Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.
I'm no marketing expert, but I doubt that the best way Google can think of to sway public opinion is to call people privacy nuts. Google employs over 100,000 people and even more people work at similar companies like Facebook or buy targeted ads. Many of these people browse Hackernews and get offended if others accuse their livelihoods of being evil.
I believe those policies exist. I don't believe they are followed by everyone, and all it takes is a vocal minority. I've seen plenty of comments on HN from people who say something like, "Hey, I'm an employee of X, this is my own opinion, but..."
I regularly am discussing Google's business with Googlers on here. Some of them disclose in the post, some of them disclose on their HN profile. Many do not, and calling them on it is generally discouraged, but it's usually not super hard to figure out or prove.
There are definitely some acting as spokespeople (even if they claim otherwise), but there are also quite a few who are just, you know, incredibly biased fans of their employer, who like to defend them on topics unrelated to their job.
But when a tech company has 100,000 employees, it's not particularly surprising to see a good number of them on a tech forum. ;)
Or that they start every comment with 'I'm an employee of X'
They might just say, 'That seems silly!', 'You're a nut', 'Do you have a source other than yourself'. Or they might just downvote stories that have a negative effect on their income.
You've got 100k people working at google and many of them are going to be active on this type of forum. The same goes for the other big guys that have a ton of employees
There are regular comments by declared employees of quite a few companies including Google on HN. The commenting and vote/flag brigadeering around subjects that center on one of these companies is such that many subjects are either voted off the homepage entirely or the participants in the thread get downvoted/upvoted to better support the company position or narrative.
Whatever else it is, it's one of the more important guidelines of the site (at least judging from the time Dan and Scott spend on it) that you not make appeals like this in public comment threads. What evidence you hsve of this, you should send to hn@yc.
How is that evidence of "vote/flag brigadeering around subjects that center on one of these companies [...]" by those people? This story sat on the front page for a day, has zillions of votes and comments and as far as I can tell, even people who work in the field can't actually figure out what it's about.
I doubt the vast majority of employees would get offended that easily. I work for a tech company providing marketing tools (basically, I help send marketing emails (aka spam)), I like the pay, the overall environment and the technical challenges, but I'm under no illusion that I contribute to the betterment of our societies.
If you see these kind of behavior online, it's almost always people paid to explicitly monitor forums and "protect" a company image.
I can attest to that as when you point of things like Google gets caught stealing IP from a MIT student they invited for an interview (a popular thread here on HN) it gets downvoted voraciously.
Either its employees, hired guns and or something...
You spammed an HN thread with these comments before, which amply explains why you were downvoted.
We've been over this topic a gazillion times on this site: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Astroturfing exists, but imagined projections of astroturfing are far more common, and whatever the effects of the former may be, the latter has an extremely degrading effect on discussion. In fact it eats up everything if you let it. We don't want that here.
I've personally banned several accounts over the years for propagandizing for Google (for whatever reason—it's impossible to distinguish between a paid agent and an overzealous fan, nor does it particularly matter). But this has been rare, and we don't do it without evidence.
Are you saying I am not able to discuss this true story where it's relevant? In threads where people have discussions that hold Google in a negative light cause they choose to act that way and get caught? My real life story along with the MIT's student story in which there's clear evidence of Stealing IP further details more bad behavior by the big G!
Is Hacker News not a place where freedom of speech is welcome? Speech that is helpful to other not well connected innovators who when invited by the big G read this and tell the big G no I'm not going to take that meeting!
Overall I'm confused as to why you call my story and Jie Qi's story spam? Do you not think her story is true and or mine is? That is not helpful for other not well connected and or rich innovators?
The issue is that your comment broke the site guidelines by insinuating astroturfing without evidence. That's the main thing you're not allowed to do here, as I explained, and have explained ad nauseum before (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).
Separately, there was an issue with your copy-pasting the same comment about this story repeatedly in a previous thread. That is what I called spamming (not the actual story). Doing that is no doubt what led to your being downvoted, rather than manipulation as you implied above.
In cases where the story is relevant, of course it's fine to discuss it. But I don't see that it's relevant here, and your history of bringing it up in ways that break the site guidelines suggest that the bar for relevance needs to be higher than how you've been drawing it.
But the main point is that you can't make up sinister stories about why you got downvoted ("I can attest...") and post them here. Long experience has shown that nearly all such comments are baseless, and as I just said, they eat everything if you let them. Therefore we mustn't let them.
Ok I understand and agree with the spamming recently.
Ive never knew or heard about an astroturf guideline before. Thanks for pointing it out ... i was trying to start a debate as I wasnt sure if my comment was downvoted voraciously because of multiple posts or something else?
As for telling my story and or Jie Qi's similar one in posts that detail other bad behavior from Google I wonder how that isn't relevant? Per the upvotes HN readers must feel it holds relevance? Though you don't think pointing out that Google steals/gets caught stealing IP is relevant to other posts detailing more/other examples of their bad behavior?
Correct, for the most part I don't think that, because it tends to make the threads more generic. For example, in this case the topic was about GDPR and identifiers in real-time bid advertising. It's fine if that leaps a single hop to, say, privacy issues. But if it leaps more than that, to every bad thing that Google has ever done, then the discussion will simply be "Google bad" vs. "Google good", which is far too generic to be interesting. It's a bit like what happens when you blend too many paints together. Everything becomes the same shade of brown. And this problem gets much worse when the things people bring up are predictable, i.e. have been repeated from the past. That guarantees a predictable discussion, which although it may be very agitated, has zero curiosity in it—and curiosity is the whole point of this site (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Yes curiosity is indeed what this site is about and if you see below HN user "philwelch," was interested & curious about Ji Qie's story as he wasn't familiar with it. I pointed it out to him and satisfying his and other HN readers interest & curiosity it received 14 upvotes. Aren't the upvotes saying the information was useful, their interest and curiosity was satisfied?
Though are you saying I should never talk about Google getting caught stealing IP where it's relevant on Hacker News(have you censored other members b4 on certain topics)? It does not satisfy readers curiosity or is helpful to other dreamers/innovators, ones who dont have Joi Ito (MIT student's advisor) on their side, in whats the best way forward when Google R&D sends an invite?
Ive been a HN reader and commenter since 2007 and spoken freely since. I hope I am to continue to do so!
Or maybe that particular story didn't really stand on its merits. I never saw the thread, but from my perspective (which is increasingly skeptical of Google), any sort of "stealing IP from interview candidates" theory doesn't make much sense.
I saw that happen to you when you pointed that out in the big Anthony Levandowski discussion a week ago--but I think a lot of that had to do with you posting essentially the same comment at three different places in the same thread. I don't think it started getting downvoted until then.
I have noticed this pattern over several years. A few of the times it trips the flamebait detector and gets buried. Negative stories about other big tech companies don't seem to have the same issue with staying up.
Could also be selfishness, I remember reading an article about leaked internal Facebook employees where some employees would pressure others to not talk about privacy or sensitive topics because it would hurt the stock price further and therefore hurt all employees. I can't seem to find the article. I can see employees of big companies trying to sway or minimize decisions to feel like they are protecting their future earnings.
I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this.
As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy practices, Apple for their crappy laptop keyboards, but it's a tiny minority that goes after Tesla when they're the company least capable of hiring people to argue on the internet.
(I would also assume that it's a little bit overrated how often this happens, for the sole reason that I spend a lot of time arguing on the internet and never once have I received an offer to go pro!)
I used to read a Financial Times article from either 2011 or 2012 (can’t remember exactly) where some Israeli military person was confirming that Israel was using what we now call shill accounts (he used a different, more pleasantly sounding term). If Israel does it I’m pretty sure Russia and China do it, too.
(I don’t have a direct link to said FT article, just a photo I took of said military person’s quote which is somewhere on one of my computers)
> As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.
I would guess that those are, more often than not, not paid shills but rather just people who like taking devil’s-advocate sides in arguments “for fun”, i.e. just for the challenge of seeing if they can construct a valid rebuttal to a comment. (I say this because I believe I’ve done this myself more than once, and I know my personality-type isn’t uncommon on HN.)
How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit?
I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't mean it's the Devil and everything it does is evil. It's a country, not unlike Russia or the US.
(Particular things I've been addressing in the past are a) treating a billion+ population as if it was a small country, and b) blaming China for all cheap mass produced crap and its environmental impact, conveniently forgetting that they aren't doing it for fun, but to fulfill orders from Western companies.)
Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else.
Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.
Your points are fair, and I'm not saying China isn't directly responsible for the environmental costs of both their internal and export manufacturing. But it's not fair to shift all of the blame, as some naïve or disingenuous people do, because most of the export manufacturing is either managed by and done for western companies (China being "the factory of the world"), or simply driven by the demand on western markets. In other words, their environmental impact is in large part caused by our consumerism. And if China decided to no longer serve as the world's 3D printer, you're correct that some other nation would probably take up that role - and those same naïve/disingenuous people would then decry that nation for all its environmental problems.
In other words: it's bad that China is offering, but it's also bad for the west to take them up on that offer.
> Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else.
That's IMO just giving up. Corporations are not yet independent governments, they should still be taken to account in the countries they originate from and those they operate in.
> China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place.
Not sure what they disrupted. It looks to me they played by the books, simply arbitraging labor costs like everyone else does in a global economy. Still, it's a feedback loop - China is enabling western consumerism, but growing consumerism is driving further growth in environmentally unsound manufacturing, most of which happens in China. If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would. It's a feedback loop, and both sides of it are to blame.
>If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would.
I’ll point the finger at any country who lets their national environment(which is really a global resource, we all share the same air and oceans) get trashed in the name of industrialization to serve consumerism.
Western countries have a system that controls those externalities at least to some extent, in the US we have the EPA, OSHA, and our various institutions of permitting make sure of that, at a very real cost to businesses and consumers. By not caring about the environment developing countries absolutely are burdening the species long term. The lack of a level playing field in this regard enables consumerism because you are allowing consumers to not pay for externalities, else we should really be placing tariffs on any country who doesn’t meet at least EPA regulations and probably all of our regulations and laws—building, safety, worker compensation—but that would likely shock the global economic system. This is what “developing” countries disrupt, and why I think that ultimately globalization and environmentalism(which I prioritize personally right now) are incompatible. This is a problematic conclusion because war is probably worse for the environment and globalism is the only thing that’s made this era so relatively peaceful.
I don’t think you can blame both sides, because on one side you have a relatively organized group of people with power who rule a country, and on the other you have a mass of people with 0 organization and no structural power whatsoever. Blaming the /populace/ of any country for a problem is a very slippery slope indeed.
I feel like on a place like this site where there are occasionally job postings and networking opportunities, there's an element of "my comments are my CV/resume" which biases some people towards defending/advocating for companies just in case it affects their career prospects.
Agreed, I see this often.
To be honest if the devil is far more powerful in a given situation, I find it distasteful to fight for him against the hurt party.
At least in the case of corporate defense, most of them are the "free market solves everything" types who believe that if completely left alone, business will turn the world into some utopia.
And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors.
I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.
> while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors.
That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”.
The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in many Google related topics is as a distraction. I don’t have to care about the competitors to be 100% correct when attacking Google.
On the other hand I got downvoted into oblivion even when comparing Google to competitors with undisputed data. My subjective experience is that the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs. And it makes sense that they would be more organized since they are working under one umbrella with more or less one voice. I find it hard to believe that all anti-Google parties would manage to reach anything close to the same level of organization and alignment of goals.
I clearly said it’s my subjective experience. On top of that I just heard things the same way you did. Also some common sense.
Is your implication that ideological warriors can only exist on one side, against Google? Or that Google would resort to plenty of things that are borderline immoral or illegal but they draw the line at playing the PR card to make it look better? How about some of the thousands of employees that support the company line?
You have switched between “whatabout the other guys” and “Google never does this but all their ideological warrior opponents do”. The wording alone is already suspiciously aggressive, not to mention the naive implication that a company like Google would not resort to something all of its opponents are (apparently) doing.
Perhaps Google’s real strength is getting people to blindly support their crap. You see, it doesn’t actually have to be a “campaign” if all they did was train people to distract and constantly point the finger at others, pretend everybody else is bad but Google can’t be, and try to censor (via downvotes, reports, etc.) any internet opinion that doesn’t conform. Might sound weird but it’s more or less a literal summary of what you did in the previous 2 comments.
It doesn’t even require a ‘paid agent’ theory to explain. Large companies actively court allegiance from their employees and spend serious effort to retain it by, for example, relentlessly offering mandatory courses in the company’s Cultural Values and evaluating promotions through that lens.
So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums.
The best way to understand modern tech company culture is to consider them all very successful cults.
I don't know if Google is different in this regard, but every tech company I've worked at has forbidden me from "actively defending my employer's values on forums". Maybe not in so many words, but at the very least there's a prohibition against commenting on the company's business on the internet. PR depends a lot on message discipline, which is not what you get from random employees jumping into these arguments.
Ive even created an account to answer this. It's true that most of these companies have cultural values trainings and a bunch of policies, but it's naive to assume that the hired top 1% will follow these policies or even take them seriously. They are smart enough to not get caught (as if anybody cares to catch them), but that's about it.
The today's employment model is a no strings attached contract: the employment can be terminated for no reason at any moment without a notice. This is a double edged sword: not only it gives the company flexibility to fire anyone they don't like, it makes employees mostly indifferent about the company as long as it cuts the paycheck. A typical software engineer does a 4 year gig and when the stock vesting plan ends, he moves on to another gig. There is no reason to take seriously policies of a company he worked at 10 years ago. And regarding evaluating promotions thru the cultural values lens. Yawn. There's no money in promotions.
For a cult to be successfull, its members need to be bound by something more serious than a company values training they watch once a year.
Remember when Reddit investigated the Boston Marathon bombing and discovered that it was Sunil Tripathi? And then Mr. Tripathi went missing and his body was discovered several weeks later?
False. He went missing a month before the bombings:
>Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings.
I recall that this is exactly what Monsanto was caught doing about a year ago, to cover up the dangerous effects of the chemicals they used (iirc). Paid shills on the internet who had facts at the ready to disprove Monsanto's bad actions, and were willing to use 'conspiracy theorist' to shut up anyone who didn't believe them. And, the facts they used came from legit-looking research, which Monsanto was also exposed to have created fraudulently, by suppressing bad results and elevating 'good' results.
Nation states employ shills to attack other countries best companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. There has been a sustained PR campaign against our companies.
I've seen a huge number of accusations that people espousing my views are shills in some thread here or on reddit. I'm sure there are paid shills, and even in large numbers. I'd bet it's a problem. But we have to be reeeeeeeeallly careful about throwing that label around.
When you're wrong, you shutting down discourse by effectively saying the other person isn't even a person. This gets us to far more extreme us-vs-them dynamics than otherwise possible.
Because literally anything is a fact, when worded the right way. In fact, that's most of what is wrong with the state of our 'News' today. Even little word changes can be used to sway public opinion (ex: 'victim' vs 'drunk woman', in a case an assault victim happened to have been drinking).
I confess that I've also never really understood why people are so outraged by the hypothetical it likely presence of actual shills: it's not like the population of non-shill commenters doesn't already produce every stupid and inane take possible. Shills can shift the composition of votes and comments away from a given board's biases (towards their preferred biases), but what does that change from the perspective of you, the reader? Why would you engage differently with a terrible take from a paid shill and a terrible take from someone dumb enough to sincerely believe it? This seems especially the case on anonymous or pseudonymous fora, where you've already given up hope of leaning on known character as a prior (and IMO that's an excuse for skipping critical thought much of the time anyway).
I think you're overestimating how much people think critically about the news or discussions online. A couple upvoted comments here and there, paid for by a massive corporation, can absolutely influence opinion.
I don't want to sound like I think some "smart" people are somehow immune to this - I think everyone, regardless of their education or intelligence, is susceptible to this kind of group-think.
It seems almost definitional to me that you'd have to be pretty dumb to fall into this trap, but I'm probably being lazy with my terminology, and "bad at thinking" might be a better description than "dumb" (ie, critical thinking is a learnable skill, if you're smart enough).
It's still not clear to me that I see why shills are such a cause for outrage, at least at a personal level: if a person's critical thinking abilities are impaired enough of people that they'd have their views appreciably changed by shills' voting patterns, the absence of shills just means they'd be blindly following the whims of online mobs. I can see how this is better, but just _barely_.
OTOH, for those who are capable of basic critical thinking, shills don't seem to have much power: if they make good points, then good, if they don't, then no harm done.
I just don't see how why bad comments are somehow worse when they're driven by payments instead of simply the stupidity of a normal person.
Critical thinking is one thing, but that's not always or even usually the point of such campaigns. It can be as simple as 'bandwagon effect', which regardless of how silly it is to believe people behave that way, they absolutely do. Few people want to be on the unpopular side of an opinion.
> Few people want to be on the unpopular side of an opinion.
I can't relate to this impulse even a little bit, but believe that it's common. That being said, I don't see how its ubiquity makes it any less a failure of critical thinking ability.
The Internet is a pretty hostile environment for those whose epistemology depends on who's behind the pseudonym: it's not clear to me that shills are going to make these people much worse at thinking and processing information than they already are.
The same goes for those who do have appreciable critical thinking abilities: you shouldn't be credulously consuming the thoughts of any random pseudonym, and the same skeptical habits that inoculate you against dumb ideas from unpaid strangers work roughly as well on shills.
Yeah, I notice this every time there's a story about Facebook or Google, there's always a group of posts that are exclaiming how great their life is since they deleted their account.
> This is the lazy and ignorant method of dismissing other people's arguments.
First, please observe the principle of charity when posting.
> Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?
Because it is entirely possible to tell large lies using small facts.
Because propaganda and disinformation are actual, real things and are very difficult to combat once unleashed in the commons.
Because the "let the marketplace of ideas figure it out" excuse to not police propaganda and disinformation attacks is hopelessly naive at best, and deliberately ineffective at worst.
I'm John and I have views on privacy that are completely genuine and happen to align with what benefits the corporation(s) that my company, TotallyLegitimateComments LLC, contracts for. I believe advertisement is a force for good in the world and can bring together people and products that enrich their lives while creating value for shareholders! While I'd love to share what wonderful businesses my company works with, various privacy agreements prevent us from doing so. However, I can tell you that they all appreciate the fact that you find their views important! We will continue to lobby your congressmen on your behalf to ensure that these views are reflected in the nations laws! Thanks and remember, corporations are people like you and me!
It's like push polling... Poller: "Are you A) a reasonable person who agrees with my totally rational question or B) a psychopath who won't THINK OF THE CHILDREN?" Person taking poll: "Uh, A?"
Is it really a point of view, or is it a carefully engineered sequence of words designed to program people with certain opinions? There are lots of ways to "program" people that bypass their rational mind, and creating a false sense of social consensus is one of them.
Also, I noticed that some submissions unfavorable to Google seem to be flagged heavily (at least, they were posted more recently and had more upvotes, than higher-ranking submissions).
Of course, posting and flagging may not be intentional policy of Google, but also the work of individual Google employees.
It's gotten a little better over the years but still being critical of Google gets you downvoted and flagged quickly.
Also worth highlighting that many HN members work for Google, so they have less incentive to shine light on these issues, sometimes maybe even defend Google.
I would love it for companies to jump into these conversations and defend or explain what's going on. It's less interesting for them to speak through a secret proxy.
That said, I don't think there are nearly as many shills as some people think nor do I think they are very effective.
Not if it's disguised as a private individual (which is the default assumption in discussion forums such as this one).
If a company wants to present its views, they can do so via press releases or clearly mark their posts as such (or via verified accounts like on Twitter).
Honest question: under which law? Does anything actually prohibit companies from employing people from going on forums and shilling? I think it's perfectly fine for the third party platform to have a policy forbidding this, but the government enforcing something like this would not be ok.
I didn't answer the question with laws in mind, as the parent wasn't exactly asking a legal question, but what I would guess would be more a moral one.
IINAL, but since we are at the topic of laws, in the last years influencers (at least in Germany) had to fear hefty fines if they didn't label sponsored posts as such, as that counts for covert advertising. As astroturfing could be construed as advertising, that might fall under the same law.
I think if you want the point of view of a corporation you should feel free to go read their official blog, press releases, etc. They have plenty of ways to spread their point of view that aren't people pretending to be individual commenters.
A corporation is a collection of people. A corporation doesn't have fingers nor mouth, and can't type nor speak. It is always a (series of) paid individual(s) who types and speaks "on behalf of" it.
Note also that "on behalf of" can only exist in response to some prior meeting (or deal) with certain members (board or employees) of the corporation who wish to push "its" policy.
If they want their view heard, they're welcome to share it like everyone else.
Paying someone else to share a very sanitized, market researched version of your opinion while pretending that they're organically sharing their own opinion isn't that. It's dishonest, and it's eroding honest conversations for the sake of advertising.
What's more likely: that Google's willing to risk being outed for employing shills or that there are people who actually hold the opposing viewpoint?
Personally I tend to think of most people on HN as privacy nuts. Honestly of all the problems in the world to get worked up over, online advertising is pretty low on my list. There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it.
If Google or whoever wants to pay me to keep posting, I'm listening.
>that Google's willing to risk being outed for employing shills
This risk might be lower than you think, the key phrase is, "we didn't realize that the marketing firm we contracted was subcontracting to other, shadier marketing firms, who themselves aren't evil, but fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up trusting a yet deeper level of marketing firm, who was in fact evil."
> There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it.
Actually, of all the stuff going on in the world, this is the one thing where you have an actual degree of control that matters.
Sure, one individual won't change business policies. But: you can easily take steps to prevent or reduce the amount of data these companies have on you.
Don't use their services, use an ad blocker, use tracking preventing, etc. You can even easily tailor it to your specific needs.
Compared to stuff like Brexit, fires in the Amazon, Hong Kong, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, attacks on democracy in Turkey, Hungary etc., it is trivial to do something against Google/FB that has at least the effect of protecting you.
The threat that Google's tracking infrastructure represents is not limited to ads. If they stayed in their proverbial lane and used their panopticon exclusively to sell me things, many of us wouldn't mind as much as we do.
But they lend the power and reach of their machine to governments, whether it's China looking to smoke out dissidents, or the NSA PRISM program, or even the DEA itching to score another weed possession arrest, Google gladly and happily does whatever governments ask of them, frequently with no warrant required.
Exactly. I don't care about getting marketed at (an ad blocker is the simple solution there). What I worry about is the collection and storage of all that data, to be used/sold for x purpose by y organisation in perpetuity.
Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.