I think the public doesn't care for a good reason; no one has articulated a realistic, tangible cost to quality of life caused by letting Google track you. Lots of people talk about it being 'creepy' and dreaming up possible scenarios where it WOUDLD be costly, but for most people, the costs simply aren't actually felt.
I am trying to think about it for me personally, and I can't come up with a single time that Google tracking me has had a negative impact on my life. I know people have examples for themselves, but none resonate with me as being something I am at risk for.
Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?
They can change your perception of anything, leading you to buying stupid shit you don't need, or to voting for somebody that doesn't protect your interests.
And any piece of knowledge is dangerous in the right context. This is usually felt more strongly by minorities. You're actually privileged if you're a straight, white, middle class male, but even so you can end up being harassed and hurt for who you are. Have you ever cheated on your wife? Have you ever spoken against powerful men? Do you walk funny?
I was born in 1982, so I caught a couple of years of communist in Romania. And let me tell you, the atmosphere, the paranoia, the secret service of a police state managing to change the fabric of society by using a huge network of informants and fear was far, far more interesting than the 1984 novel.
And if you think it can't happen to you, then think again, because at least your parents were alive when such things happened for real.
A network of informants that feed information to a police state that harasses you based on that information is objectively horrible.
I think the connection of that police state to Google tracking your search and browsing history is a bit tenuous, however. Sure, if that police state existed and I lived in it, then Google's trove of information would certainly be useful to it. If I begin to believe the state that I live in is becoming that police state, I will certainly curtail my Google searching.
Of course, you might say, "But wait! You might not live in a police state now, but if your current state changes to become one, they might use your historical search history from before the rise of the police state to persecute you!"
Yes, this is true. However, they could also use my many public things I have said against me. I have said and written many things that a police state might find dangerous, and persecute me for. I can't possibly live my life trying to avoid creating any record of my life that a possible future police state could use against me. That would be impractical and possibly unfeasible. If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.
> If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.
No, that is how you prevent a police state.
I mean, obviously you don't actually live as if you already lived in a police state, but you take some of the same precautions, which all boil down to keeping power distributed.
That's the whole point of democracy, really: We make our political system deliberately inefficient by making sure that the amount of power that's concentrated in any single person's hands is limited, and the only reason we do that is to limit the damage when the wrong person gets into a position of power. If there is one thing we absolutely should have learned from history by now, it is that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous.
Also, much of this is not about individuals, and it's not black and white. Authoritarian regimes don't care about most individuals. This is about power structures in a society as a whole. A dictator wants to know the top 100000 or so individuals that could be dangerous to their power in order to be able to concentrate their efforts on keeping them under control. Even if your political disinterest is no risk at all to the dictator's power position, the fact that they can tell you apart from the dissident next door helps them staying in power. And all of that is gradual, it's all an economic question in the end: How much effort does it take to prevent everyone from successfully challenging the dictator's authority? Every additional person you need in your secret police in order to maintain your power makes things harder, everything that a computer can just tell you makes it easier.
So, you have to think not from the standpoint of an individual and what someone could do to target you specifically (which usually is impractical to protect against, and is unnecessary in a stable social structure), but from the standpoint of someone trying to gain power over a large social structure (such as a dictator in a country--but really, it's not in any way tied even to political positions, it might just as well be the head of a company trying to establish themselves as a de-facto monopoly, say), and what makes it easier for them to gain and to maintain power, and what hinders them, on the scale of the society as a whole. And you have to realize that a lot of this is path-dependent: It's a lot harder to remove a dictator once they are in place than to prevent them. So, reactionary solutions don't really work. In simple terms: You can vote a dictator in, but you can not vote a dictator out.
These all feel like hypothetical examples of potential problems to me. Yes, I have a heap of privilege, and I can understand why people might be concerned about these things, but deep down I don't believe (still!) that Adwords is something that puts these minorities at risk.
> but deep down I don't believe that AdWords is something that puts these minorities at risk
Case in point example! On Twitter Ads, I select the gender "male" for my projects. It's because my software sells twice better to males, but if everyone notices the same, it'll also mean women aren't properly informed of software options on the market. Having the gender on the ad platform provokes a discrimination by minorities.
Speaking of 1984....every few paragraphs I find myself pausing, because it feels a lot like our current world in some sense and what our future will inevitably become.
> Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?
People have lost their freedom because their Google search history was used against them in court:
Right, again, I am not saying that there aren't cases of people being harmed; however, none of those cases resonate with me because it is hard to imagine a situation where I would be harmed.
Of course, I can imagine some crazy set of coincidences that lead to be being falsely accused of a crime I didn't commit, and then by more coincidences having my random search history make me look more guilty. I am sure that will probably happen to somebody, and it will totally suck and be unfair.
The chances of it happening to me, however, seem very low; much lower, for example, than dying in a car crash when I drive to the store. I know there is a non-zero risk of dying in a car crash when I drive to the store, but it is low enough that I take the risk every week in return for the trade-off of getting groceries.
The risk of a random search of mine coinciding with a false crime I am accused of seems low enough that it won't change my behavior with how I use google.
I wasn't trying to say that at all. I am all for limiting the government's ability to subpoena or access data collected by companies about us. If we allow the government to use wide nets to try to catch criminals, they are going to catch innocent people, and that is bad.
What I am saying is that on an individual level, the risk seems low that my using google is going to end up in a bad situation for me.
It is all about which options I am choosing between. When you ask me "Is it better to allow the government to collect information about everyone, and then use that to target suspicious individuals they find in that information, or is it better to limit that data collection and risk possibly missing some criminals?", then my answer is it is better to risk missing some criminals versus most likely harassing and possibly arresting innocent people because of false positives in the massive data collected.
However, if you ask me "Is it better for you, as an individual, to use google services and let them collect data about your, or is it better to avoid google completely", then the answer to me is to use google. The direct risk to me is low enough for me to make the trade off.
> I wasn't trying to say that at all. I am all for limiting the government's ability to subpoena or access data collected by companies about us. If we allow the government to use wide nets to try to catch criminals, they are going to catch innocent people, and that is bad.
I think your trust in laws is naive. A law doesn't self-enforce. The mere existence of a law does not limit de-facto power. You can not limit an entity's power by telling it that it is required to limit its own power. That might make exercising the power illegal, but it does not take away the actual power. And you don't have to look particularly far back into history to see how governments don't care about enforcing laws against themselves when that would limit their power. A lot of the things the NSA has been doing was illegal--did that stop them from doing it? No. As a matter of fact, they could eavesdrop on google's fibers, so they did, whether legal or not. If you really want to limit the power, you have to use technical measures that actually remove the power.
Agreed. For me though, my biggest concern with having "everything" in a handful of providers. At least once a month, we get a story about someone having their account shutdown with no way to get ahold of customer service without creating a blog post and turning it into a news story.
Sure, a number of these show fault on both sides, but many do not. The recent article about an amazon seller adding a profile on his kid's kindle and getting his seller account suspended is an example. With google, having a google account suspended can remove access to your email, calendar, plus all of the linked "log in with google" accounts you have out there.
I am trying to think about it for me personally, and I can't come up with a single time that Google tracking me has had a negative impact on my life. I know people have examples for themselves, but none resonate with me as being something I am at risk for.
Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?