Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. - Marshall McLuhan
Not OK, Google
551–560 of 594 posts
Re: Not OK, Google
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's privacy in decentralization but you have to recognize that for many of us, there's value in openness. I'm very optimistic about Google making my life better in lots of little ways. I have virtually no concerns about my openness to Google causing me trouble.
"making my life better in lots of little ways" I think that's a common goal and widespread belief and find its implication of having given up on "bigger ways" troubling. Our industry was going to change the world. Rewrite the cultural rules of socializing. Rebuild the economy in a new form. Encourage major cultural and political shifts by empowering the little guy. Bring knowledge to the ignorant, companionship to th…
While it doesn't seem like that much of a revolution, things have changed significantly.
For centuries, people have navigated using stars and maps, yet now you have turn by turn navigation in your pocket with real time traffic and crowd sourced traffic incidents. You can reach most of the world population instantly by dialing a few numbers or even sending them a text message or mms, no matter where they are.
In the context of the article, a couple of years ago, Google Now told me I had to leave for a meetup in my calendar that I completely forgot about, gave me transit directions for a part of a city I've never been at and got me in exactly at the meetup start time.
While that all seems like modern conveniences nowadays, even thirty years ago if you'd have told people that you couldn't get lost anywhere in the world and could get ahold of just about anyone at anytime instantly, they'd think you'd be talking about science fiction, not today's reality.
Re: Not OK, Google
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely, and this is why it needs to be a global option to disable location history - just sending it to them in the first place is the problem!
Can't you simply disable the GPS radio?
I still want maps, I just don't want my every move logged or sent to Google.
Re: Not OK, Google
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends how you view what you're setting. Do you think you're setting a behavior of the phone, or a behavior of your account?
I guess it could be both but I view it first as a setting of the account since you can also be location tracked perhaps by a browser, or your Wear device? That would be my first go-to on that setting but I guess it can be seen both ways.
Wear devices have to be paired with a phone and browsers don't really have the constant access they want for this.
Re: Not OK, Google
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always say that. What about the real emergencies? There's a lot of anxiety and dread that carrying a phone seems to alleviate. I live in a big city. There's always a phone nearby, including landlines and payphones (they're still there precisely for emergency reasons). There are also passerbys who can help me. The risk of being all alone, having an urgent need to call 911, and be unable to do so is much too sma…
What city do you live in where there are always payphones around? All the cities I've been in have had virtually all their payphones torn out long ago.
Canada still has payphones.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadians-...
Re: Not OK, Google
#556Imagine the storage implications - i mean they have a hard time to store every click we make with the mouse, now they will have to store every noise and breath we make as well. I see a data store with the size of Canada.
Also how do they plan to make money besides the initial cost of the gadget? Can they push adds while driving? would be too intrusive, or is this supposed to be based on monthly payment, or a tax? Google for government! Wall-E might be needed to clean up the mess after them.
i didn't know that Sting said in 1983 that his song is really a nasty song about surveillance; at least they have an anthem for promotion purposes. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=548
Now i really don't think that personal assistants are going to be a success. They do descriptive modelling based on what you do, there is no way to evaluate if the suggestions are any good. Without such an evaluation they can't do reinforcement learning. Also they might suck in too much data - that would make it harder to make meaningful suggestions.
Re: Not OK, Google
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Google Scholar, Google Books, and Google Earth data for researchers existed before the Google Assistant was even an idea. Not sure what your point is, either: do you want to get a notification in the morning saying "try to leave early today, as an accident has caused increased traffic," along with another one saying "remember to save to buy an electric car"?
Not talking directly to the awesomeness of each of their individual products, which I would be the first to admit, they have many. And not speaking directly to their Assistant product. Before Google Assistant there indeed were those other products, which, I honestly don't get why you chose these ones, they aren't exactly great counter arguments. My central point was, Google puts it's resources best where there is the best return. I did not say, Google never created anything which makes non monetized information more freely available. With this being Google's central philosophy and guiding corporate light, it's a hard sell to continue to paint it as a benefactor to all of humanity.
Gmail was initially a product started by one guy at Google, and was not a project born out of Google corporate philosophy or business strategy. --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
Google Books has been mired in lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers with the issues including copyright, privacy, censorship issues. --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_...
Re: Google Earth... This one is fully being leveraged for monetization, especially with mobile's commercial possibilities finally being realized. From Wikipedia: "Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographical information program that was originally called EarthViewer 3D created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004 (see In-Q-Tel)."
some more reading on one take on Google books: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happene... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-samuelson/google-books-... https://gigaom.com/2013/01/14/google-books-and-the-librarian... http://nysbar.com/blogs/EASL/2011/09/the_google_books_projec... https://www.wired.com/2009/05/libraries-warn-of-censorship-p... https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_...
Re: Not OK, Google
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that algorithms, and AI specifically, are perfectly able learn what distinguishes those. Maybe even better than someone who might not be in their best state of mind.
The handwaviness is telling. Why would an algorithm or its creators even care about the difference? The highest bidder is the highest bidder.
Because the whole of Google's ad business stands on people wanting to click on the ads shown, and buy the products offered through them. That's why they spend resources on detecting misleading or fraudulent ads, which by your reasoning they wouldn't care about as long as they paid. PR is very important for this business to be sustainable: If the goal was for every user to click through one ad, and then never again, that might not even pay one engineer's salary.
Re: Not OK, Google
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Scholar, Google Books, and Google Earth data for researchers existed before the Google Assistant was even an idea. Not sure what your point is, either: do you want to get a notification in the morning saying "try to leave early today, as an accident has caused increased traffic," along with another one saying "remember to save to buy an electric car"?
Not talking directly to the awesomeness of each of their individual products, which I would be the first to admit, they have many. And not speaking directly to their Assistant product. Before Google Assistant there indeed were those other products, which, I honestly don't get why you chose these ones, they aren't exactly great counter arguments. My central point was, Google puts it's resources best where there is the…
Again, what's your point? That it's bad that Google tries to make a business out of organizing the world's information? It's the only way to keep doing it. You say:
> One thing that drives me mad about Google is how they say "the world's information", then ignore 99.9% of the worlds information
One wonders what's that 99.9% that you miss. You mention:
> I don't see things like "species extinction", "oceanic water temperature history", or say "dolphin linguistic data", equally represented
What equal representation do you want? A notification when you arrive at home telling you "this is some new discovery on dolphin linguistics"? For what it's worth, even that I'd bet you can get, by letting Google Now know of your interest in the topic, or subscribing to a science news channel in YouTube.
> How many people chew pieces of gum until 100% of the flavor is gone? I'll never know, and Google isn't going to help me, because it isn't a profitable data set.
Is it even known? Google's certainly not going to do the research; research isn't organizing. Would such an investigation even get funding from anyone, to pay the researcher? But supposing it's done, and it's published in some paper or some book, what's your best chance at finding it? Google Search, Scholar, or Books.
> 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?
> Before Google Assistant there indeed were those other products, which, I honestly don't get why you chose these ones, they aren't exactly great counter arguments.
Because before Google was investing a dollar in any of:
> "my browsing history", "my location history", "my search history", "an archive of my voice searches", "when I leave or return home via Nest", "who I associate with via Google's communication suite"
it was already investing plenty of resources in those products I mentioned.
Re: Not OK, Google
#560With faster multi-core CPUs, much more RAM and SSD, smartphones are probably powerful enough to run a privacy respecting AI assistant locally: watch your web access, phone access, location, and do all processing locally with no data leakage. Ideally it would be open source, or at least from a trusted company that made money only from selling the app, and not off of our personal data.