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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
Yesterday, I opened Google Reader for the first time in 2012. I wanted to add a few subscriptions, but while I was there I decided to check up on some blogs that I hadn't read in quite some time. In doing so, I discovered something rather alarming about Google Reader. While still inside Google Reader, I read the latest article in my friend's blog. It was moving piece, and I decided to click on the title to jump over to his blog itself. Page Not Found. I was confused for a moment, and headed to the main page of his blog. I could only find the second most recent blog entry, as indicated by Google Reader. It was now clear; he had deleted the article. Once Google Reader crawls a blog article, its contents are stored indefinitely within Google's servers. Not only does Google itself have permanent records of it, so do the readers subscribed via Google Reader. Google and privacy concerns have been a persistent duo. With its new privacy policy (where its products will share user knowledge between themselves), issues and concerns will surely continue to arise at an increasing pace. I had been aware of such privacy concerns for at least a few years, but never took any preventative action against Google. Such concerns were always nebulous; they had never manifested themselves in front of me in concrete and visible form, until this incident. This is a rare hiccup by Google. The truly fearsome aspect of privacy concerns against Google is that such so called breaches are largely invisible and unnoticeable. We tend to be reactionary rather than proactive about online privacy; if we never see anything with our own eyes, it then follows that we'll never react. I consider anything I write online to be public acts. It is a somewhat difficult thing to accept, but we may be in an era where we must consider our searches to be public acts as well. A certain friend of mine has switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for his searches, and I have followed suit just now[1]. We're both contemplating moving away from Google Mail, even though the task is daunting to say the least[2]. It's not every day that Google gives me a visible reason to stray away from its services. I might as well use the opportunity to wean myself from its death grip. These days, it's unquestionable that privacy and convenience are in an inverse relationship. The more convenient services we use, the more privacy we lose as a toll. Such is the nature of so called free services[3]. The first challenge is realizing that there is a price we are paying for these services; the second is to decide how much, if any, we want to trade. I myself am not sure where I stand in all of this. If the czar of Facebookian (lack of) privacy is Mark Zuckerberg, then the renegade more than half-insane but unbendable rebel commander is Richard Stallman. I'm somewhere in between, unsure of where I stand, unsure of where I'm headed, but sure of principles that guide me.
[1] DuckDuckGo is a search engine that claims to not store any personal information. [2] Reliable storage and searchability of email is not something that is easily accomplished. [3] Now is a good time to go back to 10th grade economics and remember, "There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Crossposted from my main blog
 
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On March 06 2012 01:26 thedeadhaji wrote:
[3] Now is a good time to go back to 10th grade economics and remember, "There is no such thing as a free lunch."</p>
About this specific quote, may I recommend you Chris Anderson's book Free, The future of a radical price? A very interesting development on the economics of information, if you're into it  .
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
>Ahelvin
O_o I had heard of this book recently~
Thanks, I added it to my wishlist.
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The only people I know who use DuckDuckGo are people who buy bulk illegal drugs and similarly illegal things on the deep web. In fact, a kid I know who got served federal indictments had his use of DuckDuckGo brought up in court. Food for though :D
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United Kingdom3685 Posts
I don't understand how Google Reader saving a copy of your friend's blog post is a manifestation of a breach of privacy? Was it not posted publicly in the first place? Your browser will do the same thing to a lesser extent when it caches webpages to speed up your browsing. I can understand privacy concerns about searches and whatnot, but your example seems unrelated.
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Well, even beyond Google Reader, there is a little link called 'cache' under every site Google searches. I think for the last ten years it's been safe to say anything you put on the internet is out of your control.
Does it make you afraid to participate on the internet because of the permanence of your actions? We make a lot of sacrifices to participate on the internet, but we make a lot of sacrifices to participate generally in society as well.
One question it brings to mind is this: Would you rather have a record of exactly what you said, if you needed to defend it, or would you rather rely on someone else's memory (perhaps warped by passed time)? If you're well liked and people warp their memories positively in your favour, maybe the latter is preferred, but I know many times when the former has come in handy by people who're arguing with me  And sometimes I enjoy it when I can hold someone to something they said and they can't blatantly deny it just because they forgot. Overall, there's social rules for both... You can't be too mean about things with permanence, because everyone makes mistakes, and you often have to give people the benefit of a doubt when there is no record, just to keep things running smoothly.
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South Africa4316 Posts
I'm not sure I really understand the linkages in your post, or the problem
You start with the story about your friends deleted blog which is still available via Google Reader. As you say, anything you post on the internet should be considered public, unless you make a specific effort to hide it. The fact that it's still available after it gets deleted might be a problem, but I'm not convinced it is. To me, it seems similar to having someone else overhear a public proclamation you made. Either way there are all those services specifically designed to show you old websites that no longer exist, so it's not as if Google is unique in keeping a cached version of deleted sites.
However, what I really didn't get is how you jumped from "google caches websites" to "we should accept that the searches we make are public". As far as I know, nobody else can access my searches without accessing my computer and checking my history. Sure, the searches are shaped into a profile by google and then sold to advertisers, but there's a large difference between admob running algorithms on my searches to serve me personalized ads and my searches being public.
All in all, I think your one paragraph summarised my issue with the whole privacy debate perfectly:
The truly fearsome aspect of privacy concerns against Google is that such so called breaches are largely invisible and unnoticeable. We tend to be reactionary rather than proactive about online privacy; if we never see anything with our own eyes, it then follows that we'll never react.
If a problem is unnoticeable, if it never interferes with your life in any way, then it's hardly a problem at all. None of us ever see any harm come to us so we never have a reason to react. When people do react, they react because they perceive potential negative effects in the future, negative effects which never come. They are reacting so that an unnoticeable problem won't occur.
In your conclusion you state:
The first challenge is realizing that there is a price we are paying for these services; the second is to decide how much, if any, we want to trade.
So I would like to ask: What tangible price are we paying for using Google?
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On the internet everyone can hear you, and nothing is forgotten.
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United Kingdom3685 Posts
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On March 06 2012 02:28 Daigomi wrote:
So I would like to ask: What tangible price are we paying for using Google?
This is a matter of choice and sensitivity indeed (and what I'm studying is making me more prone to this kind of consideration) but the fact that advertisers are able to reach me "personally" is quite a tangible price to pay in my opinion.
After all, all the targeted advertisements are all too often making me buy stuff I may not consider consider buying without them. Do not even try to argue with that, I was not convinced too, but I've changed my mind. So yes, the price for using Google is quite high, and that's why I'm in the process of switching search engines and I'm actively looking for an alternative solution to Gmail.
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Ya I haven't understood the last 4 blogs or so.
Please don't turn into micronesia.
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On March 06 2012 02:28 Daigomi wrote:
I'm not sure I really understand the linkages in your post, or the problem
You start with the story about your friends deleted blog which is still available via Google Reader. As you say, anything you post on the internet should be considered public, unless you make a specific effort to hide it. The fact that it's still available after it gets deleted might be a problem, but I'm not convinced it is. To me, it seems similar to having someone else overhear a public proclamation you made. Either way there are all those services specifically designed to show you old websites that no longer exist, so it's not as if Google is unique in keeping a cached version of deleted sites.
a completely different angle on the whole debate, but what if something posted on a blog site was deemed to infringe in copyrights. how would google deal with having to purge its servers constantly over changes to illigal content. what about things like child porn aswell, surely google keeping a record (even though they dont know they are) makes them liable to being taken to court?
im not sure where i stand on the privacy side of things either but there seems to be loads of situations where google keeping so much data might be problematic.
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As far as I know, nobody else can access my searches without accessing my computer and checking my history.
o.o Your ISP, the search engine, and any website you access knows how you got there. Whether this information is shared or stored depends on each service, but I think you definitely don't know enough to talk about it :S
For the overwhelming majority it doesn't particularly matter if someone else is saving things that you've uploaded. But think how many stupid things you've said in the past as a kid on the internet before you really understood the rules. If you become a public figure, that could become quite troublesome. There are many examples of politicians who've been screwed over by not realising something dumb they put on the internet was still there. Did they deserve to be screwed over? That's another perspective. But certainly it's troublesome to have people judge who you are now for things you did under peer pressure when you were a kid. Whether it is a blog you were unable to delete, or an embarrassing photo on FaceBook, privacy is something we value because in the future we may have different goals and attitudes, and it may be necessary to let go of our past to enter new careers. What if an employer finds something you said that you don't believe anymore? I think the Face Book generation is obnoxiously unaware of just how difficult it is to predict what you'll want your public image to be in the future.
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I think something to point out too is that the website apparently doesn't get views via Google, since it uses its own copy on their servers. Is this something the blogs agree to, or is google potentially stealing ad revenue here? Or are they being paid for their subscribers/ viewers? Just one thing that looked weird to me.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On March 06 2012 03:21 Chef wrote:Show nested quote +As far as I know, nobody else can access my searches without accessing my computer and checking my history. o.o Your ISP, the search engine, and any website you access knows how you got there. Whether this information is shared or stored depends on each service, but I think you definitely don't know enough to talk about it :S For the overwhelming majority it doesn't particularly matter if someone else is saving things that you've uploaded. But think how many stupid things you've said in the past as a kid on the internet before you really understood the rules. If you become a public figure, that could become quite troublesome. There are many examples of politicians who've been screwed over by not realising something dumb they put on the internet was still there. Did they deserve to be screwed over? That's another perspective. But certainly it's troublesome to have people judge who you are now for things you did under peer pressure when you were a kid. Whether it is a blog you were unable to delete, or an embarrassing photo on FaceBook, privacy is something we value because in the future we may have different goals and attitudes, and it may be necessary to let go of our past to enter new careers. What if an employer finds something you said that you don't believe anymore? I think the Face Book generation is obnoxiously unaware of just how difficult it is to predict what you'll want your public image to be in the future.
Sorry, I meant they can't read what you searched for in a practical sense, not in a "it's physically possible sense". Furthermore, I meant that they would know that me, Daigomi, searched this or that, not that some IP address accessed Teamliquid through a search for Jae's dong. The example you mention in your second paragraph is what I'm talking about. As long as an actual person who could potentially impact my life in some way can't see that I searched for Jae's dong, then I don't think the knowledge is public.
Regarding your second paragraph, I agree with you but I think it has very little to do with invasion of privacy. What we say publicly on the internet is public material. Yes, it could fuck over your life in a horrible way, but so could saying something in public (of the non-internet variety). As you say, many people of this generation aren't aware that what they say or do on the internet can harm them, but it's not Google or Facebook's job to protect people from saying idiotic things publicly.
On March 06 2012 02:58 Ahelvin wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 02:28 Daigomi wrote:
So I would like to ask: What tangible price are we paying for using Google? This is a matter of choice and sensitivity indeed (and what I'm studying is making me more prone to this kind of consideration) but the fact that advertisers are able to reach me "personally" is quite a tangible price to pay in my opinion. After all, all the targeted advertisements are all too often making me buy stuff I may not consider consider buying without them. Do not even try to argue with that, I was not convinced too, but I've changed my mind. So yes, the price for using Google is quite high, and that's why I'm in the process of switching search engines and I'm actively looking for an alternative solution to Gmail.
That's a very interesting point that I hadn't considered before. The idea that some TL members would prefer to get ads for "Dating for Seniors" to gaming ads so that they don't get tempted is bizarre but I guess there's logic to it. I don't think I agree with you that it's a cost though. I'm willing to bet that most people who are forced to watch ads would prefer to see ads that they are interested in to ads they have no interest in. If people prefer it, then it should be a benefit rather than a cost, regardless of the economic effects of that preference.
Either way, I'm sure you'll agree that the primary reason people are concerned about privacy is not because they get ads tailored to their tastes. For people where that is the primary concern, I'd have no issue with them taking significant steps to protect their privacy.
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
Hmm I probably did a poor job at explaining my thoughts.
The Google Reader records served as a reminder to me that we have an illusion of privacy and control over our information and activities on the internet. I'm sure that my friend thought that his blog entry was now off of the face of the earth when he deleted it; clearly not the case. When I make a Google Search, I certainly don't consciously think to myself, "okay, this is going to be on the records forever, make sure I don't write something like -- PAMELA ANDERSON -- in there!" When I search something on Google, I believe, subconsciously, that I am the only person that will EVER know that I searched for these things. This is not the case, however remote it may be. And as long as these Black Swan events have some nonzero possibility of occurring, it is something to be wary of, at least for me.
As Chef explained, I am actually becoming increasingly concerned over the trail I leave online, as my life becomes more and more public as a function of my direction in professional development, as well as my activities online. More than once I have considered having my TL post history completely nuked, because I am sure you can find plenty of crap there that could definitely used against me, say, if I ran for office.
It may be unlikely that Google "breaches" our privacy beyond what it tells us it does already. But (1) we tend to think that Google records far less than we consciously realize (and thus in relative terms, Google breaches the privacy we think we had), and (2) everything has a potential to become public when Google is subpoenaed for its information. I have undoubtedly accidentally stepped foot into very un-clean websites in the past, and the prospect of having that come to light, no matter how remote, is not attractive.
Now, I fully admit that Google is one of the least likely entities to succumb to something like (2) above. However, there are lesser sites out there that can surely be hacked for its information. I'm sure all of you can recall at least a few instances of user information / security leaks from various web services (Sony, AOL, Amazon Japan, DropBox, etc). How about having our Megaupload history being attached to us? Our AIM logs? Or skype history? I'm sure most of us have thrown out a racial slur or a sexually inappropriate comment in "private" online before. It's all the same; there's a false facade of privacy and security that can be taken away at any moment.
There are things we can and arguably should do in light of the fact that there basically is no such thing as privacy online. The Google Reader incident was a rare visible reminder to me that there is no such thing as control over our past actions online. Our only course of action is preventative. We have no options of corrective recourse. Knowing this, our behavior may very well change.
edit: also, Ack definitely wins comment of the week LOL
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South Africa4316 Posts
On March 06 2012 15:46 thedeadhaji wrote:
Hmm I probably did a poor job at explaining my thoughts.
The Google Reader records served as a reminder to me that we have an illusion of privacy and control over our information and activities on the internet. I'm sure that my friend thought that his blog entry was now off of the face of the earth when he deleted it; clearly not the case. When I make a Google Search, I certainly don't consciously think to myself, "okay, this is going to be on the records forever, make sure I don't write something like -- PAMELA ANDERSON -- in there!" When I search something on Google, I believe, subconsciously, that I am the only person that will EVER know that I searched for these things. This is not the case, however remote it may be. And as long as these Black Swan events have some nonzero possibility of occurring, it is something to be wary of, at least for me.
As Chef explained, I am actually becoming increasingly concerned over the trail I leave online, as my life becomes more and more public as a function of my direction in professional development, as well as my activities online. More than once I have considered having my TL post history completely nuked, because I am sure you can find plenty of crap there that could definitely used against me, say, if I ran for office.
It may be unlikely that Google "breaches" our privacy beyond what it tells us it does already. But (1) we tend to think that Google records far less than we consciously realize (and thus in relative terms, Google breaches the privacy we think we had), and (2) everything has a potential to become public when Google is subpoenaed for its information. I have undoubtedly accidentally stepped foot into very un-clean websites in the past, and the prospect of having that come to light, no matter how remote, is not attractive.
Now, I fully admit that Google is one of the least likely entities to succumb to something like (2) above. However, there are lesser sites out there that can surely be hacked for its information. I'm sure all of you can recall at least a few instances of user information / security leaks from various web services (Sony, AOL, Amazon Japan, DropBox, etc). How about having our Megaupload history being attached to us? Our AIM logs? Or skype history? I'm sure most of us have thrown out a racial slur or a sexually inappropriate comment in "private" online before. It's all the same; there's a false facade of privacy and security that can be taken away at any moment.
There are things we can and arguably should do in light of the fact that there basically is no such thing as privacy online. The Google Reader incident was a rare visible reminder to me that there is no such thing as control over our past actions online. Our only course of action is preventative. We have no options of corrective recourse. Knowing this, our behavior may very well change.
edit: also, Ack definitely wins comment of the week LOL
Yeah, I think I have a much better idea of where you are coming from now, especially regarding your comments on public sites like TL. While I think this will only affect 0.1% of people, if you do end up running for some government office, calling some kid a "fat faggot" on a public forum might bite you in the ass one day.
What I still disagree with you on is Google's culpability in this and whether it is worth doing anything about it. True, when Google gets subpoenaed your info could become public, but similarly, when the government gets a search warrant for your house the same would happen. That doesn't mean the info you keep in your house should be considered public information. The same goes for websites getting hacked. Sure, it could happen, but in the same way your house could get broken into. Just because there is some possibility of something going wrong doesn't mean we should necessarily take preventative measures. The size of the preventative measure has to be a function of the proability of something going wrong and how negative the result would be. Since the probability is very nearly 0 that our Google searches will hurt us, and since a significantly negative result is small (unless you are searching for child pornography or something like that), it seems to me that we should take almost no preventitive measures.
From a purely pragmatic perspective, I can't help feeling that your chances of being negatively affected are considerably larger by not using Google than it is by using Google. The chance of getting hurt because someone obtains your search history from Google is minute, while the chance of getting hurt because a substitute search engine gives you poor results, or because you spend considerably more time to find good results, is at least within the realms of possibility. The other day I was forced to use Bing (Google was down in SA), and after ten minutes of searching I had to give up, even though I had a direct quote from the page I was looking for. When I repeated the search in Google later, my target was the first search result.
All of this is just regarding Google and search. I agree with you that if you consider a life where you are likely to be very carefully scrutinized, you should assume that everything you say on the internet will remain publicly visibile permanently, and you should act accordingly. Personally, the thing I'm most worried about people one day finding is not a racist comment or some homophobic slur, but pages of pages of me arguing about pointless shit :p
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On March 06 2012 19:49 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 15:46 thedeadhaji wrote:
Hmm I probably did a poor job at explaining my thoughts.
The Google Reader records served as a reminder to me that we have an illusion of privacy and control over our information and activities on the internet. I'm sure that my friend thought that his blog entry was now off of the face of the earth when he deleted it; clearly not the case. When I make a Google Search, I certainly don't consciously think to myself, "okay, this is going to be on the records forever, make sure I don't write something like -- PAMELA ANDERSON -- in there!" When I search something on Google, I believe, subconsciously, that I am the only person that will EVER know that I searched for these things. This is not the case, however remote it may be. And as long as these Black Swan events have some nonzero possibility of occurring, it is something to be wary of, at least for me.
As Chef explained, I am actually becoming increasingly concerned over the trail I leave online, as my life becomes more and more public as a function of my direction in professional development, as well as my activities online. More than once I have considered having my TL post history completely nuked, because I am sure you can find plenty of crap there that could definitely used against me, say, if I ran for office.
It may be unlikely that Google "breaches" our privacy beyond what it tells us it does already. But (1) we tend to think that Google records far less than we consciously realize (and thus in relative terms, Google breaches the privacy we think we had), and (2) everything has a potential to become public when Google is subpoenaed for its information. I have undoubtedly accidentally stepped foot into very un-clean websites in the past, and the prospect of having that come to light, no matter how remote, is not attractive.
Now, I fully admit that Google is one of the least likely entities to succumb to something like (2) above. However, there are lesser sites out there that can surely be hacked for its information. I'm sure all of you can recall at least a few instances of user information / security leaks from various web services (Sony, AOL, Amazon Japan, DropBox, etc). How about having our Megaupload history being attached to us? Our AIM logs? Or skype history? I'm sure most of us have thrown out a racial slur or a sexually inappropriate comment in "private" online before. It's all the same; there's a false facade of privacy and security that can be taken away at any moment.
There are things we can and arguably should do in light of the fact that there basically is no such thing as privacy online. The Google Reader incident was a rare visible reminder to me that there is no such thing as control over our past actions online. Our only course of action is preventative. We have no options of corrective recourse. Knowing this, our behavior may very well change.
edit: also, Ack definitely wins comment of the week LOL Yeah, I think I have a much better idea of where you are coming from now, especially regarding your comments on public sites like TL. While I think this will only affect 0.1% of people, if you do end up running for some government office, calling some kid a "fat faggot" on a public forum might bite you in the ass one day. What I still disagree with you on is Google's culpability in this and whether it is worth doing anything about it. True, when Google gets subpoenaed your info could become public, but similarly, when the government gets a search warrant for your house the same would happen. That doesn't mean the info you keep in your house should be considered public information. The same goes for websites getting hacked. Sure, it could happen, but in the same way your house could get broken into. Just because there is some possibility of something going wrong doesn't mean we should necessarily take preventative measures. The size of the preventative measure has to be a function of the proability of something going wrong and how negative the result would be. Since the probability is very nearly 0 that our Google searches will hurt us, and since a significantly negative result is small (unless you are searching for child pornography or something like that), it seems to me that we should take almost no preventitive measures. From a purely pragmatic perspective, I can't help feeling that your chances of being negatively affected are considerably larger by not using Google than it is by using Google. The chance of getting hurt because someone obtains your search history from Google is minute, while the chance of getting hurt because a substitute search engine gives you poor results, or because you spend considerably more time to find good results, is at least within the realms of possibility. The other day I was forced to use Bing (Google was down in SA), and after ten minutes of searching I had to give up, even though I had a direct quote from the page I was looking for. When I repeated the search in Google later, my target was the first search result. All of this is just regarding Google and search. I agree with you that if you consider a life where you are likely to be very carefully scrutinized, you should assume that everything you say on the internet will remain publicly visibile permanently, and you should act accordingly. Personally, the thing I'm most worried about people one day finding is not a racist comment or some homophobic slur, but pages of pages of me arguing about pointless shit :p
Yeah, the power the courts and media can have into reading every single aspect of your life on the Internet is amazing, and a little scary.
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