Google sells the ad.

You click the ad.

Google gets the click, and gets paid.

Advertiser gets the http_referrer, but in doing so, also gets the user IP address. Every IP address in IPv4 space is a known destination.

What was your question, again?

And each click gets them an IP address, and a history and an object. Who do you think you're kidding? Click-thrus are insanely read by each of the advertisers, and in turn, as no agreement exists at this phase, does WHAT THEY WANT with the data.

Advertisers see 100% of the clicks. 100%. Not nothing, 100%. Why? C'mon. You think we're stupid??

So that the car could be made in the living room.

Everyone forgot the size of the door....

There are well-known methods of avoiding browser fingerprinting, and supercookies are easily eliminated.

Hints: use multiple browsers; rename innocuous cookies to the filename of well-known supercookies, then use whatever is appropriate for your operating system to make the cookie R/O. Some of us don't use gmail (or google) at all, and many more use a separate browser for social media, sometimes several of them. It's also fun to go to the library and copy salient cookie files from their browsers (easily done) and then copy them into your favorite browser's storage to salt things up. YMMV.

Which is why it's a great idea to kill your cookies frequently. A few years from now, I'll find a thrift store with wearables, don some random ones, and freakout some database analysts.

Wow-- Ernie-- look at this! J Lo, Rod Canion, and Merle Haggard Jr are passing thru this train station! Look!

I vaguely remember that during the nomination of Judge Bork to the SCOTUS, his video rental habits revelation spawned a law that forbids such things, but the details are eluding me.

But that's the US, and not the rest of the world, and is likely to be done eventually. The data is voluminous, the motives evil.

Happens right now. Google gets your permission to vacuum the contents of Gmail, liberate data from your Android phone, and then somehow, removing "personal identifiable information", liberates this data and sells it to others, who reassemble the information.

Permission, I believe within this context, is another of Schmidt's reality distortions. The Internet of Crap will indeed require interactions, and they'll be two states for you to interact: by the facade of your permission, and by devices querying your to obtain metadata to interact with you and then send the results to some hadoop cluster in SeaLandia for, um, additional processing.

When you look at atmospheric maps, the amount of space debris is truly horrendous. No space garbagemen are going up there, tidying things up, then coming back to earth with a load of space trash-- unless we have details the military aren't confessing to.

If you're trying to put satellites into LEOs, you must also contend with all of the other junk already there, most working but some not. Yes, they decay. Could take weeks, could take centuries. I say: pay the freaking money and just wire fibre, multimode, pay the damn bill, and get over it. Fiber done well has the ability to go far beyond gigabit to the bedroom. Use low power/low radius tranceivers, like we do with cellular and WiFi technologies (among others) to give that all important Facebook search at the beach.

I'm not worried so much about ulterior motives. I'm worried about all that space junk when the upgrade.

Hello tech support? Can you, um, upgrade our 2400 satellites to gigabit, please? Sure, I'll hold.

Nice work, but serious hubris and marketing going on here. Google can't seem to find a product these days, and this is just another attempt to get in on the non-robotic servant market. I wish they'd read the scifi books inspiring their products to the freaking end of the book.

Indentured servants, just like those within the nooses of student loans.

As an industry, a gaggle of monopolies, and true, oligopoly. Said differently: a couple of them have at least the facade of trying to be reasonable, and while admittedly planes stay in the air and land safely these days, that should have been a pre-requisite.

More than two million flight miles later, I won't fly on half the carriers in the USA, and British Airways is added to the list for multiple sins of mismanagement.

And this guy is a hero, IMHO.

The effing games played by the monopolies need every modern legal arrow possible to surmount their bought-off fortresses.

You make a mistake in conflating social justice to a reaction like this. Defense/defence of social justice and free speech are highly compatible.

The post is about control of hideous, if free speech. I'm on the side of both free speech and social justice. Many others are, too.

And my point is that the chain of authorities is broken, and needs to be fixed, and anyone not doing MD5s are at risk. I would do these anyway. Lots of others don't.