While I agree with the gist of the article, I have a problem conflating Google and Facebook in the same evil bag.
Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for.
Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my friends don't either, and I will prevent my kids from having one for as long as humanely possible, I'm not sure what kind of benefit it provides. (I'm aware that 25% of all of humanity is on Facebook so they must find something in it. I just don't know what it is, and would rather not find out.)
But, to me, Google is quite different. Not only is Google Search is unparalleled, it's also quite open. Yes, Google constantly tries to have you "login" and turn on search history, etc., but one can still use Google Search completely anonymously. That's not a detail, that is a very important feature of Google Search.
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Now about fighting back, what about starving the beast with adblock? Everyone concerned by any of this should not only use adblock but heavily promote it to everyone. That's probably not the complete solution but it's obviously part of it.
I think they lost that argument when they started Google+, going into direct competition with Facebook with a comparable product, albeit unsuccessfully.
If anything Google is more sinister to me, with a much broader reach than Facebook into areas like mapping and navigation, personalized ad tech, personalized search, mobile OS, PC OS, web analytics, etc. etc., all at least partially geared towards data mining.
Not defending Facebook by any stretch, but "my dictator is not as evil as your dictator" does not hold up for me.
The information that should be public without an account -- public events, businesses and so on -- is visible on Facebook without an account, including comments people have made on these pages. (Admittedly, the "Sign up to Facebook" banner is pretty large.)
The private stuff on Facebook -- personal posts, friends lists and so on -- is also private on Google+, where it exists.
The problem with Google is that all the money it makes are gained by selling top search positions for money with adwords. It is like corruption.
The real evil are ads. They are bedrock of all worldwide bullshit and scam. They make seller don’t care about reputation, competitors and eventually product quality. They transfer products completion into ads competition. They make all products more expensive because of this “advertising tax”.
They turn off customer’s head to make a zombie who buys best advertised product instead of one with the best quality. They are good only for advertising companies and scammers.
Try turning off any of the incredibly invasive features in Android. If you try to turn off constant location, for example, maps starts throwing all sort of cryptic messages at you. You can't use google play without an account. They want to get you to log into Chrome so they can hook up your desktop searches to your mobile searches and profile you. If you've ever used Ok Google, every word you've ever said to it is recorded and stored in their servers.
Their entire existence revolves around extracting your personal information to sell you things, to profile you and sell that information to others to sell to you.
When you actually look at what they're storing about you Google's shockingly invasive.
They steal traffic and revenue from content creators, and are getting ever more brazen about it because they know the content creators have nowhere else to go. They use their dominance in search to promote their own sub-standard offerings, exactly as Microsoft did years ago. They've systemically attacked and destroyed other aggregators, while at the same time getting those aggregators to normalise that content so they can scrape and steal it in the form of data annotations, etc. to present the data directly to users without redirecting the user to the site that's actually provided the information.
It's not at all a noble cause and it definitely hop, skipped and jumped feet first into evil years ago.
And now they're trying to take over all mobile web traffic with AMP to lock everyone into their search platform.
They're evil coated in Engineer Cool to fool people like you.
EDIT: I do think they're a necessary evil though. If the government stepped in and forced web search to run as a public utility, which sometimes I think it should be, perhaps even at cost, it would decline.
I actually like what they started doing lately, where the answer to my query is extracted from the page, and shown at the top of the results, especially when it's something simple that I just want to double check.
When's sunset today?, what was the name of that movie with surgeon turned spell caster?, how long does it take to go from A to B? Another way to say XYZ?
Too many sites are full of crap, so this saves me a non-trivial amount of time.
There was an article on HN front page recently showing how this feature is at best unreliable. I don't have the link but the story was from a teacher asked about a US president being a member of the ku klux klan.
I encourage people to use Adblock, but I don't think it does much to combat companies like facebook. On facebook the adds and sponsored content is mixed in between your regular news feed, and it would be hard to tell the two apart.
I do think google belongs on the evil list though. They are not as bad as Facebook, but they sure know a lot about you even when you're trying to be anonymous. I've never used my work machine for anything private (I'm odd like that), I've never had it on my own network without a vpn, yet google seemingly knows that it's mine. I've taken quite a few work related certificates over the years, and every time I do, I'll find adds for those exact courses and certificates pop up on my private devices.
Like I'll log into gmail on my iPad, a few days after having searched for TOGAF courses on my work machine, and there will be a sponsored message about a TOGAF course near me.
Blocking ads is highly effective against facebook, that's why they're trying to workaround ad blockers. With enough users using ad blockers facebook would disappear sooner rather than later.
It's also effective against google which is nothing else than an ad network, until they pivot into being the self-driving car company or something.
Oh, but google is as evil, just in a different way. Google collect everything. With android it has your phone activity, postion, text messages, conversation and contacts. With gmaill is has more contacts, and emails. With search, youtube and analytics, it knows everything you are interested in. With map it has a recording of everything that has a location and a visual of it.
It keeps accumulating intimate data on a scale way larger than facebook. And we know that google, like facebook, cooperate with governments, sharing this data.
Google also has a strong AI background, using it for search, driving car, data analysis... This makes it concerning at best.
Google is even scarier than that, it's not confined to the online world.
Let's not forget they were involved in sequencing the human genome and are involved in genomics from investing in 23andme to their own "baseline study". And that's just one thing among many.
Google is a lot less useful than it used to be... Google getting rid of blog search, forum search, and google reader has done as much as facebook to silo-ize the web.
In my opinion, Google stopped being a "search engine" roughly 10 years ago. These days I'd call it a "recommendation engine" and it seems to primarily work by giving you results that people similar to your profile (according to the tracking surveillance data they have) have clicked with keywords similar to your query.
Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible.
That said, I regularly do feel creeped out by the "search results" and the advertising they present to me. Sometimes the results are pretty useless too, I was once presented with a page of results where the 7 of the top-10 were written by myself (HN comments, etc) when I was searching for the docs of an obscure GCC feature I've discussed in the web often.
I don't know if there's anything that can be done to "fix" this. I generally try to navigate directly to an url I know or e.g. do a search on Wikipedia (Firefox + Vimperator make using many search engines on the address bar easy, unlike Google Chrome where the address bar UX seems to be designed to maximize Google searches and advertising).
With the gradually worsening signal-to-noise ratio, the web is getting less and less useful to me every day.
> Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible.
They use to fight the spam, though, and you could still find obscure-but-relevant sites. Not 99% of searches are, at best, a few top results from the same handful of sites that always seem to top the results, then a sea of spam. They seem to have just given up and ranked hard toward the top traffic sites and let the spam sites simply have the entire middle of the search rankings, starting around '08 or so. If you manage to search for something that's not on the couple hundred top sites, you end up with nothing but spam.
I agree. Google's removal of the discussions filter was a big blow to the openness of the web. There are some hacky solutions that emulate that feature but it is not as good. I was hoping Bing might pick up on it and introduce similar features, but it looks like their ad sponsors are just not happy with people having instant access to uncensored and unmoderated product discussions and reviews.
"Google's removal of the discussions filter was a big blow to the openness of the web"
This!
With that filter I could name a product and find common people talking about it, now all I find is companies selling the product.
This is getting even worse when searching political topics because from mixed people discussing the topic I now find only news sites or biased sources promoting their point.
You can use the query below (or something similar) to narrow results to include keywords found in popular discussion boards (modify it to suit your needs):
Alphabet as innocuous is ridiculous. Guess their elementary school name and bright primary colors are working.
You realize that your search results are topped by people who pay Google right? That they use your browsing activity to sell things to you just like everyone else?
> You realize that your search results are topped by people who pay Google right?
What do you mean? Do you mean ads? Or do you mean "natural" results are influenced by people who buy ads?
I almost never see any ad because I use uBlock both on the desktop (90% of my browsing time) and on Firefox Android.
I really don't think there's a connection between buying ads and getting top ranks on "natural" results; I could be wrong about that but I would need proof, not a simple assertion.
If you went on Facebook you might be disappointed by how mild the evil is. Holiday pics, cats, people eating etc. There is also an argument for controlling that in a non open way - you don't want the kid photos up everywhere or trolls piling in with threats like Twitter etc.
I don't have a problem with conflating Google and Facebook. Facebook's encroachment on your privacy is just less subtle.
Yes, you can use Google search anonymously. But the search results you see are tweaked and tuned by the majority that don't search anonymously. Without them, your results would look more like DDG's. And "anonymous" is malleable. It still dumps cookies and fingerprints your browser, etc. Not logged in != anonymous.
For me DuckDuckGo works pretty well. If I can't find something there, I always try to use Google, to no avail. It proves that DDG is as good as Google at least for my searches.
> one can still use Google Search completely anonymously
If you try to use it via Tor, you'll have to solve CAPTCHAs, not for every search, but still pretty often. It's annoying and not very anonymous-friendly. Sure, you can use Google Search anonymously, but Google does enough to discourage you doing it.
Google has a quite efficient PR strategy to make sure it does not look that bad while it is a worst offender than facebook simply because google had a several years head start.
Make not mistake here, google and facebook are both enemies of the internet, though each with a somewhat different approach, google being much broader as in facebook makes an app that runs on pocket computers operating a google OS and desktop users visit the facebook website using a google browser.
In aggregate, the article may be right in conflating Google and Facebook, as my own view on them is pretty much the polar opposite of yours.
Facebook is oft-criticised for their "walled garden", but it is their walled-garden. Facebook is:
- mostly opt-in (though admittedly there's a huge social pressure to do so for many people)
- I can very easily choose what I do & don't share with Facebook and my set of connections on it (again, this has a few caveats and gotchas. Instagram shares data with Facebook by default, but does provide an opt-out, and Facebook used to allow a kind of 2-degrees of separation data sharing where friends could share your data with 3rd-parties without your consent, but they have since shut this down)
- oddly transparent about their weird, creepy, dodgy activities[1]
- they have a very open and positive (recent) history of relatively large contributions to the open-source community
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Google on the other hand is attempting to convert the internet as a whole into their walled garden. They are:
- completely pervasive: not only opt-out, but almost impossible to opt-out of. There are thousands of vectors to consider, all of which involve significant compromise of one's ability to use the internet conveniently in order to mitigate.
- the ways in which they track you are not apparent. One particularly grievous example of this was the Google WiFi Location service, which up until recently was sending Firefox and Safari user's locations and WiFi network data to Google (desktop's and laptop's included), a fact users not reading lengthy Ts&Cs would be unaware of. Thankfully initiatives like Mozilla Stumbler are battling this feature now, but there are so many other invisible vectors. Adblockers block Google Ads and often Google Analytics, but most don't block Google CDNs, Google fonts, and many more ancillary services. This is before we get started on Maps and Youtube embeds. You're opting into Google's systems by using any popular website.
- unlike Facebook, Google are notoriously clandestine about their practices.[2]
- Google's contributions to open-source, while massive in scale, leaves a lot to be desired in execution, sentiment and commitment in my view (though there are obviously exceptions). This is kind of a lengthy topic however...
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TL;DR
- a Facebook account is exactly as creepy as it appears; no better, no worse. And pretty much opt-in.
- Google is invisibly everywhere, it's largely opt-in, near impossible to opt-out of completely. Choice is removed.
I agree that Google is worse in most of the ways you noted. However, I would note that the choice of not using Facebook is a somewhat-arbitrary one, due to the incredibly strong network effect and the huge userbase.
Google is somewhat better in this regard - they're so huge because so many people use them, but in many cases you have options for not using Google, or most of their services. Or using them less intensively / intrusively than people tend to use Facebook.
Depends on the user, mostly. Both are quite detrimental to the liberty of users overall, I would say.
Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for.
Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my friends don't either, and I will prevent my kids from having one for as long as humanely possible, I'm not sure what kind of benefit it provides. (I'm aware that 25% of all of humanity is on Facebook so they must find something in it. I just don't know what it is, and would rather not find out.)
But, to me, Google is quite different. Not only is Google Search is unparalleled, it's also quite open. Yes, Google constantly tries to have you "login" and turn on search history, etc., but one can still use Google Search completely anonymously. That's not a detail, that is a very important feature of Google Search.
* * *
Now about fighting back, what about starving the beast with adblock? Everyone concerned by any of this should not only use adblock but heavily promote it to everyone. That's probably not the complete solution but it's obviously part of it.