I can only assume this guy wears The Breeches Of Trust
Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
221–230 of 399 posts
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#222Concur completely. The practical alternative - an iPhone, is worse in other ways. In the history of general purpose computing, never ever has a company sold hardware to the customer transferring ownership rights to the customer, and then locked the device up to apps approved by the hardware manufacturer, going as far as taking a 30% cut. How this is flying past regulators is anyone's guess, and as more time progresse…
Not a hard decision at all. There are very few apps you cannot already purchase for the iPhone or cannot write yourself with a free developer profile.
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#223The idea that you'd have any location privacy while carrying around a cell phone is absurd. Both iPhone and Android devices record location history, and your network provider always has a rough guess of where you are. It may be annoying that Google is very persistent about trying to build its maps dataset, but the suggestion that it's not happening on other devices is crazy.
There's a huge and meaningful distinction about the technical ability to violate your privacy, and actually doing so, and trust (slash non-creepiness) is largely about not doing so when you could. For instance, the fact that my roommate can open my bedroom door at any time does not mean that I have no privacy when making phone calls in my room; it means that I have privacy because I trust my roommate not to do so, ex…
What controls does an iPhone give me that I do not get on Android?
Google gives me a dashboard with everything laid out they track and not aware of anything like that from Apple?
I am probably unusual as love the data as need to refer to it to remember stuff for expense reports and such. We also have Google homes in our house and GW and I carry a pixel 2 XL and an iPhone but feel like Google is properly giving me a choice.
Btw, it is next to impossible to cancel our cable but Google procatively gives me a link to what they track and make it very easy to delete if I desire.
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#224Earlier 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.
I've just been looking through the app, it doesn't really describe that well what the "points" system even earns you, for your contributions.
The help page has this vague statement saying "Those points lead to higher levels of the program, as well as benefits like early access to Google features and special perks from partners"
Obviously covering their backs because "special perks from partners" could mean anything
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#225I'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…
I'd be completely fine with all that even if it was turned on by default and if there was a simple off button. The point of the author of the article is that it is a permanent struggle with privacy settings. It's the same on Windows 10. There are like 30 registry entries one needs to change to turn off the spying, and they keep adding more. Like the author, this is a game I just have no appetite playing.
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are billboards or radio stations or television channels unethical to you? Because they are also trying to "manipulate" you into buying things. Advertising is not inherently unethical. I want people to buy my product so I need to raise awareness of it, encourage people that it is the best, make them feel like they need it. I would even go so far as to say that Google's default anonymized model makes this far better. M…
IMO advertising systems that have this intimate of knowledge about you are immoral because they undermine a consumer's agency well beyond traditional demographic-level or local advertising. Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they li…
> Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they like, your address, your preferred colors and letters... It's possible that they figured out you just broke up with your SO and use shopping as a coping skill, so it was time to pull out the big guns. Google probably doesn't even understand exactly why they served that to you. And that's a problem.
These things are not true. Your point is true, but google doesn't do things like look at your specific address, preferred colors, etc. You can't be mad at them when you don't really know what they do, and embellish what actually happens.
> Google serves me ads and tracks my behavior even if I never use a Google product
You can opt out of all behavior based advertiser very easily: http://optout.networkadvertising.org and http://optout.aboutads.info/#!/
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#227Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…
Geotagging of photos, reducing the time it takes to acquire your gps location when you need a map. These are reasonable reasons to have GPS running all the time. There are not reasons to upload these locations to a remote server outside of your control nor to log these locations on the device.
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#228Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…
Good comment. Might be worth mentioning that turning GPS off reduces the accuracy of your location, but does not prevent it from being known: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location...
GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device.
I'd be surprised that this is true. I used several battery monitor apps on several phones, and never found this to the case. It's a simple receiver, and doesn't require much power to do so. If you find a correspondence, it may be more likely that the power is actually being used by the apps that are using GPS, rather than the GPS itself: http://alienmantech.com/blog/android-disable-gps-save-batter...
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#229The idea that you'd have any location privacy while carrying around a cell phone is absurd. Both iPhone and Android devices record location history, and your network provider always has a rough guess of where you are. It may be annoying that Google is very persistent about trying to build its maps dataset, but the suggestion that it's not happening on other devices is crazy.
The network provider records which antenna you trigger but has no need of recording your precise GPS location. Google has absolutely no good reason to record your GPS location without your consent other than for nosy purposes.
Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
#230I'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…
I can similarly say: If I could pay for the services of Google with money instead of with my data (which will be used in ways I cannot imagine or control), then I'd gladly do that. Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer.
> Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer.
I am one of Google's real customers, I bought an expensive phone from them, but, to quote Josh Marshall:
> One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm)