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Google's Real Name Policy, Why You Are the Product
bs0d3 writes "Google tells their investors: 'Who are our customers? Our customers are over one million advertisers, from small businesses targeting local customers to many of the world's largest global enterprises, who use Google AdWords to reach millions of users around the world.' Site users don't seem to understand. It's not that it's free. It's that you are the product being sold. ThomasMonopoly points out, 'I'm unaware of any company that feels responsible to their product. And if I'm to understand that they're responsible to their customers, the advertisers, I don't want "the world's largest global enterprises" dictating my identity or choosing who in Syria is granted a voice on the world stage.'"
Is this really new to anyone who hasn't lived in the cage for the last 80 years? This business model is a de facto standard since Phil Taylor Farnsworth invented the tele. Nothing to be upset about. You don't have to use Google if you don't want to. Besides, I'd rather be a product of a company that does no evil than a client of some other companies that do.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
It shows that the "omg free stuff" marketing works to people. People also go crazy about coupons and all kinds of "give us permission to spa.. mail you and get these cool things" offers and everything else. Even many slashdotters go to great lengths to defense Google just because their stuff is free (and you don't need to use it if you don't want to!!). At the same time they're ranting how government and companies are violating their privacy, when they're themselves whoring it out.
So don't think it can't happen to you, as it has to me and I was following their rules
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I'm unaware of any company that feels responsible to their product.
That's rather unimaginative. Lots of companies (or rather the people who run them) do show some responsibility toward their product. The first example that comes to mind is animal breeders: the good ones care about the animals they raise and have ethical standards in how they treat them, even when they are going to be sold as food (all the more so when they are going to become pets). Many artists certainly feel responsible toward their product, even when they sell it.
To what extent is this true of Google? Time will tell, but it's unproductive to say that because they are in this to make money it's impossible for them to be responsible. The real question is what combination of public visibility/pressure, economic incentives, and regulation will lead to optimal outcomes.
.sig withheld by request
It's the same as it has always been with commercial television, which most people don't understand either.
The vendor is the commercial broadcaster.
The customer is the advertiser.
The product is the viewer's soul which is sold to the advertiser in 30 second increments.
If you're not paying for something, take time to consider that maybe *you* are what's being sold.
Paying real money is very often the lowest cost way to get something.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
G.
The TV networks only traffic'd in viewers in aggregate form, e.g. college-educated males aged 18-34 watch "Seinfeld" in such-and-such proportions.
Google will use an ever-growing variety of tools to determine exactly what each man, woman, and child in the entire world is doing, thinking, buying, selling, and traveling to on a moment-by-moment basis, whether they're explicitly logged in or not. And this data will be stored, replicated, indexed, data mined, and peddled for at least the next 150 years. It will never go away.
It wasn't long ago when Google was considered the protector of everyone's all-important right to obtain any piece of digital content for free. I remember thinking, you guys are fools. Sony, Warner, and EMI want to charge us ten or fifteen bucks for a CD. They'll take their cash and be out of the picture. Google wants to own us forever. They or their successors and customers will be publishing the dirty laundry of how each of individually led our lives long after we're dead.
It's been the staple of "free" commercial TV. You, the viewer, are not the "valued customer". You're the product, to be sold to the ad companies. Why the outcry now?
I don't think it's good or that I feel like it's ok to "sell" me, but, people, if you really just noticed that now, I wonder where you've been the last 50 years.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Google's naming policy strikes me as a non-issue. It won't prevent anyone from publishing indirectly, by way of an out-of-area friend, which is safer option anyway if you're posting about a government that wishes to silence you. It seems to me that worst case, it creates an opening for Google's competitors. Last I checked there were still many of those. Were it a government decision it'd be a different matter.
Making the world a better place, one psychotic episode at a time.
Google is not "more evil". They just have the better tools, if NBCBSwhatever had the tools, they'd do EXACTLY the same.
Companies see you as a way to make money. By selling to you, or by selling you. Either is fine by them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...is that to most people that's free.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
What's new is that Google has found success (initially, at least; people seem to be wising up lately) among the self-proclaimed and self-absorbed digerati crowd that heretofore viewed themselves somehow above the Marketing that always suckered in the mere mortal consumers beneath them. The smug, sniffy, MS-hating, open source espousing, latte-drinking, Starbucks-frequenting hipsters with fifty-dollar haircuts all fell for the warm gooey spin that using Google products made them better people -- which would have been hilarious just-desserts if it hadn't had the unfortunate side-effect of increasing their market share so much.
'I'm unaware of any company that feels responsible to their product.
First of all that says more about him than Google. Most companies are.proud of their products.
The end users are not the product. The product is "exposure" - page views if you will - and the end users are the suppliers of that product.
Google, just like any other company, can't screw its suppliers without consequence.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
The export of Canadian personal information outside the country is governed by PIPEDA. Google simply doesn't have the right to demand any personal info be sent to their servers outside the country's borders. This is effectively the same legislation that Germany later copied.
Also, government-issued ID is not to be used as "identification." The social insurance card numbers are ONLY to be given to employers and government agencies, and, at your option, to your bank (unless you have an interest-bearing account) - and it doesn't have a photo. The universal medicare card, which has a photo, is also not to be used anywhere except when dealing with medical services such as hospitals and pharmacies.
That leaves your drivers license - IF you have a drivers license. And even that is classified as "personal identifying information".
Advertisers don't care what your name is as long as they know what you are likely to buy. If my name is Joe Schmoe that tells them nothing more about my buying habits. Now, if they can say my handle is twerpmeister67 on hamstersrock.com, then they have something they can sell to advertisers. Petsmart can try to sell me corn cob bedding, or whatever.
Better yet, let people have multiple handles, just like they do already. Tying those together, but allowing them to be separate in the consumers mind would be the best of both worlds. That way people can surf around however they want (e.g. Justin Bieber fansites) and not be worried about being outed as some kind of weirdo later. Say your trying to play video games with your kids or something. You don't want unsavory Bieber adverts popping up when you're looking for a fun game of Dinowaurs. Instead, you want to see advertisements for more dinosaur stuff or similar games.
It really seems like Google is missing the mark here. Advertisers, too. But honestly, I'm not that surprised.
Except that for television networks you specifically had to opt into giving them information, through ratings tracking companies.
Yes, Google's business model is just like an over-the-air TV network's. Except that Google has much more information about us, is now in charge of many or most of the communication channels we use to talk to each other, AND effectively controls much of the information we receive. So Google is kind of like the television networks, newspapers, postal service, phone company and government service branches all rolled into one. Oh, and they'd really like your medical records too, please.
"You are the product! Ooga-booga-booga!!1"
It's just a sound-byte meant to whip you into an outrage by equivocating advertising with slavery.
Company X provides a product.
You, the customer, pay for it with tiny portions of your time.
Company X then sells those bits of time to other companies.
You are not being sold. You are willingly looking at a few ads in exchange for a product. I know outrage feels good. It's like a drug. But find something real to be outraged over.
Philo T Farnsworth invented US television, which is that commercial stuff in which the viewers are the sweetcorn, the advertisers are the buyers, and the TV company is the farmer. John Logie Baird invented British television in which the taxpayer is the customer, pays directly for the product, and elects politicians to keep an eye on things. That's quite different, as well as being a whole lot better.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The fact that something happens and is known, by those who make the effort to think about it, to happen does not make it reasonable, fair or acceptable.
The fact that there are other companies which do even worse things doesn't make it good either. Nor does it matter that the evil company has a slogan which implies that it will do no evil, if they still do evil.
Comments like this, "You don't have to use Google if you don't want to." are breathtakingly dumb (surely you're just trolling? mensababe?). When use of a service makes it so much easier to carry out business than the old way, people will tend to migrate to it. If use of all the rival services incur much the same penalty in the form of your data being packaged and sold, then the people do not have a choice. They are forced to use the service - or live in a cave.
Why not set up a rival business providing the same service but without the nefarious bits? Because nobody would finance it because the profits would be so much smaller when the rival companies are able to collect and package the highly profitable user data. For it to become viable the collection of user data has to be restricted by law.
That is where governments should step in and mandate that the collection of user data be separated from payment for the service. If a user signs up the company should not be able to tie that contract in to an agreement to give up personal data too.
Governments don't step in because they are in the pockets of big business. They too want to drive up revenue because each transaction means more money for the government and more funding for grandiose schemes.
You don't have to use Google if you don't want to.
Yeah and you can email your resume in .tex format for jobs too because you hate Microsoft and Adobe. If the only way you can successfully advertise your product online is through advertising companies like Google, then you have little "choice". I suppose a child like you has to learn about lock-in caused by network effects. Don't worry you can leave the thinking to others if it hurts your brain.
People without children pay towards the public education system. I live in an area which has had no recorded crime in two years, but I pay for the police. As the great Harvard jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, taxes pay for civilisation.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Schmidt is insistent that Google has the right to know who their users are. On the other hand, Google doesn't do proper due diligence on their customers, the ones who buy ads. That just cost them a $500 million fine to the Department of Justice for running phony pharmaceutical ads. (Those supposed "Canadian pharmacies" often aren't real pharmacies at all, and many are not in Canada. DOJ went after Google because an investigation into some Mexican drug dealer was also running an offshore pharmacy.)
Because of Google's "we don't care who you are" policy about advertisers, Google has become the advertising system for a wide range of scams: typosquatting, adware, ads for free stuff that's not free, ads for counterfeit software, and mortgage modification scams. Prof. Benjamin Edelman at the Harvard Business School estimates that Google makes about $25 million a year from ads for spyware and adware, about $6 million a year from ads for "credit repair" scams, and about $100 million a year by allowing competing trademarks as search keywords (that last is being litigated.)
Most of those scams depend on advertiser anonymity. Business aren't entitled to privacy. Even in the European Union, which has privacy rights for individuals, businesses don't get that right. The European Directive on Electronic Commerce is very clear about that. Google has the right to demand proof of business identity from advertisers, and to demand that the advertiser disclose the actual name and address from which the business is conducted on their web site. Google doesn't do this, which makes Google the scammer's friend, and in some cases, as they just discovered expensively, an accomplice to criminal activity.
Google claimed to the DOJ that they cleaned up their act on drug ads. Let's see. Search for "no prescription diet pills". See a Google ad for "Phentremine 37.5 mg HCL - As low as $30. Free Shipping. www.phentreminediet.com No subscriptions, or hidden cost.". There it is, right at the top of the page, in prime position, a drug ad run by Google. This is a fake drug scam site. It's a form of drug typosquatting; the real drug is spelled "phentermine". The site has a Google Checkout seal (which may be fake) and a BBBonline seal (which is fake). Yet Google is running that ad.
Prof. Edelman says it better than I can: "I have long doubted Google's claims of innocence. For one, Google has an obvious incentive to allow deceptive and unlawful ads: each extra ad means extra revenue -- an ad in lieu of white space, or an extra competitor encouraging other advertisers to bid that much higher. Furthermore, unlawful and deceptive ads have been widespread; I found dozens in just a few hours of work. Meanwhile, it's hard to reconcile Google's engineering strength -- capably indexing billions of pages and tabulating billions of links -- with the company's supposed inability to identify new advertisements mentioning or targeting a few dozen terms known to deceive consumers. From these facts, I could only suspect what the DOJ investigation now confirms: Unlawful ads persist at Google not just because advertisers seek to be listed, but also because Google intentionally lets them stay and even offers them special assistance."
The fact that the Murdochs hate the BBC means the BBC is doing it's job ...
The BBC is the reason the commercial companies have to actually produce quality programs themselves, and why they have to space adverts out, unlike the US where the Advertisers rule ...(I was amazed the first time I saw American Football, the number of Ad breaks was astounding, a Football (Soccer) game over here is an unbroken 45 minutes of viewing without an ad break)
Puteulanus fenestra mortis