Google cheats on location privacy
Part of the attribution con.
Arizona AG Mark Brnovich is suing Google for lying to its users about location privacy, tracking them even after they opted out. A newly released set of unredacted Google records are explosive evidence of the company’s deception.
https://www.azag.gov/media/interest/updated-redacted-google-complaint
The documents show that Google deliberately engineered its products so that you couldn’t get your own location, or share it with an app, without also giving your location data to Google, too.
They reveal a system so deliberately tangled that even senior Google product managers who worked on location systems didn’t understand how they worked.
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398359580275523590
They also reveal internal message board conversations between Googlers who were outraged to learn how hard it was to disable location tracking.
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398359265807581189
A thread by Jason Kint of Digital Content Next gives chapter and verse on the revelations from the document drop:
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398353211220807682
What I found particularly striking, though, was the history of location privacy in Google’s settings. At one point, the company made it easy to turn off location tracking and then was aghast when users disabled tracking in droves.
This is surprising given how strong the power of defaults is: Most users never change any settings. The fact that users disabled location tracking widely and immediately speaks volumes about how people value location privacy.
But despite this “revealed preference” (to use econo-jargon), Google’s response wasn’t to turn location tracking off by default — rather, it responded by using dark patterns to turn tracking back on and make it nearly impossible to disable again.
The location tracking opt-outs were smeared out across multiple sets of preference screens, and the company leaned hard on its mobile device partners to follow suit. The names of the manufacturers who caved are still redacted in the docs, except for LG.
This is a prime example of consent theater: the company asks you for your consent to creepily follow you 24/7. You say no, so it asks again, in such a convoluted way that you don’t even realize you’ve said yes. Talk about “manufacturing consent.”
https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96
It’s worth asking why Google was so thirsty for our location. The company will claim that it’s because location tracking improves search results, which is doubtless true; location data lets them give good results for “pizza” instead of making you search for “pizza nyc.”
But that’s not the main event from a business perspective. As the UK Competition and Markets Authority Report on ad-tech made clear, Facebook and Google have monopolized the ad market by offering “attribution.”
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study
What’s “attribution?” It’s when a company shows you an ad and then tracks every click you make, every location you visit and every purchase you make (merging data from payment processors) to prove to advertisers that you bought something after seeing an ad for it.
Attribution solves the age-old advertising problem, famously articulated by the department store mogul John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
That may be great news for advertisers, but who gives a shit? The fact that advertisers’ lives are made easier if I let them follow me around 24/7 forever to see if their ads worked is not my problem.
I mean, advertisers’ lives would be easier if, instead of showing you an ad, they could reach inside your bank-account, withdraw some of your money, and send you a product because they think you need it. We’d be idiots to let them, though.
Advertisers are willing to pay huge premiums for attribution tracking (despite the fact that, as with the entire ad-tech stack, attribution data is full of Big Tech frauds that make advertising look far more effective than it ever is or will be).
That’s why Google was so desperate to keep location turned on — why it was willing to commit outright fraud and to bully its partners into following suit.
One of the major promises of a Google antitrust breakup is the possibility of ending attribution. Unfortunately, that’s not what many competition regulators view as the “solution to “the attribution problem.”
Indeed, the CMA’s report sees the major attribution problem as being a lack of competition among attributors. Rather than allowing Facebook and Google to monopolize attribution, the CMA proposes to let everyone get in on the game.
This is not what we need from our competition policy. We don’t want competition to see which companies can inflict the most human rights abuses at the lowest cost.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include The Shakedown (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering; and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias.
