I agree regulations are the best long-term solution. I think we probably agree on a lot of things regarding this issue. But I am disappointed to see the same equivocation regarding Google’s data collection.
> So while you seem to want to paint Google as manipulating people to harvest their data and sell it to the highest bidder (what Facebook basically does) nothing could be further from the truth. Facts matter.
The fact is that last winter, when reinstalling Android, I realized my phone was uploading location data to Google constantly as soon as I had clicked the misleadingly labeled “help make Android/Google Maps better” button. Curious, I decided to ask my friends and family if they knew about this—none did.
Google does ask for “permission” in the sense that it shows a misleading dialog box where the default option (visually indicated—see the Dark Patterns website for examples of this tactic) is to share everything. This is not a good faith effort to ask for consent: that is the empirical, objective truth, no matter what good intentions you might hope to ascribe to Google. Again, I invite you to see if a majority of normal people know what they are agreeing to when they set up their Android phones.
> Not only does Google give you the full ability to control and delete your location data [1] but the data collection is not on by default (though applications like Maps will prompt for it) and the data is always anonymized when used and most importantly the data is never shared with commercial third parties (though I believe Google may make anonymized data available to researchers whose projects pass certain ethical checks)
Whether data is shared with third parties is a good point, but this isn’t really meaningful when “Google” encompasses search, maps, phones, video, office software, etc. But it’s noteworth my friends at Facebook told me the exact same things about Facebook’s policies towards data—researchers need to go through approved processes there, too—it’s just that here those processes approved someone who was actually not ethical at all.
Facts matter, and to paraphrase you, although it may feel good to think that Facebook is worse than Google (and correspondingly that it’s ok to work at one but not the other), we need to look at what companies actually do, not what we think they believe they are doing.
Also, it seems you think that my claim about the average person not being aware of the extent of Google’s data collection is false. This is what I concluded after asking the people close to me, most who are not in technology. I invite you to actually go out and ask people before claiming otherwise about the results of what is well-acknowledged as a dark pattern.
> So while you seem to want to paint Google as manipulating people to harvest their data and sell it to the highest bidder (what Facebook basically does) nothing could be further from the truth. Facts matter.
The fact is that last winter, when reinstalling Android, I realized my phone was uploading location data to Google constantly as soon as I had clicked the misleadingly labeled “help make Android/Google Maps better” button. Curious, I decided to ask my friends and family if they knew about this—none did.
Google does ask for “permission” in the sense that it shows a misleading dialog box where the default option (visually indicated—see the Dark Patterns website for examples of this tactic) is to share everything. This is not a good faith effort to ask for consent: that is the empirical, objective truth, no matter what good intentions you might hope to ascribe to Google. Again, I invite you to see if a majority of normal people know what they are agreeing to when they set up their Android phones.
> Not only does Google give you the full ability to control and delete your location data [1] but the data collection is not on by default (though applications like Maps will prompt for it) and the data is always anonymized when used and most importantly the data is never shared with commercial third parties (though I believe Google may make anonymized data available to researchers whose projects pass certain ethical checks)
Whether data is shared with third parties is a good point, but this isn’t really meaningful when “Google” encompasses search, maps, phones, video, office software, etc. But it’s noteworth my friends at Facebook told me the exact same things about Facebook’s policies towards data—researchers need to go through approved processes there, too—it’s just that here those processes approved someone who was actually not ethical at all.
Facts matter, and to paraphrase you, although it may feel good to think that Facebook is worse than Google (and correspondingly that it’s ok to work at one but not the other), we need to look at what companies actually do, not what we think they believe they are doing.
Also, it seems you think that my claim about the average person not being aware of the extent of Google’s data collection is false. This is what I concluded after asking the people close to me, most who are not in technology. I invite you to actually go out and ask people before claiming otherwise about the results of what is well-acknowledged as a dark pattern.