If I may ask you a personal question: how do you feel about working on ads
for Google, given that a lot of people find Google's tracking practices
(to make personalized ads possible) questionable at best? Did you
specifically choose that team, or was that just were Google needed more
hands?
Personally, Google ads give me mixed feelings. I see how personalization
is useful for everyone involved and, so long as only machines look at my
data, I don't have any personal issues with it. But at the same time,
Google collects everything on everyone worldwide to the point where I
feel like the USA would have an easy time conquering any country they
please (if a nation already has live data on pretty much all its enemy's
subjects, war would be exceedingly efficient for them to start and
quickly win), so that kind of threatens our freedom if you see what I
mean; and secondly the data is not necessarily 100% secure, so in the
event of a breach it might be seen by humans, specifically people that I
would not want to know what I searched for (or pages I visited that have
Analytics or an embedded YouTube video or ads or a map on their contact
page or ...). So it's a mixed bag of feelings and your position (job) seems
like the kind that would make one think about before accepting. I'm curious to
hear your thoughts on it.
"Many people would put ad tracking on this list of downsides: sites pass information to data brokers that build custom profiles for each user and allow personalizing ads. From my perspective, however, while having this information collected seems a bit creepy, it allows showing ads I'm more likely to be interested in. This makes publishers more money than showing untargeted ads, and I'd much rather fund them through better ad targeting (invisibly intrusive) than through more obnoxious ads (visibly intrusive)."
I chose this team because I thought the work would be interesting and I liked the people on it, and they were interested in me because of my prior work on mod_pagespeed rewriting websites so they would load faster.
> if a nation already has live data on pretty much all its enemy's subjects, war would be exceedingly efficient for them to start and quickly win
Lots of thoughts:
* I think you're dramatically overestimating how much data Google has and how well that is mapped to the kind of identity the military would care about.
* I don't think Google would share this information unless legally required to, and I don't think such a request would be constitutional.
* Many other countries are in similar positions; for example Criteo is based in France and has a similar ad tracking reach to Google.
* I'm still not sure how this is especially useful militarily. Military targets are mostly not in the data one of these companies would have, and none of these countries would go to war targeting civilians.
> I chose this team because I thought the work would be interesting and I liked the people on it
That is fair! I guess most people would make that decision if you already know people there and you think you'll enjoy the work as well.
> none of these countries would go to war targeting civilians
Not as if people in the army are somehow exempt from tracking though?
As for whether Google would share it in the first place: I don't think the government cares much what Google thinks if they're willing to kill (us) over something. Laws can be made by the same people that decide on this. I don't mean to pose it as a simple matter, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works in principle.
Now that I think of it: aren't "national security letters" exactly this? "It has something to do with the safety of the country, just give us that data [e.g. Lavabit private key]"?
Of course, the chance is remote in the first place. Much more likely, if it is ever used for this kind of purpose in the first place, it'll just be posturing and threats, and people will protect themselves better before it ever gets to armed conflict. Just imagine, though, if you're not in the USA, China, or Russia, and one of the three (the most democratic one of the tree, it is fair to add) has the rest of the world's data. That's kind of uncomfortable when I pause to consider it.
> how well that is mapped to the kind of identity the military would care about.
While not readily available, I expect that it's not hard to find a few datapoints to filter them out. Following someone for 10 minutes as they go through traffic and matching the coordinates against location history data is probably enough to find a subset of 1-5 possible accounts. But I doubt physical following is even necessary to find enough datapoints to find them in the data.
Personally, Google ads give me mixed feelings. I see how personalization is useful for everyone involved and, so long as only machines look at my data, I don't have any personal issues with it. But at the same time, Google collects everything on everyone worldwide to the point where I feel like the USA would have an easy time conquering any country they please (if a nation already has live data on pretty much all its enemy's subjects, war would be exceedingly efficient for them to start and quickly win), so that kind of threatens our freedom if you see what I mean; and secondly the data is not necessarily 100% secure, so in the event of a breach it might be seen by humans, specifically people that I would not want to know what I searched for (or pages I visited that have Analytics or an embedded YouTube video or ads or a map on their contact page or ...). So it's a mixed bag of feelings and your position (job) seems like the kind that would make one think about before accepting. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it.