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Ask Slashdot: Should We Have the Option of Treating Google Like a Utility?
eegad writes "I've been thinking a lot about how much information I give to technology companies like Google and Facebook and how I'm not super comfortable with what I even dimly know about how they're handling and selling it. Is it time for major companies like this, who offer arguably utility-like services for free in exchange for info, to start giving customers a choice about how to 'pay' for their service? I'd much rather pony up a monthly fee to access all the Google services I use, for example, and be assured that no tracking or selling of my information is going on. I'm not aware of how much money these companies might make from selling data about a particular individual, but could it possibly be more than the $20 or $30 a month I'd fork over to know that my privacy is a little more secure? Is this a pipe dream, or are there other people who would happily pay for their private use of these services? What kinds of costs or problems could be involved with companies implementing this type of dual business model?"
They'd happily take your money, and promptly "lose" your information a few times a year for more.
How much you would be willing to pay AT&T to ensure they did not give your information to the NSA?
For the analogy-impaired: Google and Facebook might be happy to sell you "privacy", but they're still not going to say "no" when the feds come knocking.
My company actually has several private in-house Google services, search, wave-like thing, docs, etc. It cost us a good deal up front, I honestly don't know how much, but we insist on using them because we can guarantee they do not leak information out (they are even firewalled from reaching outside the company).
So it is at least possible.
I wouldn't trust those guys with my credit card info.
Google only does anonymous aggregated data. They act as a gateway between you and the advertiser.
Who you should be worried about is all the other huge companies tracking your behaviors on websites. They're the ones buying and selling your data, trading in "partnership" agreements, and finding other ways to identify you specifically.
Google doesn't want to know *you*, they want to just send ads to various group of people that you can be categorized into.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Right after we start treating ISPs as utilities too.
For everyone here who says he's willing to pay rather than be tracked, the chances rise that someone here will develop that service.
It certainly has utility-like status, and should be awarded the same protection/regulations as other essential utilities we have come to take for granted over time. It is also unique that it is largely manpower limited and can quickly evolve through the spread of ideas alone. Why not allow search to return to its birthplace, in the hands of academic institutions? Governments should pool funds to create working sets of networks, with various policies drafted by the respective committees. Research should be collaborative and shared like other academic realms.
Search should be considered as an educational utility, at least on some basic social level. And on this level it should be tax-payer funded.
A quick search gives an estimate of 400 million to a billion users a month. Lets be conservative and say only 100 million users/month. Times that by 20 and you get 2 billion. That is a lot more than what Google makes in a month. Certainly more than what they make by simply selling data from their users. I would think maybe $1/month should be enough, maybe $2/month to make it worth their while to setup and such. I think $2 is much more than what they make every month.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Your electric company is likely installing "smart" meters in your area...so they can track you more easily. Your phone company--cellular or otherwise--tracks your every move, literally. Your cable TV provider tracks your viewing habits in minute detail. What makes you think that treating Google "like a utility" will make them stop tracking you...or even stop sending you advertisements?
Remember when cable TV first came on the scene? They offered "commercial-free" television, in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. You can see how well that idea worked out!
Your offer of money wouldn't really change anything. It would only give you temporary relief, and Google more of your money than they need to have.
How many volunteers would it take to run a decent search engine? Maybe not as many as you think. Then they wouldn't be commercial slaves or share your information with anybody beyond what was necessary. Really. It might not be that hard. Google always returns a bazillion results; but you only use a few dozen at the most. It shouldn't be too hard to generate a few dozen results for most topics over a period of several years, and keep it up to date. In other words, why not just start with Wikipedia because that's where most of my Google searches end up anyway.
Paying to have advertisements removed is very different from paying to prevent tracking. Your personal information has many more uses to a company than just how much than they can sell it for. For many of the services which technology companies provide, such as when Google decides which search results are most applicable to you, a store of personal information is absolutely essential. Few companies are willing to compromise the quality of their services, and therefore their reputation, on the whims of a few individual users.
The customer doesn't always know what's right: indeed, listening to the customer in this case could be corporate suicide.
It's called the "Jack Mehoff" account.
1) Create a Google sign in with "Jack Mehoff" or another name
2) ???
3) Live a profitable and secure life
Your subscription has to not only exceed the revenue from the ads you may receive.
It has to exceed the total loss to Google from the whole customer base.
If I can buy Google with no ads for $10/mo, then Google ads become served to a whole lot less people for who $10/mo is irrelevant.
These are some of the most lucrative recipients, and creaming off the richest customers from the ad-base reduces the amount advertisers will pay.
Are you a terrorist?
or are there other people who would happily pay for their private use of these services?
Probably not.
What exactly are you paying for them not to do? You won't get a complete answer because they don't want to let competitors and spammers know exactly how they use some information. For example, does google use the pattern of clicks on search results to determine ranking of those results over time? If they tell you your payment opts you out of that tracking, they just gave spammers a bug hint. How much would you pay if it is not clear what they are going to not do with your data?
This story is just trolling the free-market retards.
who doesn't really have a problem with their web traffic being tracked?
If you don't like it, then don't use it. It's a free country.
Which services, specifically? Most services Google offers have paid competitors. Google Maps? There are plenty of mapping apps. Gmail? Your ISP already provides you email. If you don't trust your ISP, reagan.com has an email service with strong privacy guarantees.
Have you purchased Streets and Trips, or a Delorme product and do you use it? If not, there's the answer - the premise is flawed because you in fact do NOT choose to pay cash. Rather, you prefer Google's ad based model. I do too, for many services Google offers - I use their navigation and if that gets me an ad for some tourist attraction that's on my route, I'm okay with that. I choose not to use their email service, and pay with my time, maintaining my own email system.
Facebook / social networking is kind of the oddball. The whole POINT is that it keeps track of who your social circle is, so that really can't be done without a big ass database connecting friends and friends-of-friends.
Google is not trying to single anyone out. As explained above, it's all about Google being the "Trusted party" between the advertisers and the users.
I much rather have Google as a single point control this data, than having to trust EACH advertiser.
The biggest problem is with the Government, When they come knocking there is nothing anyone (including Google) can do.
The only thing they CAN and have done (they are not obligated, heck, sure the fed's would be happier if this stayed a dirty little secret) Google regularly publishes information about how many requests they receive from the Government.
If you worry about your privacy - THAT is who you should try to reign in!
(Captcha: Blunting)
A link about how Facebook and Google are selling data that the referenced page doesn't support at all.
Sigh :(
I'd rather use Bing, or any other free alternative.
It's not that hard to not give the big companies all your private info. You're the one who set up that facebook account, you're the one who gave his real name to google, you're the one who made it possible for them to sell that info you willingly shared with them. Why should everyone be penalized for your own mistakes on the internet? This is how the internet works, if you still don't get it, just cut your internet cable and be afraid of "big brother" instead.
Are not utilities. Electricity, gas, water, and sewage are all fundamentally integral to society. The bottom line is that your life is not threatened if you decide you can't use facebook or google because you don't like the way they handle your information. There are also plenty of competing services available to you. Stop whining for the government to make companies do what you want. Vote with your money. If you don't like facebook's service, don't use it, same for google, or any other service.
The summary has this completely arse backwards and is really a warped view of the world. Your privacy is your right, companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft et al should be paying YOU in order to track you, that is assuming you approve of it at all. They have absolutely no need whatsoever to track you, yes they make more money by being able to track and manipulate you but that is hardly right they should have and it is completely fucked that anyone should think you should have to pay not to be manipulated.
Want to not be tracked? Use Tor
Want to not be untraceable by your email provider or ISP? use tormail
But %99.99x of the people think having fast internet is more important than having privacy so having the above and also interacting with your friends and family in a way that makes he think you are not a paranoid nutjob is impossible... maybe you are better off just taking the soma and not worrying about it.
Consume Watchdog is a paid astroturfing company; specifically, they are owned by Grassroots Enterprises Inc."
http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/
In the spirit of the original poster - I would look forward it. However, I am skeptical - even from Google.
Google are not allowed to disclose even the request, let alone Google's reaction to it. The recent Supreme Court decision was along partisan lines, i.e. Republicans voted you can't challenge the super secret orders unless you can prove you've been spied on, and you can't prove you've been spied on because they're super secret. Hence NSA has a completely free hand.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/02/26/231203/supreme-court-disallows-fisa-challenges?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
What Google shows is the regular legal process which is a subset. It likely a tiny subset too, since NSA has this huge new data center its built in UTAH and it's difficult to imagine they'd build a data center that dwarfs Facebook's if they weren't hoovering up most of Google and Facebook's, email banking and every other kind of data.
What's laughable is Americans think they're immune from it!
You have the option of starting your own company and operating it that way. But it's a little bit..`entitled` to lie in your bed and dribble silly ideas into your tablet about how other people's companies should be run, because it's none of your business.
I don't want to pay another monthly bill (likr the power bill, gas bill and cable/internet/phone)
In fact i don't pay Google anything, I get my Android Apps from Amazon
If you started doing this you would quickly realize that you would have to subscribe to a whole raft of companies in the business of tracking and profiling you.
Your only real recourse is to take responsibility for your own privacy, and learn the various mechanisms by which you can defeat their attempts to capture the information and/or devalue the quality of the information they obtain such that they have little economic incentive to do so.
In essence, they are paying us. The services provided, free of fee, are not free to create or deploy. They cost money. And providing them free of fee is offering a good for a good. I for one am a significant google user. I depend on their email, their docs/drive service, and their android aosp project to manage my day. It comes with ads. Which I block, using tools I download from their services. I am continually astonished and appreciative of how easy it actually is to opt out of most of the adsense network. I downloaded an adblocking utility for my android phone from the 'play store,' and adblock from the 'chrome store.' I use incognito mode in both to dodge a couple of pay walls. Google is both the largest user of tracking based ads, and the least aggressive. We deal. I for one agree with the OP. The trouble is, the best services available are ad supported, because that's the business model that's working. Anyone bought webmail service lately? was it better than gmail? I don't like ad supported services. I'd rather pay. But I want to pay google, not some $0.50 operation that cant deliver what the google can. so frankly, i appreciate how easy google makes it to not pay my information as collateral for services. Don't want ads? Google it.
People underestimate how much is spent advertising to them. At one point the New York Times had an article on Facebook that noted you were only worth $5 a year to Facebook, when the NYTimes was getting $1000 annually per subscriber with their "declining" print business.
Would you pay $1000 annually for the New York Times? Probably not. Newspapers used to be very expensive and people rarely bought them. The model of putting ads in them caused a huge surge in sales. The ads were annoying as hell, they didn't cost you anything personally.
There are paid competitors to many Google products. People chose to use free versions with ads instead.
Google is NOT selling information about you.
They just use it to match advertisements, but nobody outside gets any of these information, not even that a particular ad was matched to you.
Will you stop lying about Google?
A utility service model has a fixed revenue - the number of heads. To add revenue you either have to increase the number of heads, or sell new services to the existing heads one at a time.
Trafficking information has a perceived revenue based on the number of heads times the number of ways you can sell that data. Add a new way to sell data and the revenue leaps. No need to consult each customer. (In practice this takes finesse, as Facebook keeps finding out.)
From an investor standpoint, the potential revenue growth from the second model is more appealing. Google is therefore unlikely to offer pay-based services.
Is this a good idea, from the consumer point of view? Possibly.
Will Google do it? Probably not. Because:
(1) The vast majority of Google users don't spend much time thinking about how Google makes money, and Google wouldn't want to draw their attention to it by offering a paid privacy option that only a tiny fraction of users will sign up for. Everyone will go: "OMFG, Google makes that much from me Googling for pr0n?" Spooked cows give less tasty datamilk.
(2) Google has some of the world's smartest people looking singularityward and thinking up newer and newer paradigms for user data utilization, so their estimates for the value of this data is likely to be higher than most people think. This is made more significant by the likelihood that people willing to pay extra will be disproportionately more wealthy than the average user, and thus their data would be worth more. If they offer this option at a more expensive rate to compensate, the effect mentioned in "(1)" will increase.
(3) What assurances would Google have to give to the small minority of users who'd sign up for this? How would those assurances be enforced? This would require many outside eyeballs to peer into the Google inner sanctum - a liability which will probably significantly outweigh all benefits of this option for Google.
(4) Even a 1% paid privacy sign-up rate would slightly decrease the value of the data from the remaining 99% by introducing more selection bias.
(5) Google is doing well right now - in terms of market share, brand, market capitalization, etc. Why fuck with what works?
Should Google be forced to do this? Absolutely not! What kind of services they provide is up to them. And whether you use those services is up to you.
--libman
Is it time for major companies like this, who offer arguably utility-like services for free in exchange for info, to start giving customers a choice about how to 'pay' for their service?
What about "utility" service allows one a choice in billing method? My impression is that "utility" here merely means some sort of public infrastructure or service. My experience with such hasn't yielded any that have such billing flexibility as the submitter of this particular article want.
Privacy is a right, not a service.
I've been an insider for a long time, and they, at best, get a hand full of cents a month from you.
Look at how much they get for a *single* page view, and how little it still is per *unique visitor*.
Then multiply by the amount of page views / site visits you do a month. And there you have it.
Google could easily double its income, and we'd still only pay chump change, to get rid of all tracking, profiling and advertising forever.
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
227-3517
How about you take your authoritarian ideas back to a socialist country from where it came? I don't like what google has become any more than the next guy, but the law/police/courts/legal-system/govt isn't the way to do it. There's something called choice.
What about the Internet as a whole? I think that needs to become a utility before a company does...
Come on. Its a free service. No one is twisting your arm to use these services. Stick with your isp or AOL for all your needs then.
If you are so worried about what can happen to your "private information" then you should be also inclined to read and understand that once you put anything on the Internet you must realize its not private any longer.
I would prefer to pay for these services to not only have privacy of my data, but also if it could provide some assurance that the service will not be dropped overnight.
If you keep telling companies you will pay for their free services as long as they dont sell your information, they will make you pay for them AND sell your information. What the fuck do you think all those companies you pay do now?
Like any Utility, you can not use their services. That may make dealing without that service difficult for you but there's a certain ubiquity about Google that means that like a utility they need to be regulated. If you use any of their services, whether that be Android or Google Search or Google Maps, just don't expect to get something for nothing.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
No, Google is not a utility, nor is facebook or bing or any other internet service. On the other hand, your ISP is and should be treated like a utility. They provide a communication service just like the telephone company does and should have the same consumer safeguards. In the internet age, your connection/access to the internet is every bit as vital your connection/access to the power grid and communication grid and should be treated accordingly.
However, just like the utility company doesn't have a say as to what you do with their electricity, they only supply it, the ISP shouldn't either. If you want to use Google's services, that is up to you. If you want to use somebody else's that is up to you, too.
Now an interesting thing about ISPs being a utility is that both you and Google are using that utility. Just like I can choose my long distance provider separate from my local phone company, both come across the same connection provided by the local company and the long distance provider pays the local company for that access. Of course, the LD provider charges me for that and includes it in the fee. So both ends of the line (me, the consumer and the LD provider) pay for access.
Google, OTOH, doesn't charge me direct, but sells my information to others. That is their prerogative, but doesn't mean they should pay for their use of the access to defray the cost to the consumer.
Treating the ISP as a utility won't cost consumers anything extra. It may mean that Google's costs go up, which means what they charge others for my information goes up, but that is just the true cost of what they are doing.
Sure seems like it. Every load of BS that MS wants to promote seems to be a slashdot article. As if this corporate propaganda were actually news.
If you don't like the service they are providing for whatever reason, decide if you dislike it enough to find another provider. Then, do it and leave the old one. Why do we have any right to force them to change their business model?
Unfortunately that approach favors those with money and almost constitutes extortion on the part of a provider.
This is why we need privacy laws written by legislators with a backbone.
Why all my data should be freely traded without my explicit, written consent, and likely not all of it, even with that due to the
abuse that is likely to occur in companies knowing things about me that should be private, such as my fetishes, health problems, legal issues, etc.
So you mean you'd like the rich folk to have their privacy while the working man would remain fair game?
This does not sound just. The law should shield the all of us equally.
I used to care more about privacy and didn't want companies collecting a bunch of information about me. But it's so hard to avoid! I held out for years on creating a Facebook acount. so.. my wife created it 'for' me. grrr!
But.. how has all this information being out there really effected me? All I have noticed is that the ads on most websites seem to be targeted to me. So.. I get this nice warm comfortable feeling that all my geeky interests are more normal and I am not so alone out there. As a geeky male I see ads for oscilloscopes and capacitor checkers where once I might have seen ads for purses and clothing.
Over the years since internet access came out I have developed quite an internal filter for advertisements. I could look at a page full of ads and really only see the content, it was like the ads were invisible. Now I actually find myself clicking them fairly often. And.. it isn't a bad thing, they are often actually interesting to me. Occasionaly even more so than the content I came to see!
I know there is a principle somewhere I should be getting upset about. But... it's getting hard for me to care.
Ultimately I like the idea of a 'personal cloud' for that. If you really want to gaurantee you will never lose your service and never lose your data that's the only way. Any company can drop a service or go away. A good suite of personal cloud software that is easy to install on a cheap shared web host is what is needed. Then of course, it is up to the user to back things up regularly.
This is what you get for adding Twitter and other faddish social media hooks into Slashdot. Wise up, admins.
You can use Google search and maps approximately anonymously. They may aggregate the accesses using cookies and IP addresses, and they could learn a lot from that (i'll leave that to the imagination)
The problem with google is that they derive much of their value from the data you provide them. This seems to be intentional, as they make services like Google Now on Android, which provides unsolicited content-sensitive information, and searching the gmail inbox via the main google search. They need to get people used to the idea that google has tonnes of info about them. This is why they display "happy birthday" on the main google page. They need to redefine "creepy" to be able to collect more data. I don't know what drives google to want all that data. Maybe they have an evil (or good) masterplan. Maybe they have an extrapolation of how their ad revenue will improve with more targeting, or how it will suffer if they do nothing (this seems to be the trend).
A few months ago one could think about replacing google services with software running at the peers. A "cloud storage" service is really just a synchronisation service, which could be replicated by an extremely advanced P2P application. There's no economic incentive to build one, so nobody have done it. It may be that there is some synergy effect in having all the data, which can't be replicated by software at the end user device and open protocols. It certainly is easier to build.
So to answer the original poster; if you want google's services you have to let them collect data about you. It's necessary to provide the services. So they have the data, which you seem to be OK with, but you want to pay them to not do anything bad with it. What exactly are they doing now that you object to? I think nothing. So why pay if you get it for free. Google isn't selling your data, they are selling ads. The data never leave Google, they only push other companies ads based on what they think you want. Granted, it's annoying to see nothing but ads for HDMI cables 2 weeks after you bought such a cable, or to see ads for cheap phone contracts for *a frickin year* after you researched and bought the best contract, but ads are annoying anyway, deal with it. They have the information about you, which is what you should be worried about. (Maybe Google Apps for Your Domain is without ads, it certainly costs money. But don't think they won't track you)
It's called Google Apps.
As much as they think otherwise, the internet is not made of Google and Facebook. Alternatives exist and ought to be considered. For instance, instead of Youtube, try posting at Archive.org, instead of Twitter, use Identi.ca, instead of Facebook, use e-mail. These major companies are creating 'gated communities' where they control what goes in and out. You need not wring your hands, the internet worked fine before Facebook and Google. If my suggestions are no good, look up other alternatives and pursue a free internet.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Start with the traditional advertising space/personal info revenue model. Calculate the average advertising/personal info revenue per user, offer a privacy-assured ad-free version of the app at that price. Also offer a "free" ad-supported version of the app. Then continually adjust that price to keep the ratio of paying users to "free" users at 1:1.
Seems pointless to pay off Google when that info could easily be yanked in to Federal jurisdiction.
If I could know that my info was 100% private I would pay the price, but that just doesn't seem realistic at all.
As long as the info exists period, someone will use it if the need arises IMHO.
If you are stupid enough to make Google as essential as a utility for YOU PERSONALLY, then you simply an idiot. Many of us live quite comfortably without Google being a major player in our life.
The more people that opt out of participation the less useful the service becomes. So, find a comfort level of privacy that works for you and continue to be assimilated. We will all be better off if you do.
I wonder how much Google would charge? $50 per year? I wonder if it would seriosly hurt advertising revenue? Google didn't start out selling this information, they made a fortune hooking up "looks" to "finds" so it may be a viable business model. The downside? Admitting they were "evil."
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato