That questionable-sounding stunt by the media outlet wasn't comparable: Google/Alphabet knows much more about individuals than addresses, salary, and political donations.
Google/Alphabet knows quite a lot about your sentiments, what information you've seen, your relationships, who can get to you, who you can get to, your hopes and fears, your economic situation, your health conditions, assorted kompromat, your movements, etc.
Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.
But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks. Or perhaps he was going to have enough money and power that he wasn't personally threatened by private info that would threaten the less-wealthy.
We might learn this year, how well Google/Alphabet protects this treasure trove of surveillance state data, when that matters most.
If it was his job to downplay the risk's then he absolutely deserved at least this.
Google or any other US company will not be defending your's or anyone's else's data. It's not only that they doesn't want to(which they dont) but they simply can't.
You must comply with the law and you do not want to currently piss off anyone's at the top.
It was probably a decade ago and I recall using something within Google that would tell you about who they thought you were. It profiled me as a middle eastern middle aged man or something like that which was… way off.
If I were extremely cynical, I would suspect they might have intentionally falsified that response to make it seem like they were more naive than they actually were.
I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.
I think its their currently targeted ad demographic or whatever. Its probably a "meaningless" label to humans, but to the computer it makes more sense, he probably watches the same content / googles the same things as some random person who got that label originally, and then anyone else who matched it.
male, lives in this region, has an income between X to X+40000, and has used the following terms in chat or email, regardless of context, in the last 6 months: touchdown, home run, punt, etc. etc.
the ad game is not about profiling you specifically, it's about how many people in a group are likely to click and convert to a sale; they're targeting 6 million people, not you specifically, and that's balanced by how much the people who want the ads are willing to pay.
palantir or chinese social credit, etc., is targeting you specifically, and they don't care about costs if it means they can control the system, forever.
The idea that Google’s lack of knowledge of you a decade ago is somehow related to what they know today is naive. Dangerously naive, I would say. Ad targeting technology (= knowledge about you) is shocking good now.
Color me unconvinced. Google can't even figure what language I speak even though I voluntarily provide them the information in several different ways. I can't understand half the ads they serve me.
Google doesn't choose what ad to show you. Google serves up a platter of details and auctions the ad placement off to the highest bidder.
That platter of details is not shown to you, the consumer.
What you are experiencing is that your ad profile isn't valuable to most bidders, ie you don't buy stuff as much as other people do, or your ad profile is somehow super attractive to stupid companies that suck at running ads who are overpaying for bad matches.
It is not evidence that google knows nothing about you.
Google is pleased that you think they don't know you. It helps keep the pressure down when people mistake this system for "Perfectly target ads". The system is designed to make google money regardless of how good or bad their profile of you is.
It's not just the ads though. Am I to think that Youtube helpfully replacing a video title (whose original text I understand) by a half-assed translation into a language that I don't speak is actually Alphabet playing 5D chess ? If so, hats off to you, Google. I totally fell for it.
> Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.
> But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks
I feel that as the consumer surveillance industry took off, everyone from those OG Internet circles was presented with a choice - stick with the individualist hacker spirit, or turncoat and build systems of corporate control. The people who chose power ended up incredibly rich, while the people who chose freedom got to watch the world burn while saying I told you so.
(There were also a lot of fence sitters in the middle who chose power but assuaged their own egos with slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot)
Yeah, being unaffected by social pressure when philosophizing about what is moral and liberating is strongly related to being unaffected by social pressure regarding personal hygiene and social norms, unfortunately. Still I'd rather have the weirdos, especially this one particular weirdo, than not! Stallman has blazed the trail for us slightly-more-socially-aware types to follow, while we look/act just a little more reasonable.
There's a popular video on YouTube of him eating skin peeled from his foot during a lecture at a college. Not AI, very old, repellant to normal people.
I'm a bit awestruck. Was there any discussion about it among your peers? We might be a generation or two apart, I saw that video when I was not yet an adult and it might have been literally part of my introduction to the person that is Richard Stallman. It definitely wasn't a good first impression.
Yes, I remember that period of conscious choice, and the fence-sitting or rationalizing.
The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.
The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.
And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.
And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).
Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.
Sorry, I didn't mean to write out the hacker collectivists. I said "individualist" because to me hacking is a pretty individualist activity, even if one's ultimate goal is to contribute to some kind of collective. Or maybe I just don't truly understand collectives, I don't know.
But yes, individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated and coexisted. I'd say this is because they were merely different takes on the same liberating ground truths. Or at least liberating-seeming perceptions of ground truths...
It wasn’t a stunt and there was nothing questionable about it. I’m amazed by how easily people shit all over journalists - it really has to end because it is precisely how truth dies.
Here’s a question - since you have such strong feelings did you write the editor of the piece for their explanation?
Having met him one time he seemed like just a really intense dude who embodied the chestnut “the CEO is the guy who walks in and says ‘I’m CEO’.” I dunno if there’s more to it than that.
Google/Alphabet knows quite a lot about your sentiments, what information you've seen, your relationships, who can get to you, who you can get to, your hopes and fears, your economic situation, your health conditions, assorted kompromat, your movements, etc.
Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.
But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks. Or perhaps he was going to have enough money and power that he wasn't personally threatened by private info that would threaten the less-wealthy.
We might learn this year, how well Google/Alphabet protects this treasure trove of surveillance state data, when that matters most.