I always wonder - if there is such a huge gap, why don't folks just employ women, since they're cheaper and do the same work?
Isn't that the question to be answered in order to really understand what's going on?
Otherwise I bet I can always find, for any company, a subset of people that are underpaid relative to the rest, be it related to age, gender, race, sexual preferences, employment history, ZIP code, whatever.
No, there isn't. The gap is between different professions, not intra-professional. Where it is intra-professional, men tend to work more hours, and women tend to preference conditions over monetary remuneration (i.e. flexibility over pay, extraneous benefits over direct compensation etc etc). Just to be clear, extra time off is remuneration, as are things like on-site day care centres, but they aren't ever counted in pay gap studies (that I have seen anyway).
Add to that that Lesbians make more than straight women[1] - and gay men less than straight men [2][3] - and there is a bit more at play.
The problem is that any time there is something men do better than women - like negotiate pay - rather than bring women up to the male standard (teach women to negotiate better), people want to hamstring men (no pay negotiation). Anti-worker policies and pro-gender policies are often indistinguishable, if only to me personally, and in my more cynical moments think this is a business conspiracy to deflate wages to female levels, not increase wages to male levels.
It's possible to pay everyone equally - especially when you just pay everyone less.
If you disclose what everyone earns at every level, it's easy to then let all your employees pull everyone hold themselves accountable to the same level.
There isn't a huge gap, not for the same job/title combination (there are cases where the gap does exist for the same job, but it's typically less than 10%). The gap widely most widely reported, the 70% figure, is primarily caused because of the genders holding different jobs, where the average pay for female-dominated jobs is less than the average pay for male-dominated jobs.
So... this is light on details into their analysis, but Laszlo Block [formerly of Google - where I work fwiw], claimed "In 2015 we added 8,214 employees to Google. And the women we hired, on average, received a 30 percent bigger salary increase upon joining the company, compared to men."
If you accepted his claim that Google does pay genders equitably, then this would indicate a large pay disparity outside of Google.
> If you accepted his claim that Google does pay genders equitably, then this would indicate a large pay disparity outside of Google.
Or it would indicate a successful outreach program at Google for women by which they were successful at getting qualified women not currently working in tech to apply; this doesn't necessarily imply a like-duties gender pay gap.
There's a lot of variables which are not being taken into account there. If you hired a person from outside SV, and another from within SV, you immediately have a 40-50% difference in salary increases. Or, if you hire one person out of an advertising company and another out of a software company, the difference will be quite large.
It's also a bit of a weasely statement - to quote Penn & Teller, they are lying with numbers - since it doesn't mention the current difference in wages.
Yes, it's large, but it's also only practically visible when you can see all of the wages for all companies. Pay gaps between individuals in the same company - regardless of gender - can be much larger than 10%, since your wage (in the US) depends more on your wage at your last job than your actual skill level.
Perhaps it is due to "family costs" being carried disproportionately by women.
Leaving early to pick up kids, staying home when kids are sick, etc. Even though typical gender roles are becoming less typical, they may still result in differential output from the perspective of an employer.
Thomas Sowell (a while ago) showed a dramatic difference in salary between all women, and women who had never married, suggesting that a huge component of the pay gap was due to household and family expectations.
I imagine there is more recent research on this exact theory, but I'm not aware of it.
But if a man earns enough to pay for the needs of his wife in addition to his own, that means he is paid much more than her. I wouldn't deduce that from the man's total compensation, since it essentially is an expense like any other.
Childcare / alimony is not an expense like any other because in many legislations you cannot really decided to stop paying that expense, see
e.g. [1]. In the US you typically go to prison pretty swiftly if you refuse to pay.
The belief that a woman with the same experience, skill, etc. is a worse performer would lead to a lower salary for women. That's the whole point of contention.
And we should probably let go of the idea that markets are rational.
Plenty of places have no problem hiring (almost) only women, e.g. kindergarden, waitresses, art galleries, medical sociologists, stewardesses.
In any case I doubt this would be illegal in every legislation. In the US men are not a "protected group".
Where there is a will there is a (legal) way!
I imagine that a company could legally
load up with women to the max, compensate with differential hiring: e.g.
only hiring female programmers, compensate with lower paid male drivers/cleaners.
Or use outsourcing.
I'm sure if Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Pichai etc really belived that women are underpaid vis-a-vis their contribution, they could easily make it happen. Indeed, they are now so powerful they could get their army of lobbyists to change the law.
> Plenty of places have no problem hiring (almost) only women, e.g. kindergarden, waitresses, art galleries, medical sociologists, stewardesses.
Yes, there's plenty of kinds of jobs men don't apply for at nearly the rate women do. That's certainly not the case for programming jobs.
> In any case I doubnt this would be illegal in every legislation. In the US men are not a "protected group"
This is simply factually incorrect; in employment, sex—not just one sex—is a protected class, federally [0] and separately under most state laws, as well. About the only assymetric protected class in employment is age, where discrimination is only protected against when it is against those over 40.
> The structural core of feminist argument patterns is
...also not germane to the present discussion, though it perhaps is relevant to some post far uphtread or off to the side somewhere.
A company adopting a policy of hiring only women for technical positions is a bright line violation of federal (and, in California, also state) employment law. The fact a number of industries that aren't tech are nearly exclusively female (largely because of applicant patterns) does not change this. The fact that some industries are male dominated, in part for similar reasons, really has nothing at all do with this one way or the other. The nature of feminist argument patterns is even more completely irrelevant.
Daycares in the USA get away with it, and, sadly, a lot of parents are very happy about it. Look at the gender % for daycares and elementary school. This is actually a rather larger problem since we are not properly providing young boys with role models.
With a policy of hiring only women, or with being a field of mostly female solo operators without employees, with nearly 100% of applicants for places that do hire employees being female?
Because the two things aren't equivalent in the law.
By hiring only women as a policy. People overlook it, and a lot of parents don't want their children changed by a man. Plus, insurance companies mysteriously raise rates when men are on staff. My college friend started a daycare for his church and encountered all this fun, and I had to deal with some of these issues when we were running daycares (excuse me, Early Childhood Education centers) in the 90's.
I would imagine after rejection after rejection men would find something else (insurance was my friends out). It still amazes me how many industries insurance companies seem to influence the hiring in.
The one my friend dealt with got a list so they could do their own background check, plus it was pretty obvious to the rep it was a guy asking for the quote this time as opposed to the first quote.
If you reverse the sexes in your response then there would be outrage. Boys need to see men interacting with men and women to pick up on the social cues.
You have to be careful, though. It's possible to control for too many variables such that your set of confounders itself is a predictor of sex. This is a technique I've seen used by people who try to deny the existence of a pay gap. It's FUD.
> set of confounders itself is a predictor of sex. This is a technique I've seen used by people who try to deny the existence of a pay gap.
This doesn't seem invalid? If for example 'wanting to spend more time at home'/'cares about team fit more than salary' is a predictor of gender, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be excluded from analysis.
What we care about is whether the pay difference is because of people treating women unfairly. If a different trait causes lower salaries in both men and women, but is more common among women, the problem is not a gender pay gap.
The second article I vaguely agree with, except that the fact that pay gap exists isn't really interesting - what is interesting is why it exists.
For example suppose women on average don't care about money as much as men do, and take jobs with different benefits (like more free time). In such a situation, you would observe a gender pay gap. But the pay gap wouldn't be bad, or something that we need to fix. It would just be a difference in preferences, and a woman who does care about money as much as an average man could expect to earn as much as a man.
The article itself talks about how a significant part of the gender pay gap is the higher willingness/better fit of men to take dangerous, difficult, but well paid jobs in natural resource extraction. This... sounds like not a problem to me?
That needs to be shown. There are many ways an unadjusted paygap might exist without any discrimination being involved - for example simpson's paradox.
Problems are released midnight EST. First person with a solution globally gets 100 points, second person gets 99, etc. So you have to be one of the first solvers globally to get any points.
If you feel the global challenge is out of reach, you can setup a private leaderboard for you and anyone you give the 'join code' to, localizing competition and points to your own circle of "AoC" friends: http://adventofcode.com/2017/leaderboard/private
I had the same happen to me when I moved countries, but I kind of understand it too as there is a whole industry of stealing and selling WoW accounts for a lot of money.
So I steal your password and account, sell it off (who buys stolen accounts? What do I know): Why would you need to change the account country?
I literally just wanted to change the account country to .. give Blizzard money. Anyone with access to one of my (now) two Battle.Net accounts can play my games and use anything in-game. What is this address verification actually protecting?
Yeah but once you're verified you're not asked again - if anything, stealing an ID verified game account only makes them worth more, because they can't be generated using bots anymore.
I have switched to using black cabs with Gett, I find it a much better experience. I like knowing what to expect, lots of space, the drivers are professionals and there's no pressure to chat. For me that's a good thing, I prefer to have a bit of free time instead of a social interaction with a stranger.
Ok, I know I might be relatively lucky, but just to provide a different anecdote: I spend 34% of my take-home income to live in a big studio in a leafy neighbourhood with Edwardian houses, 35 minutes from work door to door taking the tube, next to 2 parks. I'm pretty happy. Like all big cities London has better and worse neighbourhoods and the experience you get living in them varies greatly.
We know very little about what the Brexit agreement will look like. As long as high paying jobs exist, nothing stops highly skilled European people from continuing to get them, even if that involves a bit more bureaucracy.
The problem is highly skilled Europeans can also get those jobs elsewhere. Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin, Munich, Stockholm, Copenhagen, etc.
And if somebody is willing to suffer through bureaucracy and be humiliated in that process, for a city that has an insanely high cost of living, then why would people go to London instead of San Francisco or New York?
The problem with leaving the EU is that the EU provides competitive advantages and opportunities that are now going to be gone.
Plus that referendum is signaling to me, an European, that I'm not wanted there. Oh and I'm also a Romanian and we've been used as scapegoats in the UK's anti-immigration campaign. Don't think that I'm going to forget that easily.
I really feel for the raw deal Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians have had in the UK media. People act like these are primitive countries with hordes of would-be immigrants desperate to take advantage of the UK's "generous" (HA!) benefits system ... and it's simply not true. Charlie Brooker had an excellent piece on the news coverage, once the EU restrictions were completely lifted in the last few years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jai4v4aNe-s
My partner is Hungarian, I'm English - the atmosphere in this country is fucking retarded, she has a degree in international finance and is just finishing qualifying as a ship broker, her education level exceeds mine and nearly everyone I know, she's lived here for 10 years, always paid taxes and is raising her son here but somehow she's a problem.
In the longer term we are looking at a move to Germany as she speaks fluent German (she worked as a translator), Hungarian and English and I'm a programmer.
I've never been particularly proud of been British (I didn't get to tick a box saying where I wanted to be born) but these days I am ashamed.
That's how the life in the world with borders is. Anywhere in the world.
The situation when the color of your passport is more important that any of your eduction, qualifications and experience is the rule, not an exception. It is how the world works by default, for people outside IT, and for most people inside IT too.
I'm kind of annoyed how people from first-world countries are suddently striken with this revelation when it suddently affects somebody they know, shows how blind they were when it didn't.
My favourite thing has demonstrating to people how complicated it is for me (non-EU/UK) to go just about anywhere from the UK as a base (brexit makes no difference to this).
I originally wanted to live/work here, to the extent of job hunting and getting offered a job - I decided not to go ahead because I would have to go through hell every time I wanted to take a break/vacation and go somewhere.
Living/working in the schengen zone means I can just hop on a plane/train and go to a variety of places. Why wouldn't I do that?
I don't know your situation, but I can't help thinking that some of the attitude you describe is more perception than reality.
One of the things even our current government has managed to say reasonably clearly is that people from the EU who are living and working here legally today will be welcome to stay post-Brexit. They're quibbling over details, because that's what politicians and diplomats do, but I don't think anyone serious is suggesting that someone like your partner or her son should lose out here.
Similarly, there are some very nasty racist/xenophobic people in the UK, and sadly there always have been, and it looks like there are similar unpleasant undercurrents in various other places around the EU as well. However, exactly none of the Leave voters I know would be among those people. There seem to be plenty of reasons people voted Leave that have nothing to do with the immigration issue or somehow wanting to "throw out" citizens from other EU states. One group of people I talked to before the vote were even tending towards Leave for exactly the opposite reason: they had nothing against reasonable immigration, but didn't see why the EU should have an advantage over, say, someone similarly qualified or connected but from the US or Australia, and they wanted the whole immigration and visa system to be forced to update for the 21st century. (Possibly an optimistic view of the likely outcome, but a reasonable enough position in principle, IMHO.)
I am not ashamed to be British because of the Brexit vote, but I am sad about how it's been portrayed particularly in the media and by a rather unpleasant part of the Remain contingent online, because I think it makes some people feel far less welcome here than they still are by most Brits.
This is exactly how I feel about the whole Brexit mess, as an European that is working in the UK. For me, moving here was as simple as getting on a plane and handing my Spanish identity card to a customs officer. This is my benchmark for the post-Brexit immigration system: if it is one iota more inconvenient for an European like me to move to and work in the UK, I will pack up my stuff and go somewhere else, because I would not have even considered coming here in the first place if that was the case.
Like you said, there are plenty of other places full of smart people in Europe. I feel strongly about doing this as a political statement, or "voting with my feet". In Spain, brain drain is a serious problem that politicians pay attention to, so maybe it will give the UK's negotiators some pause when thinking about this.
Maybe what you are describing is in fact a good thing?
London gets correction on its growth, rest of the UK sligtly benefits by getting industries back which can no longer be served from within EU. Which will lead to slowdown or reversal of inequality growth.
The remainder of the U.K., outside of London, has a larger dependency on the EU. These regions will suffer disproportionately more than London.
"In particular, Northern Ireland (the UK’s poorest region),
the North East (England’s poorest region) and the South West (Southern England’s poorest region) appear to be the most dependent on the ability of the UK to trade in goods with relatively few restrictions with other EU countries." [1]
I can feel the pain with regards to Northern Ireland.
Though, it's hard to justify how Northern Ireland happen to become the UK’s poorest region, given how Ireland is more prosperous than the UK by the numbers.
If I thought that was going to happen I would have voted for Brexit, if we go through with it the regions are likely to suffer the most, in particular car manufacturing.
>for a city that has an insanely high cost of living, then why would people go to London instead of San Francisco or New York?
Because that's even harder. The American visa system is even more insane than the UK one. I'd love to move to California (if only for a couple of years) but it seems to be totally impossible when it comes to a visa.
The problem is that those are not native english speaking countries.
Barcelona is a great city, but if you don't speak any Spanish and/or Catalan (and don't intend to learn) then good luck building a life there. Life is more than work. The ability of the general population to speak acceptable English in say Spain, is abysmal.
And it's like that in many EU countries. The same applies to Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam. Some cities and countries are easier to live in for English speakers, and the UK in combination with Ireland is probably a prime example.
If you follow closely the UK government's positions and actions for the last 2 years, it's only logical to assume that the outcome will be negative.
The only question is how much negative. ( hint: a lot )
As an EU national who came to the UK 5 years ago, I'm in the process of preparing to leave in a year.
Already numbers show that even if the outcome is vague, a large percentage is alrady leaving ( mainly low-wage workers that are affected from a weak GBP )
Now imagine what happens when people realise they'll need a Visa or getting a new passport and rejecting their own.
I'd certainly leave. My bet is that a 30~50% of EU nationals will leave within the next 5 years, which is a huge blow to London and the UK.
Flipside is that the UK still has one of the most interesting tax systems in Europe aside from Monaco, (London and UK) property just got 30% cheaper for those not earning in pounds and London is still a global prime city (Brexit or not, don't really see that changing).
The country will be fine in the end. If anything, with how things are going, they'll probably end up either 1) not leaving (not that likely), or 2) end up with a very similar deal to what they have now (a lot more likely). But it will take years to figure things out and put it all together in a deal.
It makes no sense whatsoever for both sides to be mad at each other -- the EU and UK make good trading partners, part of the EU or not.
> It makes no sense whatsoever for both sides to be mad at each other -- the EU and UK make good trading partners, part of the EU or not.
It doesn't. But that's the thing, the actors here are not in for the greater good like you. They have selfish micro-perspectives and all they care is maintaining power => votes.
So for the particular UK government, priority is satisfying their voters. And those voters are ... not that smart or aware of how economies/countries work.
Again, look at what they say, and then look at what they do, since the campaign for Brexit started.
Common sense is the thing that you will not find. Unfortunately.
> The country will be fine in the end.
Yeah, the sky will not fall. Everything will be "fine".
As a non-EU immigrant who has lived here for 10 years and is still struggling with visa issues, the idea that it will involve just "a bit" more bureaucracy is laughable. The bureaucracy is appalling. Europeans who have any alternative will undoubtedly go elsewhere.
> As a non-EU immigrant who ... is still struggling with visa issues
Amen. I was trying to decide between working in the UK or in Europe several years ago. I'm from a common wealth country so I assumed getting a UK visa would be cheap/easy.
No way José! The UK visa requirements were positively assinine in their requirements (everywhere you've visited the last 10 years, visa fees totaling over 800£). Requirements for someone with a university education and no criminal record or even a speeding ticket, which yes, you must also declare when applying.
It was basically an complicated and expensive process designed to catch you lying (intentionally or by omission) so they could deny you the visa.
I ended up going to a European country. Showed them my working contract and a copy of my university degree. 110€ and I had a 3 year work visa within 6 weeks.
Completely. I could immigrate to Germany for about 1/20th of the cost (in application and legal fees) that it is taking me to simply maintain my residency in the UK. And is despite being a native English speaker, Oxford graduate, resident here for 10 years, and founder of two UK companies.
By the time I get permanent residency here, I will have spent over £12,000 on application and legal fees, and hundreds of hours on paperwork.
Those in the UK who believe that they can remain an internationally competitive and attractive destination with this kind of visa regime are -- I'm sorry, there's no polite way to say this -- utterly fucking delusional.
I like Chilie's approach to visa fees: they charge you whatever your country charges Chileans. So it's something like €100 if you are German and €1200+ if you are from the UK :D
For some reason I read the first line of this comment as "I like China's approach to visa fees..."
In rapid succession I thought, why would China tie their visa fees to Chile? Are Chilean geopolitics closely aligned with China? Is there some complex macroeconomic formula that involves Chilean immigration patterns? Is China just trolling the West by randomly pegging their visa fees to Chile?
I should really pay more attention when scanning HN comments.
as a third-worlder, I've started to keep a running spreadsheet of all visa fees (and associated costs) I have paid that I would not have to pay if I were a first-worlder. (Schengen application fees multiple times, UK visit, Hong Kong visit, UK student, etc.)
The only one I can let slide so far is the one for my student visa in the UK (especially the NHS coverage parts) as I've never paid income tax in the UK.
Reading the news and from rumors, companies are planning to move away or at least to keep London on hold and instead hire people somewhere else.
Brexit is also weakening the pound, which means that is much easier for European companies to be competitive with London salaries.
I've been in London for almost 4 years and I've a very good position so I'll probably stick around for a while and see what happens. In the meantime, I'm having a look for better opportunities somewhere else.
Not really: it's not bureaucracy that scares us Europeans, rather than the fact that over 50% of the country voted in an indisputably racist way to lower immigration. It's the fact that Europeans in the UK feel mistreated and disliked now.
Whilst some people may have had racist intentions in voting leave, it is not fair to say that 50% of the country voted in a racist way. Also why does a desire for lower immigration automatically mean you must be racist?
I'm sure it's not the whole 50% but it is a significant number, I've even seen it on my own family and it isn't very nice. This part of Brexit worries me more than the economic issues.
Sure it's fair. We intelligent and moral people in America have already determined that anyone who voted for Trump to be decent facto racist. This is just a small extension of that. There's no other possible explanation. None at all. The other side is evil, and just want to watch the world burn. Can't they see that were building a better world and they just want to live in ruins with their pure bred families.
I wonder how many times I need to repeat myself on HN before the message gets across...
I voted for Brexit, but I did not vote based on immigration policy. In addition to seeing no major problems with the current immigration arrangements from an economic perpective, one of my grandfathers was an immigrant to the UK, and I'm glad to have my mixed ancestry, if nothing else it made my childhood more interesting.
The problem really is with the media. They've set out Brexit as a two-issue debate. The only two issues that get discussed are immigration and the economy. So if you voted for Brexit you're either a racist or an economic luddite. I bet you can't even guess why I'd vote for Brexit without being driven by those two factors. That's the level to which the debate has been simplified in the media.
So let me say this, speaking as a Brexit voter, you are welcome in this country. Don't let the media tell you why those 50% of voters (which wasn't 50% the UK population) voted the way they did, they haven't got a clue.
I intentionally omitted the reason I voted leave to highlight how limited the public debate has been (i.e. that it's not possible for many Remain voters to guess any other reasons than the two I outlined).
If you are curious about the reasons I voted to leave, look through my comment history around the time of the Brexit vote. I may explain it again later once I've made my point about the media's role in limiting the public debate.
British sovereignity is certainly closer to the reasons why I voted for Brexit, but it's not the full picture. The main problem I have with the EU is how it's run. I'm not opposed to a union with other countries, just not the union we have, and the structure of the EU makes it resistant to any change that doesn't strengthen the current power structure.
One of the complaints I have about how the media has portrayed the issues is that it's conflated membership of the EU with being European, by focusing so heavily on the immigration angle. I'm still a European if I want to be outside of the EU. The EU is still mostly a trade organisation. Nobody calls people from the US anti-American if they criticise NAFTA (they are of course different arrangements, but certain comparisons can be made). Yet the portrayal of a European who is critical of the EU is of someone who is anti-European.
If you want a view that certainly wasn't emphasised in the Brexit debate, here are some of the comments of Tony Benn about the EU:
Agree but try "last 300+ years" rather than 30. Sadly I don't think Brexit will be their salvation. The problem with the UK and class has always lied with domestic politics. This wont change whether we're in or out of Europe.
We're entering a new industrial revolution - a lot of white collar jobs and blue collar jobs are being disrupted or eliminated. For example every factory and driving job will disappear in our lifetimes, many office jobs will be disrupted. New jobs will be found, we'll be more productive, and the world will be better because of it, but history shows us that this sort of disruption and destroyed livelihoods leads to violence, revolutions and unrest. We will see a similar situation to the original industrial revolution.
I do think it is misguided and harmful to attempt to try to find scapegoats for structural changes in society (popular just now are immigrants, muslims, corporations or evil federal governments), which is why I disagree fundamentally with almost every argument advanced for Brexit (from foreigners are taking our jobs to the evil EU is out to crush our democracy). It will not end well when people don't see improvement in their life but suffer more, and wonder who is to blame if not immigrants.
I was recently effectively forced to compost, when my council changed the rubbish collections to only once every 2 weeks, while the recycling and compost collections occur weekly. This meant that if I didn't compost, I'd have smelly rubbish for two weeks at a time. It is indeed not that bad, the compost bin has a lid that keeps the smell and it has made me much more aware of how much food I waste and why.
I'm telling you in plain mathematical terms that the way you go about hiring effects the distribution of candidates skill if you introduce any bias into the system regardless of whether or not its a literal or figurative bar or a bias on any parameter. I don't think anyone is going to disagree that biases exist on both sides of the aisle. Arguing about what google does or does not do is futile exercise I made zero claim about google and only believe they have introduced some biases in their hiring in some form.
It's ethically dubious that the advertised function of the app is a VPN to "keep you and your data safe", while the reason it exists is so that all phone traffic goes to Facebook.
This is not clear from the app description -- there is only a generic message about monitored app use, to which users are so used as to not pay any attention.
> "The app's privacy policy says it may share information with "affiliates" that include its owner, Facebook. "As part of this process, Onavo receives and analyzes information about your mobile data and app use"
> A Facebook spokesman said it is clear when people download Onavo what information it collects and how it is used. "Websites and apps have used market-research services for years," the spokesman said, noting that the company also uses outside services to help it understand the market and improve services.
Then Facebook can attack the competition by seeing in real time how usage of competitive apps varies in response to new features and inform acquisition decisions.
> Onavo's data paved the way for the purchase of WhatsApp for $22 billion. Onavo showed the messaging app was installed on 99% of all Android phones in Spain -- showing WhatsApp was changing how an entire country communicated, the people said.
I once sat in on a pitch from an antivirus software company who was selling the ability to look at the full browsing history of people who had visited your website. You could see all of their searches, if they visited competitors, and more. Most of the time I get annoyed of the FUD of "they're selling my data!" but this was different. It was true and it was scary.
If I had to guess, it's all of them. By "them" I mean all the anti-virus packages that are targeted at consumers and small business. That seems to have been part of the business model starting over a decade ago. My guess is that the negative effects of anti-virus is what prompted Microsoft to first build free products and then eventually roll anti-virus into Windows.
I'd put it this way. My first inkling that something was wrong was when Norton Anti-Virus shifted to a subscription model and charged me full retail for a renewal back around 2006. What does disabling virus updates for ordinary users with the explicit intent of leaving them vulnerable says about a company's attitude in regard to long term trust?
I left Norton for Kaspersky and paid it protection money for a few years. It seemed refreshing at first. One day, a few years later, I learned how to look at my LAN traffic and saw how often I was sending data to its servers. It was more often than seemed reasonable. That's about the time Microsoft started providing its own free anti-virus and I started switching machines...the Windows XP Professional x64 box stayed on Kaspersky despite my misgivings until I upgraded it to Windows 7 because Microsoft did not port its anti-virus to that platform.
Spyware is often the basis for free software. Adobe Reader and Google Chrome and the Ask toolbar that shipped with Java are pretty obvious examples.
If I could take a guess I'd say its likely to be Avast, which has multiple browser extensions that send all your browsing activity to them, while simultaneously offering a service to remove other browser extensions.
They'll even set their own search engine as your default homepage.
I'm not anonymous. You can identify me by going to my profile if you'd like.
To be completely honest, I don't remember. It was 2 years ago and I sit on lots of these pitches. I remember pushing back on them about the methodology, hearing how the sausage was made, and noping right out.
I want my team to be able to spend marketing dollars efficiently but I would never compromise my ethics to do so. Luckily I work somewhere that I can give a justified 'no' and keep my job.
Actually, I can't identify you from your HN profile. I guess I could google your username or something, but I'm a little unclear why you wouldn't just, you know, say where you work.
> > [I'm not anonymous. You can identify me by going to my profile if you'd like. ...] Luckily I work somewhere that I can give a justified 'no' and keep my job.
Running a DNS service doesn't give you the ability to see which pages someone visited when they navigated a website - just that they resolved that website's host name for some reason.
It can log that you went somewhere that Google could not otherwise track you. And not just websites; mail, SSH, anything else. I'll wager a fair few people's attempts to avoid tracking for certain activities, clearing cookies, private mode, whatever, has been thwarted because they forgot they'd set this up.
Yes, that is correct. Google use every means possible to track you wherever you go. If that can't get your exact activity, they at least get something.
That's a big distinction though. I don't think Google has the obligation to make sure users are educated and informed. The deceptive practice of Facebook with Onavo is what people object to.
True this. I think it was on Ars Technica that I was downvoted to oblivion for raising the privacy implications of Google's DNS service.
There is a huge segment of the semi-tech literate crowd that feel wise for using it. I think it's because it's the only time they get to type in an IP address and it makes them feel l33t.
To be fair, Google DNS is more trustworthy than ISP DNS, and if you're using Chrome, you're not exposing anything that Google isn't reading anyway. DNS requests are much less informative than full browsing history.
It is probably better to use OpenDNS, but they used to do the same spammy redirect on NXDOMAINs that ISPs do (I think I heard they stopped that). To be honest, the real reason I don't use them much anymore is that their IPs are harder to remember. It's easier to do 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4.
This reminds me of people who would re-sell search query data via aggregation of google referrals across a network (usually ad based.) In general, if there's a way to get that kind of data (search data is gold due to the ability to mine it for adwords niches), you can presume there are people out there who are going to skirt right up to the line of acceptable ethical behavior to try to aggregate it to sell it.
Yes, it sounds like malware. Had any other company done this, it would have caused outrage but for some reason Facebook just seems to get away with everything.
I remember how big a deal the News International phone hacking scandal was; this actually seems much worse.
Companies which track app download and engagement metrics also do this via VPN apps. That is how they are able to obtain such data. Not new, but also not discussed much.
If you can identify personal data (which if they can tie it to the user's Facebook account, that's pretty easy to do) it's likely (note: not a lawyer) a violation of the EU GDPR regulations (http://www.eugdpr.org/)
For crypto/security people on this thread, what encryption could app developers use to wrap their API call so that the least amount of information is leaked to this kind of man-in-the-middle services?
I.e, is it possible to:
1) hide which apps are installed on iOS/Android;
2) hide or obfuscate how frequently the app is used;
3) hide specific API calls
I assume at least #3 should be achievable with additional encryption.
I try to write anything complex, easy to be forgotten and relevant to the project at an official place like a shared functional spec document, a wiki or edited into a jira ticket.
For my own day-to-day todo list I use workflowy. These are things that I just delete once dealt with.
I tried workflowy but their limit on having 250 items on the free tier is limiting. I don't like the fact that they categorize every bullet as an "item". Some bullets can just be simple text stub rather than representing a whole item.
