Google doesn't do that. Rent, sell, donate, whatever. If you have some evidence to the contrary (e.g. public financial filings?), I'd be interested in seeing it. So would the FTC, actually, since AFAICT it would be a violation of Google's consent decree.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, unless perhaps you're talking about losing your opt-out cookie? If that's what you mean, Google provides browser extensions that ensure that never happens.

Yep, pretty much, that's it. Unless you're paying for Google services or buying Google hardware, online advertising is Google's revenue model. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Again, I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that if you stop opting out from targeted ads you start seeing targeted ads? That seems pretty obvious to me.

None of what are for my benefit? The ads? If that's what you mean, I beg to differ. Most ads are useless to me, I agree, but it does happen from time to time that I see one that's useful. Even more importantly, those ads are how the sites that I like get funded, so they benefit me very directly.

(In my particular case, Google ads also pay most of my salary. But I felt the same about all of this before I joined Google so I honestly don't think that affects my opinions much.)

First, I never asserted that Google doesn't know about the data that it collects. That would be to deny a tautology. Second, you seem to be asserting that Google sells the data, which isn't true, as I explained in more detail in my first post in this thread. Third, the advertiser may well know you by name, etc., but not because Google told them anything about you. The fact that your IP may be linked to your identity in various ways is true, but not Google's fault, and Google doesn't participate in spreading information about you.

If you don't want an advertiser to get your IP, I suppose you should avoid clicking on ads.

To the degree that it is cross-referenced, yes. And Google Analytics gives Google perhaps more of this sort of information than any other entity -- unless, of course, you opt out of analytics tracking, in which case Google doesn't track you.

Well, then, don't give your permission. I think that's the key; opt out of the services you find too intrusive. That doesn't completely solve the problem, because of the cross-referencing issue. I think we'll need to deal with that legislatively, to bar companies from cross-referencing the data they have about individuals, and to give individuals access to the information held about them, and the opportunity to request that it be deleted... with, of course, serious consequences for failing to comply with such requests.

I'm really not sure what you're on about.

Yes, Google knows you clicked, because they use that to track advertising effectiveness statistics, and, I assume, as a signal that the ad is for something you're interested in. Normally, of course, a web site doesn't know about clicks on links to other sites. When you click a search result or an ad, you're actually hitting a link to Google, which then redirects you to the destination. This is done so that Google knows you clicked. For both search results and ads, that's an important signal to Google that lets them know they ranked results/ads well and showed you what you were looking for.

Yes, the advertiser's web site knows you clicked, just like any web site you visit. Slashdot knows you viewed this article, and posted, and what you posted, etc. If you use a site, the system and therefore its operators know you did.

I don't see what about all of this upsets you, or what you think someone is trying to hide from you.

But do you want a computer where someone else can replace your OS with three minutes and a screwdriver without you being able to tell that they did so?

Yes, if you click a link that takes you to the advertiser's site, they know you did so. It's no different than if you typed in their URL, except that they see a referer header from Google, and find out what search terms you used to find them. Google didn't give them any of that information, though, YOU did.

If you opt out of personalized ads, there's no value to Google in tracking you.

It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.

The news at 11, of course, is that said serial port access is provided via TCP on a public IP, on a known port, with no password.

Yes, you can, at least with Google. Google provides opt-out tools, and they work. I know some of the engineers who work on opt-out and they're quite serious about ensuring that nothing identifiable gets stored about users who present an opt-out cookie. Any team that tried to work around opt out would be in trouble... and would get Google in trouble during its regular FTC privacy audits, pursuant to the consent decree Google signed.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above represents only my personal opinions.)

This is a common misunderstanding of Google's business model. Google doesn't sell information. At least, not very much. I think there are a few minor products that involve selling aggregated, statistical information, but they're an insignificant part of Google's revenue stream. Where Google makes money isn't by selling information about users, it's by using information about users. Google doesn't deliver information to advertisers for them to decide who to advertise to, Google accepts ads from the advertisers and uses the information it has to decide which ones to show to which users. Advertisers don't see the user data and have very little control over the targeting of their ads, which is fine with them because Google is better at the targeting than they are anyway.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above is all public information.)

Nah, it's more like whining that Chryslers should be able to burn the same 87 octane gas as Fords without having to buy overpriced filler necks on license from GM. Or that GE lightbulbs should be allowed to work on ConEd electricity. Standards exist for a reason. Letting monopolists enforce their own whims without accomodating the competition is bad for everyone in the long run. Ask JP Morgan what happened to Standard Oil in the courts.

On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no. Standards can only go so far. Suppose you design a laptop that has an innovative power storage system that can power it for a week, but in order to get the energy density high enough, you had to run the battery packs at 48VDC. Could you design it to be compatible with an existing 12–18V power supply? Sure. Would it be energy efficient? No.

The same goes for software. If you're designing a new OS, you could ostentibly add the necessary hooks to let it run Android apps, but your OS probably won't run them as efficiently, and you'd prefer folks to develop apps for your own native APIs anyway, because that results in a better, more consistent user experience.

There is no fundamental difference other than the webpages are standardized and the interface between apps and the OS is not standardized. They are fundamentally the same -- apps can be converted to websites and vice versa.

There is no fundamental difference between ice and steam other than the temperature. I don't recommend trying to walk on steam or clean your carpets with ice.

The reality is that the layout system and DOM programming interfaces available for web programming are positively primitive compared with app programming. (I'm deliberately ignoring WebGL for the moment, which though powerful, is low-level enough that it isn't practical except for games, and still isn't broadly available.) And networking is even more limited (same-origin restrictions) without cooperation from every destination site.

So in theory, yes, but in practice, not even close. And the fact that even relatively straightforward stuff like HTML editing isn't fully standardized (or, frankly, fully working) across major browsers should give you serious pause when considering standardizing anything as complex as a full-blown collection of application APIs across multiple platforms.

OS companies go to great lengths to create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes to prevent developers from developing platform-independent apps.

Uh... no. OS companies build their systems using entirely different programming languages, for philosophical reasons that diverged decades back. Because of that difference, they create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes because it would not be feasible to create APIs that aren't. Additionally, there are a number of fundamental differences between the two platforms (including their security model) that require platform-specific handling. Those differences have nothing to do with wanting to be incompatible, and everything to do with designing APIs to meet their specific goals and ideals.

In fact, platform vendors have gone to a great deal of effort to reduce portability problems. That's why both Android and iOS support cross-platform APIs such as POSIX and OpenGL ES. By taking advantage of those technologies, developers can write much of their code in a platform-independent way (with lots of caveats, of course).

Sounds like a buying opportunity... for put options....

But where he is being completely batshit illogical is where he argues that once app platforms are common carriers, the users must give equal treatment to the platforms rather than the other way around. To use the previous example, it would be as if the government mandated that if you offered to ship something via UPS, you must also offer to ship it via FedEx. Such a mandate has never happened, and probably never will.

Not offer to ship it. Ship it. With physical products, the analogy can't really work, but the closest equivalent would be mandating that companies take bids when working government contracts....

Either way, though, the idea is absurd for several reasons: platforms can't easily be compatible with one another, you can't realistically expect companies to design software for platforms that they're unfamiliar with, and there's not even a guarantee that it would be possible for a company like Apple to port their software to Blackberry, because the OS may lack required functionality under the hood. Add to that the risk of giving anyone who creates a platform with ten users the right to demand that Apple port iMessage to their token platform, and you can see how such a law would quickly spiral out of control.

What the Blackberry CEO should really be asking for is a law mandating that all protocols and exchange formats be open (with reasonable documentation) and free of any patent encumbrances that are fundamental to any implementation of the protocol. Such a law would ensure that Blackberry could freely implement iMessage compatibility themselves. And the right way to argue for such a law is twofold:

• Communications technologies must be standard if you want people to communicate with one another. It's harmful to the consumer when a text message either costs money or doesn't, depending on what phone the other person happens to use. After all, the recipient's hardware platform could change at any time. And it is doubly problematic when you factor in protocols like FaceTime, where you have to run entirely different apps and contact the other user in entirely different ways depending on what kind of phone the other person is using (e.g. Skype if the other person is running Android).
• Protocols and file formats contain copyrighted material created by users. To the extent that those protocols and file formats are controlled solely by a single company, they have the effect of taking the users' creations and locking them up. If that company goes out of business, the users' creative works could be permanently lost.

The extent to which the second argument applies depends to some degree on the ephemerality of the communication, of course.

As a happy side effect, such a law would have the benefit of putting an end to patents on technologies like GSM, CDMA, LTE, etc. for the same reasons.