Viewing profile — arctux

Related earlier post: > I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage totally mischar…

> All these links are year or two old. Two of them are more than a year old, but the practices described in each are ongoing. The third, which describes Google's tracking of users …

> And I can't vouch for all of Google, but regarding location data, Google has been pretty transparent regarding which data is collected and stored; papers like NYT covered it exte…

I'm syncing around 90 GB between my server, laptop, and LineageOS Pixel phone. I use it to sync my documents, music, passwords, and archived pictures. I also use it to sync photos …

I've only seen articles that say Google was going to "explore" adding differential privacy to Gboard analytics [0]. Do you know if the feature ever shipped, and is it the only way …

No. Fines exist to dissuade illegal behavior. The loopholes that Google (and Apple, and many other multinationals) should be abolished, and any tax evasion should be prosecuted. An…

> We also shouldn't pretend that the EU justification for fines is purely about citizen protection, they see this as a "tax" as well (though that is of course not their primary mot…

I think that this is a fairly common when it comes to technology. The terms and conditions seem reasonable ("we collect some data to provide more relevant ads"), but when you look …

I'm emphatically not defending them here, but it may make sense from their perspective. They live and die by ad targeting and maintaining their monopoly power over social networks,…

You seem to be correct. > Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform I have never felt that I have been confused by something so justif…

This is not correct: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/

The Google Maps API is a good example. They increased prices by an order of magnitude while simultaneously decreasing the free tier with one month's notice. [0] [0] http://geoaweso…

I strongly dislike that they've done that. In their partial defense, the selection of recommended articles based on your browsing history is done on device.

Yes, but it's not the default. From the article: > One could, however, add a second passphrase that is never sent to the server, and encrypt the data using that. Chrome provides th…

This is a good example of why Firefox is so important. Mozilla's incentives, unlike those of companies making significant revenue from tracking-based advertising, align with the us…