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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

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Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#111

Post by fenwick67 »

cloudwalking wrote: post #31
Mizza wrote: post #18

Google are a deeply, deeply unethical company and all of their employees are complicit. On a more practical note, I live in apartment above a restaurant. My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home and wants me to post photos I take in my apartment to the restaurant's map page. Now that OSM data is as good as Google and Maps.Me is a good enough client, my next phone will be completely de-Goo…

I'm sorry, what makes Google so "deeply unethical?"

They're an advertising company that gets most of its profits by collecting personal information about people and trying to manipulate them into buying things.

Sounds pretty unethical to me.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#112

Post by Raphmedia »

Mizza wrote: post #18

Google are a deeply, deeply unethical company and all of their employees are complicit. On a more practical note, I live in apartment above a restaurant. My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home and wants me to post photos I take in my apartment to the restaurant's map page. Now that OSM data is as good as Google and Maps.Me is a good enough client, my next phone will be completely de-Goo…

> I live in apartment above a restaurant. My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home

You think that's bad? I live above a head shop and google keeps trying to sell me bongs in ads because of it.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#113

Post by rhizome »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #89
hateduser2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I feel like it’s kind of easy to guess what they mean. I’m sure it’s related to spying and data hoarding and tracking and privacy issues and their incentives are highly misaligned and encourage unethical anti consumer behavior.

As far as centralized companies go Google is one of the better ones. It's unfortunate that so much power accrues to only a few entities. But slamming Google is like slamming a side effect of a bigger problem: many markets are naturally winner takes all and vertical integration confers enormous benefits. I don't see much of a way around this but many feel stronger regulations to protect consumer data should be enacted…

As far as centralized companies go Google is one of the better ones.

Gonna have to ask you to define your terms here, pal.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#114

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

Raphmedia wrote: post #100
saulrh wrote: post #42

I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I want to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I want to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My mem…

> My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. One could argue that your memory is terrible because you know you can rely on those services.

Well, my memory is good enough to remember that in the pre-Google world I had no way to find out reviews of restaurants in a city I was visiting, let alone 'memorize' them.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#115

Post by daodedickinson »

Google's creepy, but it seems the author should be savvy enough to know that Facebook does a lot more than what is implied here. Facebook goes after you all over the internet whether you have a Facebook account or not and won't let you delete the dossier they have on you. I don't see much of an ethical difference between the two companies; they are full of people chasing an ideal of success that is opposed to mine.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#116

Post by 659087 »

Supermighty wrote: post #43
fenwick67 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is so obnoxious. No Google, I won't do free work for you. At least offer me some store credit.

I was taking photos of locations I visited. Google Explorer's program offered free 100GB of Google Drive space once you reached a certain level. About a month after I started they changed the promotion and took away the Drive space. So I deleted all my photos and stopped taking new ones. Never work for free.

> So I deleted all my photos and stopped taking new ones.

When you're "deleting" things from services like Google Drive, it's better to think of what you're doing as "hiding things from yourself". It's unlikely that Google actually deleted that data in a way that prevents them from accessing it.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#117

Post by geofft »

izacus wrote: post #62
geofft wrote: post #39

The primary reason I have an iPhone is that I want to reach friends who use Google Hangouts without having literally my entire device be logged in as my Google account. I used to solve this by having an Android with a dedicated account, and logging the Hangouts app into my normal Google account, but that stopped working a couple of Android versions ago.

And now you have a full device logged into an iCloud account. Which Apple is pushing even more obnoxiously (and keeps pestering me about it on both iPad and Mac after each update). What did you gain?

I have all my iCloud sync options off except for Find My iPhone, which isn't something I can do with Google - it'll automatically sign me into everything. And the sync options stay off, even though yes, they do pester me to turn more things on. (Meanwhile, I found this morning that my Chromebook, which I have specifically for high-security things like my domain name registrar and privileged SSH keys, has gone ahead and turned on sync for everything again, despite having turned it off multiple times in the past.)

Also, admittedly, part of the benefit here is simply that I don't use Apple services (e.g., I don't use Facetime), I use Google services. I'd get the same benefit if I were using any non-Google phone.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#118

Post by izacus »

laurent123456 wrote: post #13

What are these "Google" notifications? Is that a "Google" app generating them? If so, can't it be disabled or uninstalled? I don't have this on my Android phone but I've uninstalled or disabled everything Google related. And if you don't want to be tracked, you can also switch off Location History.

They're generated by the Maps app which is where you can then also see the result of that crowdsourcing.

You can disable them in Maps settings (or disable Maps app altogether).

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#119

Post by cryptoz »

koyote wrote: post #78
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #10

Two things that happened to me: A) I walk into a store, get a notification from google photos asking me "I see you're at store X, wouldn't you like to take some pictures?". Possibly to use as part of google maps. Thinking back I think this is when I started de-googlifying my life. B) I get a notification from google maps asking me "you're travelling to place X soon, wouldn't you like to download an offline map, just…

I really don't see a use-case for A from the consumer perspective. Why would anyone ever want such a notification? For case B we can see where scraping all this information can be genuinely useful.

> I really don't see a use-case for A from the consumer perspective. Why would anyone ever want such a notification?

Most people don't, but it's a game of numbers. If everyone gets the notification, then 0.01% start taking photos and populate Google Maps with the largest, live-est dataset of restaurant and business information in the world. Then all the consumers get access to this information in a nice format in their phone when it matters.

That's supposed to be the deal. Google is banking on this not being insanely annoying to most people, which, maybe is where they have miscalculated and made an error.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#120

Post by millstone »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #65
saulrh wrote: post #42

I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I want to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I want to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My mem…

Also, if they were behind a configuration option and defaulted to on, most people would be fine turning it off and forgetting about it. This seems to be about lack of control. It's good for developers to think carefully before they ship products that do things with no way of being told not to. EDIT: Welp. Apparently these settings exist. I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if y…

Because if you turn it off in one place, it just starts happening in another:

Yah. I disabled Google Maps tracking, then Google Search started notifying me about places I was near.

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