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Not OK, Google

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Re: Not OK, Google

#401

Post by jerf »

witty_username wrote: post #395
jerf wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Imagine it was a personal secretary you had that gave you the EXACT same information. Gave you your flight information, turned on the light when you asked, gave you the weather and your schedule." In your metaphor, you are implicitly paying the secretary, so the secretary is incentivized to maintain your interests. How much have you paid Google for its free services? Your metaphor is inapplicable. You don't have a s…

Google earns most of their money through ads.

That's why I called them a salesman. They sell things. Their interests are not simply your own.

It seems to be a theme here today... a company can't serve both advertisers and customers. In the end, one of them has to win, and given the monetary flows, it's not even remotely a contest which it will be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12644507

Re: Not OK, Google

#402

Post by jsymolon »

blawson wrote: post #164
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a fairly uncommon name and predominately use Gmail. Still, I receive a surprising amount of other people's mail in error. Apparently lots of people guess at email addys. I do often wonder at both the lack of privacy this engenders and what the Goog machine must make of it all.

I definitely worry about my life being affected by situations like this. I receive a ridiculous amount of other people's email - for serious things like email account reset, to banking info. When the Ashley Madison hack happened, my email address was there multiple times! Imagine if my then-partner had bothered to look, what a mess that would be.

> for serious things like email account reset, to banking info.

I've called American Express a couple of times to report errant emails with account info ending up in my email. THEY didn't care that one of their customers had an issue, they thought it was a great time to have me fork over MY info "to check".

Re: Not OK, Google

#403

Post by r00fus »

peeters wrote: post #296
iamleppert wrote: post #284

"AI" is incredibly overhyped. Most of the features and applications I've seen can be relegated into the "that's neat" category, before they are turned off and never used again. Google recently started telling me how heavy the traffic is on my commute because they've figured out I do it every day, and when I'm doing it. That's nice, but I don't care. I could already get that information from my car's GPS and seeing ho…

> That's nice, but I don't care. I could already get that information from my car's GPS and seeing how red the roads were. I guess people have different experiences. Personally, I know how to get home from work, so I don't feel the need to turn on my GPS every time I drive home. So I appreciate getting notified when there's notable variances in drive times, without me having to look for it every day.

How often is it correct? I use Waze infrequently (mostly it's turned off in privacy) but it often gets things wrong (it's better than Apple's maps or Google Maps).

I need to get home on time to pickup kids, but mostly just leave a bit early...

Re: Not OK, Google

#404

Post by witty_username »

nojvek wrote: post #360

Here's why I am afraid of Google. Google could have the best intentions, but its wife NSA that Google occasionally sleeps with doesn't. Everything you say to Google Home could possibly be recorded. Storage and Computing power for google is cheap. They can record everything you say in your home. Their algorithms can connect all sorts of information about you. If trump wants to create the next Muslim holocaust, Google…

How does Google manipulate humans to click on their ads?

Re: Not OK, Google

#405

Post by thght »

I would love to have personal devices that collect my private data and apply AI for my personal benefit, but only then if all data stays inside the device under my exclusive supervision. As soon as this data is sent to some cloud service beloning to a company in the business of generating wealth and power, I totally lose my appetite.

Re: Not OK, Google

#406

Post by marcosdumay »

blhack wrote: post #215
Koshkin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, traps are usually designed so that it is simple to get into them. It is not that cheese is bad, it is that you are trapped.

Are you comparing something designed to kill a rat with something designed to help me go to a burger place I like, or leave on time for work?

Yes. How does Google make money of this service again?

Re: Not OK, Google

#407

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Nursie wrote: post #177
ubercore wrote: post #11

Google 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.

When it first told me it knew hiw long my commute would take, I realised it was creepy as all hell that the people (in another country with few protections on data) providing my phone software knew enough about me to tell where I worked and when I was going there. And it annoys me that on maps, when you turn off all the spying capabilities there's no fallback to local history. You either share it with us or you get n…

Failing to provide local history is essentially one of the dark patterns to getting you to turn on their privacy collection. Most things Google requires it for could easily be done outside the cloud, but by making things depend on the cloud, and then telling everyone you can only do it with the cloud, you convince people that they need the cloud. When in reality, they never did.

GPS navigation devices with much less storage than a phone have been more than capable of what Google Maps offers for a long time. There's essentially no reason for it to do anything with the Internet except getting map updates.

Re: Not OK, Google

#408

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sireat wrote: post #270
ubercore wrote: post #11

Google 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.

I am actually quite uncomfortable that my stock Android is making suggestions on how long it should take for me to get home or work (when I have never explicitly mentioned that it is my home or work). The problem is that I want to use Google Maps so what choice do I really have? Sure I use a dedicated gmail for my phone but that really does not help much.

HERE is an excellent maps alternative, I'd highly recommend it.

Re: Not OK, Google

#409

Post by CyberShadow »

nevir wrote: post #387
ubercore wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and to illustrate your point, I have an email very similar to someone else's. I very frequently get their emails (invoices, church events, travel itineraries, purchase receipts). Google thinks they're _my_ trips, and updates me about flight times. I think this example serves both our points. To your point, it's totally leaked this other person's info into my "google world" because I'm on gmail. On the other han…

> Sure, and to illustrate your point, I have an email very similar to someone else's. I very frequently get their emails (invoices, church events, travel itineraries, purchase receipts). Google thinks they're _my_ trips, and updates me about flight times. Fun story there. Because Google's internal privacy safeguards are so strict, the people working on features like that can't look for example emails to train their M…

> and almost no one forwards along positive nor negative examples

One time, when I marked a bunch of incorrectly-classified emails as "not spam", the Gmail web UI asked me if I wanted to send these emails to the Gmail spam team. Was this what you meant, or something else?

Re: Not OK, Google

#410

Post by a_lifters_life »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #362
piyush_soni wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know for sure if they are violating their privacy policies. But as I said, if they are doing it, and it comes out by any means, it will be the dead end of their business. So it's in their best interest to not to do that and only improve upon users' trust. So yes, there's certain level of trust I put into them, just like the trust I put into big food product companies that they'd respect the ingredients list,…

> if they are doing it ... it will be the dead end of their business. I wish I could share your confidence about that. It seems to me we've seen corporate data leaks, deceptive practices, huge hack attacks, etc and all that happens is the corporations get a temporary PR black eye -- and then spring back into action as powerfully as before. In the case of Google, if it came out that, say, Russian hackers had breached…

Im with HillaryBriss here. There aren't enough repercussions for leaking pii data.
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