Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though? It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't seem very different by that standard.
I feel like they could care, but the network effects are so strong, and the negatives are hidden for now. This is because for the most part the people designing and implementing the tech are not classically or obviously "bad" people, nor are they designing it for those purposes. Plus its complicated, so many people defer to social proof, which is a stacked metric because the strong network effects are involved. I don't know that its a "care/not" care dynamic instead of a "what where the incentives acting on those who taught you" dynamic.
There is a small and very vocal privacy contingent that speaks so loudly that many people think it's representative, but it's not. Internally, with the exception of some product managers focused on growth, most googlers are very protective of privacy, probably more so than their users.
No, the only place I see the kind of rabid hatred of Google and Facebook for their data collection practices are here on HN. Of course these people want their services, actually expect them for free, continuously at the same standard. They just don't want to be tracked, don't want to pay for them, don't want to be advertised too and don't have any real solutions on how they would be paid for other than some handwaving about breaking Google/Facebook up which apparently will solve everything.
Everytime I've pointed out that most people simply don't care about the level of tracking Facebook and Google do I'm endlessly shouted down with words to the effect of "No! If they understand how much they were tracked they'd care!", but I don't believe that's the case, I think most people simply don't care based on the value they get from these companies.
> these people want their services, actually expect them for free, continuously at the same standard.
Source? I'm sure most people would be willing to pay for a service in exchange for some reasonable level of privacy.
> don't have any real solutions on how they would be paid for other than some handwaving about breaking Google/Facebook up which apparently will solve everything.
The "breaking up Google/Facebook" argument is completely separate from the privacy argument. Strawman much?
> most people simply don't care about the level of tracking Facebook and Google do
Source?
> "No! If they understand how much they were tracked they'd care!", but I don't believe that's the case
Again, source? If you told the average person the amount of information that Facebook and Google have inferred from them, do you seriously think they would not care?
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There's no doubt that the data collection practices of Google and Facebook or pathologic. There is nothing stopping them from taking a more privacy-centric approach like Apple does and still make a ton of money.
But people have the mindset that corporations should be exempt from morality and that this is grounds for tossing considerations like privacy out the window. I'm getting the feeling you feel similarly.
Most people probably don't mind seeing advertisements. It's just completely ridiculous that Google or FB think they need to track individuals in order to provide targeted advertising.
If someone searches for 'football', then just show a fucking ad that is relevant to 'football' along with the search results.
What makes companies like Google valuable is that they can tell whether the user searching "football" should be shown an ad for "American football" or soccer.
How are you (any everyone else in this conversation) defining "tracking", and how does it differ from profiling? I can't seem to tell what people mean by "tracking" anymore.
