From the article- "In other words, your daily business is Google’s business." From Google- "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." One thing that drives me mad about Google is how they say "the world's information", then ignore 99.9% of the worlds information, and then expect their consumers to give them a pass and not call them to account for how they…
Not OK, Google
321–330 of 594 posts
Re: Not OK, Google
#322I was pissed when Google suggested I take pictures of the restaurant I was in and submit them.
Re: Not OK, Google
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But why is this a bad thing? Do you trust every single person at Google, and every single person at every third party company Google shares your data with, now and in perpetuity, to never abuse the data collected on you? Personally, my circle of trust is not that large. Totalitarian Surveillance is here. In the west. Secure document releases aside, it's too easy to do to imagine a state actor not doing it. Data bre…
Sure, there are some trust issues, but just regarding your two first points: A very limited number of Google employees have access to private user data (only when it's vital to their work) and they have strict policies in place (data does not leave the data centers etc.). Which third parties are you referring to? As far as I know, Google does not give their users' private data to a third party.
Lots of reference to a user's private data - but what is private? Is my zipcode, gender, and birthdate private? Those three factors can be used to uniquely identify greater than 80% of the US population. Are the GPS locations I visit private? If so, why does information about them show up on lock screens?
Third parties get my voice recordings for "improving the voice recognition service" - what if my name is mentioned in the background of one of those recordings? What if I'm not a savvy user and add private data to those recordings?
You're also talking about what's in place today. If I give Google my data, that data is probably going to stay with Google as long as they are a business (and potentially after, if Google were ever liquidated and their assets sold off). What measures are in place to protect me then?
Re: Not OK, Google
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
But as mentioned above, if you don't want Google to potentially track your behaviour and preferences, "don't use their services" encompasses "don't send email to anyone with a gmail address".
Which IMO is a valid thing. If you are sending something to someone, they are free to do what they want with it. You can't force them to treat it differently. If i'm on gmail, then you need to talk to gmail to talk to me. It's a tradeoff you'll need to make. If you want you can GPG encrypt the email, but there is nothing from stopping me (legally, morally, or otherwise) from just decrypting it and replying with the c…
I dunno, it's not quite that black and white. If I send someone (say) a poem I wrote, even if unsolicited, I retain the copyright and the moral rights in that poem. The recipient doesn't get carte blanche to reproduce it just because I sent it to them.
So, by the same token, does Google have the rights to profile people even if they haven't consented to that? One answer, as with copyright, is to see what the law says; and it's very possible that the law says no, especially in the EU. (I've not researched it; others will doubtless know much more than I do.)
Or Google could just seek to do the right thing and not profile people unless they've opted in. But my definition of the right thing may well be different to theirs.
Re: Not OK, Google
#325Google Now has done the same for me, told me how long it will take to get to a bar I frequent. My reaction was quite exactly "Oh that's neat, thanks!" and I went and had a great burger that night. Totally OK for me Google. I respect that people have different privacy thresholds, but I think the fact that it's different for everyone is being lost in articles like this.
My experience has been quite the opposite in terms of convenience and relevance: I commute by car and train (for some parts of the same journey) and google Now, google Maps (etc) have been totally useless there: telling me about traffice jams when I'm in the train, not telling me about train delays, etc... it now somehow thinks my home is at the train station, it tells me the last bus home is leaving soon when I've been home for hours, also Google Now's insistence on bombarding the leftmost pane on my phone with the most click-bait articles ever, often about things I had a passing interest in months ago, is just laughable.
I would be glad to give Google some of my very precious privacy, implementing some countermeasures like multiple and burner identities as needed, if I thought they had any chance of actually providing real value. So far they have failed miserably, I am not sure the economics of providing a really useful service there for free just with marketing information as source of income work now, or for a very long time. You'd need strong AI to actually help my day to day life, with solid non obvious guessing based on many very local and specific factors. I guess as long as people kind of believe that this future is coming, they may tolerate the invasion and forget about the promises.
Re: Not OK, Google
#326Imagine you're a something like a muslim in the US, and somoene like Trump is elected 5 years from now. You've been here all your life, you have a job, you pay your taxes, you're just a person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Much like a jewish person in Poland in the 1940's. Now even back then, it was not easy to escape persecution... but it was possible. In a google world though, there's nothing preventing a corrupt government, or even a corrupt corporate governence from take over, or leveraging this data to your disadvantage. Perhaps your car recognizes you, and locks you in until police come, perhaps you felt safe enough to go to a bar, and that data was forwarded.
Perhaps an exaggeration, the point is, even if you trust google today. There's no guarantee that data will always be held by the people who are google today. We know for a fact the NSA had access to all google data up until at least the snowdon leaks. To me that's the concern about privacy, you have no idea how it can be used AGAINST you in the future.
Re: Not OK, Google
#327From the article- "In other words, your daily business is Google’s business." From Google- "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." One thing that drives me mad about Google is how they say "the world's information", then ignore 99.9% of the worlds information, and then expect their consumers to give them a pass and not call them to account for how they…
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deforestation
First off let me put this out there, people that send me "lmgtfy" links annoy the f#ck-sh#t out of me. I'm proficient at utilizing search engines, thanks pal.
More directly to the point, I was (clearly) comparing the relative resources Google invests in some data sets vs others. Are you arguing that Google invests comparable resources in this type of data compared to the resources it invests in understanding Google's users' data sets?
Re: Not OK, Google
#328I think it's right for people in the know to be concerned. The direction has all kinds of possible disastrous consequences. But it also has lots of amazing dual-use possibilities for making our lives more fluid, and technology more magical. You can't deny both.
Trying to take some big stand against it I don't believe will work. Look at all those who took a stand against the 2nd Iraq war -- they were drowned out. And now everyone thinks the opposite. Culture/society always pushes a particular direction until there's a very big disastrous reason to think otherwise. Until something clearly really really bad happens this is the track we're on, like it or not.
Re: Not OK, Google
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody was thinking about "the cloud" back in those days. Back then, your data, you programs all lived and ran on your own computer in your home. Most people didn't go online, and if you did, it was mostly to read and download data to use locally on your own computer. Connections were intermittent and slow. The idea that your own data would be stored online was almost unimaginable; even using network-depending applic…
This is a great point, people didn't imagine a world where we became the product.
That existed at least as long as cable TV, probably longer.
Re: Not OK, Google
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's what I remembered, but it seems they replaced "Delete Location History" with a "Manage Activities" button which opens Google Maps and shows you location history, allowing you to delete it but only one day at a time. EDIT: Okay, found it. Follow your instructions then open that "Manage Activities" -> Menu -> Settings -> Scroll down -> Delete All Location History. You _must_ do this for every account if yo…
You _must_ do this for every account if you have multiple. As I would expect? I don't know of any service that has a "And also do this for all my other distinct acounts too".
A global "turn off and delete all location history on this device" would be best, really.
At least for turning it off I expected it to be phone wide, not account specific. Deletion yeah, I suppose you're right.