> I need control to see who they are talking to, chatting with, what apps they use, and controlling screen time.
I'm just some random on the internet, but this rubs me the wrong way. Trust is important in relationships, and this doesn't show any trust. Some of this is perfectly fine, but tracking their chatting is an invasion of privacy unless you have a specific reason to be worried.
> People have really bad intuitions around privacy.
> Having worked at companies that collected that data [...]
No, you just have a different personal definition of privacy. The fact that you think your use of my data is innocuous doesn't mean you are not violating my privacy. If your use was really, trully unobjectionable you'd be fine with getting clear and explicit consent.
Somehow, I don't think an honest consent prompt like "Can our app silently record your screen and send it to us?" would get you the results you want.
> I don't understand why people have such a big privacy issue with this. It all happens on your device.
It's not hard to imagine situations where this complete and total information package can be exfiltrated or otherwise abused. Roommates, stalkers, one night stands, domestic govt, foreign govt, domestic hackers, foreign hackers, computer repair techs, employers (seizing a personal device), etc, etc etc.
There is no scenario in a free society where this should be allowed or tolerated.
> By not being in these services and having all this data collected on you, what do you actually gain? Likely, nothing at all.
By closing the curtains in your bedroom when you're about to get busy with your partner, what do you actually gain? Likely, nothing at all.
I place a not-inconsiderable weight on not feeling like I'm being watched and recorded every second of the day and night. By controlling which data I give companies like Google and Facebook, I significantly reduce this creepy feeling and so gain a significant amount of peace of mind.
<<There's many things that are up for negotiation and consideration in a relationship, but wasting someone's time for the sake of some self righteous quest for privacy
Hmm. There was some judgment in that post. A lot of people value things on different scales. My self-righteous quest is valuable to me. It is only fair I would try to preserve some of it.
<<If you use a cellphone, have a WiFi router, don't use a VPN with no records at the router level, or are located within a city, you already don't have privacy no matter how much you personally believe you do.
Privacy is not a binary proposition that can be toggled, but rather, especially in current environment, an effort and a spectrum. If already did not have privacy, why would there be such a mounted effort to ensure that those intrusions are normalized.
What's immoral is that they collect and use data about my interests without my explicit consent. Having a stalker following you and recording your every move doesn't stop being creepy if he pinky swears to keep that data to himself.
> By now, most people are aware of the amount of surveillance and tracking that their web usage is subject to on a daily basis and how this data can be used in ways that do not match their own personal values.
> In what world does a disagreement over the right level of telemetry justify this kind of behavior?
In a world where companies think little of collecting and selling our personal data to make a profit? In a world where companies feel the need to track every part of my life with or without my permission. This is something I can't escape, as every time I interact with someone that does use one of these platforms than they are able to collect data on me.
We both know that there are companies out there that are trying their best to not exploit their users, and sadly these companies are often held to much higher standards. When a company that we trust, and trust enough to recommend to others who value their privacy, it does hurt when a company goes in the opposite direction with your privacy even when they have noble intentions at heart.
It's also completely telling when their engineers are standing up for their users and others at the company are trying to find any excuse to collect certain information for reasons.
Now, I'm never for personal attacks on someone no matter what, but I find it hard to call out people for using a widely used and available emoji. I do agree it's very much on the line and others might take the other opinion in this case.
> Who cares? If you don't like these services, don't use them. Nobody is forcing you to use this device.
I cannot dictate my friends. Should I disallow them entering my house with their shiny toys? Should I nuke their wireless connections to make sure they cannot transmit live? Privacy is a societal issue that cannot be fixed by ignoring it.
>. They're not invading your privacy, your home.. they're in a shared world, which is just as much theirs as it is yours. You two share it. So do you have the right to say he cannot remember it?
It's not about memory, it's about pervasive uploading, tagging and tracking. It's about amalgamation of masses of data on a worldwide scale, such that every detail of everyone's life is collected and aggregated by massive companies, fuelled by well-meaning idiots handing them video feeds with associated timestamps, GPS locations etc etc.
That's not a world I want to live in, where people record everything, feed it via google and facebook, and suddenly a third party company in another country knows everything you do, without your ever needing to interact with them.
Please get it through your head IT'S NOT JUST THE RECORDING
(though that is offensive enough)
> To over-generalize wildly: two classes of people want anonymity on the net
What about those (like me) who don't want to abuse others, and don't have much reason to fear abuse from others?
What about those who like the benefits of privacy and want to control our own identities? Or those who feel creeped out by the way the internet is becoming a panopticon?
I don't fear abuse, but I do feel unhappy at the need for people to put me in a box addressed by a single label. I also think privacy has a positive value, not just as a fight against negative things.
Finally, I'm very uncomfortable with the way surveillance makes me want to self-censor.
> “I don't think people really value online privacy all that much.”
I’m not far from this position, because on the face of it, privacy is only a claim proven false with the loss of privacy. Meanwhile, I still use Facebook to check on my family, etc.
I think it's kind of important when talking about privacy to keep in mind that the goal shouldn't be to force people to never reveal anything about themselves, it's to give them agency over what they reveal. That gets lost sometimes, I'm often guilty of losing sight of it as well. So a privacy world that makes it impossible for people to connect with each other, or that tells them that they're not allowed to present a certain way online is just as much of a problem as a solution that requires them to do so.
To me, the core idea behind privacy in regards to user tracking is that people should have agency over what their identities are, over what identities they're "allowed" to have, and over where they share those identities and whether those identities are associated with each other. It's totally valid for people to want to be able to tell Google that they're interested in seeing certain ads, they should be able to do that.
And when we expand out from privacy and look at algorithms on sites like Youtube/Twitter, that underlying idea of control becomes a bit more obvious -- it's not that content suggestions are bad, it's the inversion of control over how those suggestions are determined, the requirement that suggestions are constantly being computed and updated based on every action the user takes, the requirement that there be one set of suggestions for each user regardless of context, and the refusal from companies to give users the ability to do anything beyond slightly tweak or retrain their suggestions or to treat personally volunteered preferences as valid or trustworthy compared to what the algorithm determines they should like.
But I do want to get Youtube suggestions for related videos, I just want to be in control over how that happens. I want to be the entity with power in that relationship, I want to be the entity holding onto my data, I don't want to have to trust Google not to abuse me or to ask permission for Google to forget things.
This also gets at the potential benefits of a private world where users have real agency. It's very easy (I'm often guilty of this) to phrase the end goal of privacy as a world where tons of things just go away. But the reality is that targeted ads today mostly kind of stink, and there's a lot of potential for filtering, curation, and community aggregation that we can't take advantage of because users are excluded from the process of determining what they see online and how they're perceived by others. I wish there was more effort to try and describe how a private world could be better for things like search suggestions, user-relevant ads, content filtering -- because in a world where users had control over how this stuff worked and could customize their own experiences, it might be possible to try new applications, share more information, or experiment with new identities without risking abuse.
Imagine a world where you're an LGBTQ+ adjacent teen trying to figure out your own identity, and you temporarily turn on a category related to that for a subset of sites. If there's not a huge danger of fingerprinting, you can see how it feels for sites to recognize that -- maybe to tell Youtube that for right now you'd like to see more videos suggested based on that category. But you can safely do that because you know that other sites won't get that information, and that at any point you can switch the category off with zero consequences. You don't have to ask Google/Youtube for permission to edit what they know about you or to forget a category, you can control it locally right from your browser without asking anyone's permission.
That opens the door for really powerful applications or recommendation engines that arguably couldn't be (morally) built today. It's not about trying to create a world where nobody knows anything about anyone, it's about flipping the power imbalance and inverting the current predominant narrative about how information should be collected online.
With FLoC (and with other privacy initiatives from companies like Facebook), the feeling I get is that Google is trying to convince users that it can be a responsible data steward both because of internal policies and regulations. These companies try to create a narrative that the only options are either they track us, or that we never get anything recommended again. But neither of those options are what I want, what I want is to be my own data steward.
>That’s not what I am saying, actually. I think tracking should be illegal. But I don’t live in a fantasy world. My point was that in our real world, where everything already tracks me, who cares?
I do. I'm not a secretive person (in fact, should we meet down the pub, I'll probably tell you way more about me than you want to know), but I am a private person. That is to say that I don't hide who I am or what I do/say/think, but I want it to be my choice as to whom I share such information.
Or, to be more concise: My business is my business, not anyone else's.
Pervasive tracking is incredibly annoying. And while I do some things to protect my privacy (custom android roms, ad/tracker blockers, both local and network-based, disable GPS/location services on my phone, aggressively manage cookies and a raft of other things I either do or don't do to minimize leakage of my life), I have to put up with some tracking (my cellular provider needs to track my phone or they can't connect calls, deliver data, etc.) because I'm not interested in squatting in a lean-to out in the woods somewhere.
But that doesn't mean I have to like it or, more to your point, not care about it.
> You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
Given that I use roughly the same number of cloud and government services as other people, and live in a city, to me this is privacy. Without cameras or microphones it falls within my tolerance for information that third parties know about me given the risk of those third parties abusing that data (either directly or via hackers).
Sorry to break the bad news to you but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.
I'm just some random on the internet, but this rubs me the wrong way. Trust is important in relationships, and this doesn't show any trust. Some of this is perfectly fine, but tracking their chatting is an invasion of privacy unless you have a specific reason to be worried.
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