CLOSED: [2018-01-14 Sun 17:23] SCHEDULED: <2018-01-14 Sun>
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED:  [2018-01-14 Sun 11:54]
:ID:       2018-01-14-google-privacy
:END:
:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2018-01-14 Sun 17:23]
:END:

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages][Google AMP]] is a technology to speed up web content by pre-rendering
content and using their infrastructure. Independent from this
particular technology I found it very interesting how Google people
are thinking in terms of our privacy.

-------------

I am referring to [[https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-pages/][this blogpost]] by the creator and tech lead of the
AMP Project Malte Ubl and [[https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.html][this older blogpost]] by Alex Fischer, an
software engineer at Google. They are writing about the widely
critizised fact that AMP pages appear to be delivered from the URL
=google.com/amp= instead from the publishers web space like
=example.com/content/= or similar.

Please do follow their rationale: they basically say that this is a
very good thing for maintaining the privacy of the Internet users.

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Publishers shouldn’t know what people are interested in until they
actively go to their pages.
#+END_QUOTE

I am going to translate this in different words because I do find this
most disturbing. Google thinks that our privacy is protected when the
providers of content we are deliberately accessing do not know what we
are interested in.

While someone could think that this is quite obvious and true, Google
is not mentioning the rest of the story. *Instead* of being exposed to
the content providers - whose logs are scattered over the world and
hard to hack/scrape one-by-one - Google alone is able to log what
content you are interested in. All AMP pages. Every time. No
possibility to avoid their data collection machine by the usual
privacy-enabling browser plug-ins.

Well, I do have no words for this. This is just ... wow.

Another reason to [[id:tags-decentralization][avoid Google and other centralized services]] that
make billions of Dollars by collecting and selling our (meta-)data
alltogether.