Not OK, Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Not OK, Google

#411

Post by DanBC » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

a_lifters_life wrote: post #410

HillaryBriss wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

UK regulators recently fined TalkTalk £400,000 for a large data breach.

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl...

That's not company ending, but it should get the attention of directors.

Re: Not OK, Google

#412

Post by golergka » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

programmer_man wrote: post #143

wj wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you visit a place of business you are potentially under surveillance. I'm sure there is a distinction but I'm failing to come up with it right now. I was somewhat radical about privacy in the late 90s (only person I knew that read every EULA) and am still a supporter of the EFF but I don't really understand the issue here.

The distinction is that when you visit a place of business, the data is under the control of the business owner. When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control. Therefore, Google has a WAY bigger responsibility than most people realize, once they decided to collect this data.

> When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.

But it was your friend's decision to delegate that control. So, Google having that control is still a consequence of your friend's control.

Re: Not OK, Google

#413

Post by j2kun » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #366

xanderstrike wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't come up with uses for it, you weren't its target audience in the first place.

Sure, but then I'm not sure anyone I know is the target audience. Not that many people really need or want personal secretaries in the first place , let alone want to make financial and privacy sacrifices so they can have a mentally retarded AI pseudo-secretary. Most people get through their daily lives just fine on their own.

Ignoring your derisive tone, the statement "most people get through their daily lives just fine without it" applies to every new technology. Yet here we are, typing away on the internet.

Re: Not OK, Google

#414

Post by carapace » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #390

rch wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met a good friend and current employer because Google Now told me about an event I might be interested in a couple of years ago. Of course it also once told me how long it would take to get to an ex's house from my current girlfriend's place. How about an 'OK, funny once' command?

As a possibly humourous thought along those lines, imagine explaining to your future child they were born because of a Google Now reminder. ;) (eugenics through large scale suggestions anyone? ;>)

Heh, uh, oh shit.

This isn't funny at all. "They" (or Skynet) could totally do this and who would be the wiser?

Re: Not OK, Google

#415

Post by fweespeech » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

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.

Yeah, but that is also the equivalent of 24/7 surveillance of all locations you visit. Google will end up figuring out whom you sleep with, etc. from that information.

Pretty much your only privacy is in your head at that point.

I'm not sure that is a "threshold" of privacy but rather a "I am okay with 24/7 surveillance of all of my activity."

Re: Not OK, Google

#416

Post by CaptSpify » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:53 PM UTC

overcast wrote: post #398

CaptSpify wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much like a jewish person in Poland in the 1940's or a Japanese in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment We tend to think that the nazi's were crazy out-there, but we weren't too far off not that long ago, and we can get back there pretty quickly.

While not to justify their existence, those internment camps were not even in any stretch of the mind "like" the German death camps.

Oh, I totally agree. But it is a similar mindset that led them to the German death camps.

Re: Not OK, Google

#417

Post by smallnamespace » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:53 PM UTC

mziel wrote: post #364

mason55 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are all kinds of interesting thought experiments. What happens when a classifier innocently discovers that the best classification is by race? Do we care? How about if we remove race but it happens to discover that four features which are very strongly correlated to race are the best way to classify?

There are ways to account for that. A model can be fit to race, and then you only predict "on top" of race (meaning residuals). You use that model, which is independent of race.

But if the racial factors aren't all the same, then that creates an incentive for people to lie about their race.

If you verify the race field, then now you're in the business of enforcing racial definitions.

Re: Not OK, Google

#418

Post by 2bitencryption » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #407

Nursie wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And traffic.

I use Google Maps every single day to get to and from work, simply because it knows how to avoid traffic. 10% of the time it saves me half an hour on my commute.

Re: Not OK, Google

#419

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:58 PM UTC

CyberShadow wrote: post #409

nevir wrote: post #387

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. 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?

[deleted]

Re: Not OK, Google

#420

Post by thesimpsons1022 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:59 PM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #50

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.

One tiny caveat being that, Google (and others as well, to be fair) will be able to indirectly collect data even on the privacy-aware part of the population who don't use Google much. The simplest example being, even if you don't use GMail, still some part of your emails inevitably end up in GMail inboxes. Now also consider this: just being a guest in a Google-stuffed house means you are under surveillance. So no, it…

a non-insignificant proportion of hacker news seems to actually work at google and run to their defense at anything somewhat critical of their overlord.