that happened after you actually agreed to be interviewed. Now the debate happens live on the internet and trolls get to ask their loaded questions in front of the public with the implication that you're guilty if you don't respond.
What's your source?
In either case, the model for having API access was that the end user would get a nice clear permissions dialog telling them what info they were giving to the third party and having them click "I Agree" before any data was transferred.
Even better, in the case of the device partnerships, you had to login with your FB username and password!
Those articles are the equivalent of saying Apple shares data with Google because iMail can open your Gmail account
Pointing out that ISPs are worse is really neither here nor there. Just because big tech isn't the worst does absolve them of criticism nor is a compelling argument for why we cannot talk about them lobbying for the law to allow them to continue to do what they're doing or even expand it.
I'm not even going to try and address why we cannot have privacy because of "legitimate first amendment problem[s]" or because it would result in "law[s] against strong encryption." I don't consider those arguments to even pass the basic sniff test, they feel like throwing out every argument under the sun and seeing what sticks. Almost to Gish Gallop levels.
> This is gotcha journalism
That isn't what "gotcha journalism" means. Collecting facts, presenting those facts, and putting a negative spin on it isn't "gotcha journalism" because the journalist didn't trick Google or Facebook into doing these things, they're simply telling the public that they did. In fact the term doesn't really to apply to journalism outside of interviews, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotcha_journalism