limpidglitch said:

Just adding this to the lot.
Transparency International report, Apple, Amazon, Google and IBM near the bottom of the heap, along with nice guys like Citigroup, Gazprom and PetroChina.

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nice one, thx for the link.
Quite ugly the report, even the best company barely managed a 7.3 out of 10. Average at best. And the average for the whole list is 3.9 which is mediocre. Google, amazon, apple and co are all around 2.5 which is pretty clear assh*le territory.

And I'm supposed to entrust those guys with my data. Yeah sure.

prot said:

I'm sure you thought about it for almost 10 minutes

. And that's the same as someone doing it as a job for years. Say, a few google guys with phd-s in stats and psychology.

And btw, I did post a link with sample stats usages a few messages above, maybe you missed it. Your playlist is same as good as your shopping list... or a very detailed psychological profile

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So what? You have yet to cite any actual harm caused to you by others knowing your playlist.
 
I have years of professional marketing experience. You may see data as creepy, but I see it as how money is made.
 
As for a detailed psychological profile formed from your listening habits, I guess they could only conclude that I have multiple personalities, since I listen to just about every genre of music. ^_^
 
But what makes you think they care about you particularly? We're talking about millions of users here, so it's mostly automated.

prot said:

I am quite pretty absolutely sure that google is a corporation. And when it comes to privacy few (if any) are worse. But you seem to enjoy their brand of coolaid ... good luck.

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Go grab your tinfoil hat. But while you're hiding, make sure to apply occam's razor, and tell me the likelihood that there is someone paid at Google, to look through what each of their customers plays. Again, I work with tracking every day, and there is VERY LITTLE tracking that actually tracks personal information to tie any user back to a name. BECAUSE IT'S USELESS DATA. There is nothing that you can do with it. I know one organization that implemented one of those scripts, and found it utterly worthless, and way too time consuming to try to report on that data. A very VERY simple cost-benefit analysis will cause you to arrive at that conclusion.
 
I am not drinking any kool-aid, I know that there is data tracked on me, although I use methods to avoid tracking scripts, I still have an account with Google, and they can see some of what I do. But I am not arrogant enough to think that there is anyone there that is so interested in my life that they're reading my emails and checking my playlists. Of course there are servers that are scanning those things, so that they can, again, direct advertisements towards me from Google Ad-Words customers, that's it. Because that is all that they can make money from, and they're a profit maximizer. A profit maximizer isn't going to pay people to study your playlist. Sorry, they just don't care enough to.

Both sides have some valid points.

Yes, there is too much data being collected to generally be used to make specific personal profiles. That said, why would I give away information about myself for free if it's unnecessary. I'm not worried about targeted advertising from sites I purchase from, but don't need to have my personal Internet habits result in spam marketing and product & service targeting.

Someone posted "but I see it as how money is made". My response is that I expect to get compensated for your use of my personal information if you want to profit from it.

Realistically, it's pretty easy to minimize exposing your data without going full tinfoil hat mode. Private browsing, blocking cookies, and using any one of the common browser privacy plugins work pretty well. Add in ad blocking software and most of the annoyances are gone.

bfreedma said:

Both sides have some valid points.

Yes, there is too much data being collected to generally be used to make specific personal profiles. That said, why would I give away information about myself for free if it's unnecessary. I'm not worried about targeted advertising from sites I purchase from, but don't need to have my personal Internet habits result in spam marketing and product & service targeting.

Someone posted "but I see it as how money is made". My response is that I expect to get compensated for your use of my personal information if you want to profit from it.

Realistically, it's pretty easy to minimize exposing your data without going full tinfoil hat mode. Private browsing, blocking cookies, and using any one of the common browser privacy plugins work pretty well. Add in ad blocking software and most of the annoyances are gone.

Click to expand...

 
There are very many places where you are paid - by free content that couldn't be available without something to pay for it. And targeted advertising ensures that advertisers are willing to pay more, so that you can have a few targeted ads instead of a deluge of random ads in shotgun format.

bfreedma said:

Both sides have some valid points.

Yes, there is too much data being collected to generally be used to make specific personal profiles. That said, why would I give away information about myself for free if it's unnecessary. I'm not worried about targeted advertising from sites I purchase from, but don't need to have my personal Internet habits result in spam marketing and product & service targeting.

Someone posted "but I see it as how money is made". My response is that I expect to get compensated for your use of my personal information if you want to profit from it.

Realistically, it's pretty easy to minimize exposing your data without going full tinfoil hat mode. Private browsing, blocking cookies, and using any one of the common browser privacy plugins work pretty well. Add in ad blocking software and most of the annoyances are gone.

Click to expand...

 
Pretty much any membership, whether free or paid, has terms of use you must agree to before joining. If you use a free service, it's likely that you are indeed the thing that is being sold, in the sense that relevant data is gathered and used for marketing purposes. While the things you mentioned can block some of that, other things are intrinsic to the service itself. Just look at Facebook. Virtually every move you make is tracked in order to serve more targeted ads, and everyone agreed to it when joining. Music streaming sites are nothing like that, though. Their data is more in the general statistics category. Which songs are played can hardly be called personal information.
 

reginalb said:

  There are very many places where you are paid - by free content that couldn't be available without something to pay for it. And targeted advertising ensures that advertisers are willing to pay more, so that you can have a few targeted ads instead of a deluge of random ads in shotgun format.

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Exactly. Most websites with free content (including this one) rely on advertising revenue. Might as well have it targeted to the end user.

reginalb said:

bfreedma said:

Both sides have some valid points.

Yes, there is too much data being collected to generally be used to make specific personal profiles. That said, why would I give away information about myself for free if it's unnecessary. I'm not worried about targeted advertising from sites I purchase from, but don't need to have my personal Internet habits result in spam marketing and product & service targeting.

Someone posted "but I see it as how money is made". My response is that I expect to get compensated for your use of my personal information if you want to profit from it.

Realistically, it's pretty easy to minimize exposing your data without going full tinfoil hat mode. Private browsing, blocking cookies, and using any one of the common browser privacy plugins work pretty well. Add in ad blocking software and most of the annoyances are gone.

Click to expand...

 
There are very many places where you are paid - by free content that couldn't be available without something to pay for it. And targeted advertising ensures that advertisers are willing to pay more, so that you can have a few targeted ads instead of a deluge of random ads in shotgun format.

Click to expand...

Agreed. That why I limit sharing my personal and behavioral information with sites I use frequently and whose content I'm interested in. And why I don't share that same information with sites like Google where the terms of agreement specifically give them the right to use it as they wish short of releasing personal identity information.

music alchemist said:

bfreedma said:

Both sides have some valid points.

Yes, there is too much data being collected to generally be used to make specific personal profiles. That said, why would I give away information about myself for free if it's unnecessary. I'm not worried about targeted advertising from sites I purchase from, but don't need to have my personal Internet habits result in spam marketing and product & service targeting.

Someone posted "but I see it as how money is made". My response is that I expect to get compensated for your use of my personal information if you want to profit from it.

Realistically, it's pretty easy to minimize exposing your data without going full tinfoil hat mode. Private browsing, blocking cookies, and using any one of the common browser privacy plugins work pretty well. Add in ad blocking software and most of the annoyances are gone.

Click to expand...

 
Pretty much any membership, whether free or paid, has terms of use you must agree to before joining. If you use a free service, it's likely that you are indeed the thing that is being sold, in the sense that relevant data is gathered and used for marketing purposes. While the things you mentioned can block some of that, other things are intrinsic to the service itself. Just look at Facebook. Virtually every move you make is tracked in order to serve more targeted ads, and everyone agreed to it when joining. Music streaming sites are nothing like that, though. Their data is more in the general statistics category. Which songs are played can hardly be called personal information.
 

reginalb said:

 There are very many places where you are paid - by free content that couldn't be available without something to pay for it. And targeted advertising ensures that advertisers are willing to pay more, so that you can have a few targeted ads instead of a deluge of random ads in shotgun format.

Click to expand...

 
Exactly. Most websites with free content (including this one) rely on advertising revenue. Might as well have it targeted to the end user.

Click to expand...

One of the many reasons I don't have a FaceBook account....
As mentioned above, I do read the terms of any site I consider signing up at. And analyze many others for clients so they can assess their exposure.

Oddly, one of the most privacy friendly site is Microsoft. Unlike Amazon AWS and Google, MS specifically states that no data mining, sharing, or "Big Data" analysis is performed on client data stored in their cloud and made available for purchase. If people actually read the Google Terms of Service, they would be pretty shocked at what they're signing up for.

bfreedma said:

One of the many reasons I don't have a FaceBook account....
As mentioned above, I do read the terms of any site I consider signing up at. And analyze many others for clients so they can assess their exposure.

Oddly, one of the most privacy friendly site is Microsoft. Unlike Amazon AWS and Google, MS specifically states that no data mining, sharing, or "Big Data" analysis is performed on client data stored in their cloud and made available for purchase. If people actually read the Google Terms of Service, they would be pretty shocked at what they're signing up for.

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No worries, you and I are prolly the .01% who does that kind of stuff. Nowadays you are called names for simply paying attention to stuff and not signing up blindly for free pencils.
Anyway, someone change the subject please. It's not particularly funny and personally I'm not trying to convince anyone.

prot said:

No worries, you and I are prolly the .01% who does that kind of stuff. Nowadays you are called names for simply paying attention to stuff and not signing up blindly for free pencils.
Anyway, someone change the subject please. It's not particularly funny and personally I'm not trying to convince anyone.

Click to expand...

Change subject to:
Which is superior, tubes or transistors?

chris j said:

Change subject to:
Which is superior, tubes or transistors?

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Heck, why don't we talk about line cords and designer fuses??

mr rick said:

Heck, why don't we talk about line cords and designer fuses??

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OK.
Thoughts?

mr rick said:

  Heck, why don't we talk about line cords and designer fuses??

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... Or to keep it remotely OT; how about science's capacity to think or speak.  

http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
another look at it.


to get almost back on topic, the reason why the "what is the best?" kind of question is always a waste of time, is because gears are rarely the best at everything. what it the gest headphone? the one with a particular FR? the one with the lowest distortion? the one that rolls off very slowly on both ends? the one with the best left/right matching? the one that is easy to drive?
to decide upon a winner we first need to decide what we're judging, and that's why the OP's question was bound to go nowhere.
I guess for DACs we could give some objective winners sometimes, but as most DACs are transparent, it's not super useful.
amp without knowing what headphone it will drive is a waste of time. and headphones need the community to agree on at least a FR for starters.

still science does have recommendations for sound fidelity. DAC doesn't matter much because the rest usually sucks more.
amps should have flat FR, low distortion and low noise floor. if they can drive the headphone, it's kind of a + ^-^
and headphones... should be speakers

castleofargh said:

http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
another look at it.


to get almost back on topic, the reason why the "what is the best?" kind of question is always a waste of time, is because gears are rarely the best at everything. what it the gest headphone? the one with a particular FR? the one with the lowest distortion? the one that rolls off very slowly on both ends? the one with the best left/right matching? the one that is easy to drive?
to decide upon a winner we first need to decide what we're judging, and that's why the OP's question was bound to go nowhere.
I guess for DACs we could give some objective winners sometimes, but as most DACs are transparent, it's not super useful.
amp without knowing what headphone it will drive is a waste of time. and headphones need the community to agree on at least a FR for starters.

still science does have recommendations for sound fidelity. DAC doesn't matter much because the rest usually sucks more.
amps should have flat FR, low distortion and low noise floor. if they can drive the headphone, it's kind of a + ^-^
and headphones... should be speakers

Click to expand...

Definitely. They should also stay portable, isolate the outside noise both ways and sound same as clear