> Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers
The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than making this bias known.
Are we really beyond "just the facts" journalism, even by new journalism companies?
"Just the facts" journalism was always a myth, because journalists inherently choose which facts to report.
IMHO The Intercept has been pretty up-front about their POV: they're supposed to be the publication that speaks truth to power, meaning that they're opposed to basically all big institutions (Google, Facebook, big corporations, establishment media, both political parties, the government, all governments, etc.) If you share their POV, of course they're the heroic good guy. If you don't, they can be kinda annoying.
Even if you don't fully share their POV, though, it can be good to read them to get a diverse array of POVs. I'm an ex-Googler, so of course I found their anti-Google bias a bit grating. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it, because it was informative and offers a perspective that other mainstream news sources are not reporting on.
I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards.
I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened.
Would the search involve interviewing engineers and management, and then writing biased stories about their life and decisions? Would you treat "investigators inherently choose which facts to report" as an acceptable standard for their work?
No. You'd start with a fact database, you'd go on collecting every bit of related information, making it available to see and analyze, you'd gather conclusions and add things, mark some entries as "dead ends", etc. until the real cause reveals itself. Suddenly it's entirely possible to reach unbiased facts. I wish we created our news the same way.
Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense.
While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible.
Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.
Still not buying it. I don't feel like journalists are trained to tease out facts, they still tease out stories.
For pretty much any newsworthy event there are lots of facts that are concrete and objective, and frankly, that's what matters most of the time. Life decisions and motivations and biases make for a fun reading, but are otherwise irrelevant.
A politician said something, or did not. A company is going forward with a project, or is not. The proposed law implies a consequence X, or does not. Those are ground facts. I'm not saying they're always easy to establish, but the media sources are not even trying.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting site that tries to run Bayesian analysis on various pieces of information and media reports, to piece out the actual reality. See e.g.: https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/what-caused-the-chemical-ca... What I want to point out there is not their analysis in particular. Just how it's structured. It seems that establishing some objectively verifiable summary of a "messy" real-world story is not impossible.
Google does a lot of different things, but people with an axe to grind often like to label Google as something specific that they dislike.
In this case they call it a data mining company, which is both meaningless due to how vague the term is, but also slightly menacing sounding.
Does Google do things that would fall under a reasonable interpretation of data mining? Definitely. Is it their primary activity? Not by a long shot. Even the people who want to label Google an advertising company have more of a point on a revenue basis. But these characterisations are needlessly reductive and lead you to believe false conclusions like "Google wants all of your data"
As it should be. They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence.
This is pretty factual, please don't call it "bias".
Google's primary activity is collecting and monetizing your personal data. That's what their ad business is based on, and their ad business is really the only thing they do that makes money (in Google scale terms of money, anyways). It doesn't matter what department someone at Google works at, their paycheck is paid for by the monetization of that data mining.
Anything else Google does is either a route to more data mining and extraction, or a fun side project they do with money made off data mining and extraction.
That article is about the Google Transparency Project, which is a separate organization from The Intercept. Think of GTP as being a PR firm and The Intercept as being a publication. PR firms work to place sources & articles with publications that they feel will be friendly to their message, but the publication itself is a separate organization that reports on many topics besides what the PR firm wants.
Replace "that sells personal information to advertisers" with "that uses personal information to match consumers to advertisers".
Unless Google really sells personal information somewhere, in which case I'd like to know the price tag on the file about me that's supposedly for sale. My understanding is that such a product doesn't exist.
(Disclosure: I work at Google but on Chrome OS, ie. client hardware. No idea what the servers are doing except that I've heard that there must be lots of them.)
The only practical difference here is that Google isn't giving away their main value proposition. Why give people the product when you can charge them for it over and over?
Either way, at the end of the day, Google is still selling our data.
They are selling data but they are not selling personal information, big difference. If I can't pay them to lookup information about a specific person then they don't sell personal information.
The lead is not only factual, but greatly strengthens the points made within. Google makes the vast majority of their money off advertising and data, they are taking steps that will help them to get an even stronger hold on that market with high potential to be extremely anti-competitive.
Kind of, but really they -are- selling personal information, just not outright. You advertise with Google and get to see the demos, trends, etc so you can target your own ads. It's almost like a SaaS for data mining, especially when you pair it with analytics...which of course you do, that's what goals in analytics are for.
The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than making this bias known.
Are we really beyond "just the facts" journalism, even by new journalism companies?