cronaday

Hi dang, I'm new here so I'd appreciate clarification.

Someone defending this privacy debacle on Hacker News is a Google employee on the Chrome team and was a business cofounder with the Stanford collaborator. That person not only failed to identify how very close they are to the topic, but also phrased their comment in a way that falsely represented distance from the topic. It seems to me essential for understanding their misleading comment to be aware of the factual context.

I thought I had phrased this factual correction in a way that was neutral and not a personal attack. My assumption was that the commenter may have violated Hacker News guidelines by being so misleading. What did I do wrong?

As for the downvotes, I see that I should have emailed you rather than adding a note in the comment. Nonetheless, could you see what's going on?

If a user can somehow someway somewhere learn about what a company is doing, then it’s OK? Really?

> Google has written publicly about how this system works

If this is news to Hackers News, there is no way that regular Chrome users are aware of it. Saying something in a privacy policy or on a developer website just can't be enough for analyzing a person's URL data.

> This includes only listing publicly discoverable pages, only including data from users who have turned on "Make searches and browsing better (Sends URLs of pages you visit to Google)", and only including pages that are visited by a minimum number of users.

Since when does aggregating this type of data make it fair game? This is analyzing a person's URL data from their own devices. There has always been a big bright red line for browsers touching a user's browsing history. Google crossed that line.

Also, I just checked on a fresh Chrome install. The "Make searches and browsing better" option is enabled by default and buried in Chrome settings. How is that acceptable consent for analyzing a person's URL data?

Just suggesting that prior browser and OS privacy blowups involving those companies have been over less worrisome things, not that those companies are subject to more or less criticism. Looking back on outraged discussions of Mozilla's telemetry is kinda quaint in comparison.

This is very ethically dubious. Google is collecting raw URLs from Chrome users who turned on history syncing across their own devices, then reusing the data and funneling it through Stanford. No way Chrome users understand or approve of this.

The paper tries to justify its ethics with Google's privacy policy, which is laughable. There are so many papers about how meaningless privacy policies are. If Apple or Mozilla did anything remotely like this, Hacker News would riot.

Edit: I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but this post suddenly got a bunch of downvotes at the same time as defensive comments from a current Googler and recent ex-Googler. Then one of my responses below to a Chrome developer got flagged for no obvious reason. Hmm.