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Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

theguardian.com

141–150 of 185 posts

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.

> People just have different opinions. Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces. They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this wa…

I know “how the technology works”, and I don’t care. If anything, I think I might benefit in the future from availability of all that behavioral data they gathered on me, because one day a sufficiently advanced AI might analyze it and provide some insight into my personality.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.

> People just have different opinions. Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces. They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this wa…

We just have to be careful thinking everyone is ignorant except us. Stating how some UI patterns are interpreted by some people doesn't mean anything. That some people are ignorant doesn't mean they all are. I'd like to think I'm not, and I don't see many of these "problems" as worthy of new legislation.

Except when all other measures have been exhausted, we shouldn't be so quick to run to the legal system clutching our ban hammer with our perceived state of righteousness.

Another problem I often see (not here, just saying in general) is how false equivalence is constantly brought up. Oh, so we should just let companies poison food or build insecure cars or whatever. I hope that with user data we can be more reasonable in how we legislate it and at least try to realize the unforeseen costs on the "good guys" vs the "bad guys".

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#143
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Activity one is a bit scary though. How many Android users are aware that Android tracks their app use and whatnot in this fashion? I think that's a point to take home. Users know that Google looks at their "location information". In their minds, it's to provide relevant weather info and whatnot. Seeing it aggregated in this way makes you realise that you actually are sending your entire life to Google servers.

Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care. That's the problem, right here. Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them. In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to…

> Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?"

Some of this is genuine indifference to the problem, yes. But I think some of it is a lack of perspective.

After years of sweating tech privacy issues, it's very easy for me to say "oh, they track app usage, which means they track app opening times, which means they can probably tell when you go to bed every night based on the last time you open Twitter." Or construct a hundred other scary (and accurate) stories about how this sort of data can be used to build whole-life profiles of people.

Outside of tech, it's not so obvious. "They track which apps I open when, and said it's to help improve battery usage. What's the big deal?" And of course that's also true, this is useful data for innocent purposes like "predicting what you'll reopen next to expire that from memory last".

But my concern is that there's an enormous gulf between showing people what's been collected, and how it's used. This article makes a bit of an effort, but it's still far short of the sort of example narrative that actually catches people's attention.

Back during the Snowden stuff, there was a lot of talk about three-hop collection. And I think basically no one cared, because it's such an arcane description. But somebody made a tool (which, damn it all, I can no longer find) showing how location + call data at three hops could create a false-but-convincing narrative that someone was a terrorist. I showed that to a couple of family members, and suddenly they were way more concerned with the topic.

It's not easy, I think this is a losing battle and I'm not sure how to change that, but I think people do care when they have useful context to work with.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#144
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is typical. As a techie, you're triggered by technical detail because you understand the technical details of that example that is intended to illustrate the size of the data collected. Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" i…

The word "triggered" should really be reserved for military vets and those who have experienced traumatic events in their past that would cause severe distress, not as a synonym for "annoyed." A veteran who relives the horrors of war when fireworks go off is not nearly in the same space as a developer who is annoyed that someone misused technical jargon.

[deleted]

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#145
post #123

The fact that Google stores deleted documents from my drive makes me kind of uneasy... why would they ever need this? Speaking of which, does anyone know if the contents of your drive is used for your ad profile?

Possibly they were in this users Trash folder, otherwise it's worrisome.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#146
post #133
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us do not subscribe to the "ends justify the means" theory. And with that, I'd consider this example a form of failed journalism. Regardless of whether or not there is actually an underlying point, this particular piece of pseudo-journalism didn't capture it. I chuckled when I read the author's description of himself/herself: "... who does extensive research into spreading technical awareness ...". One might…

> Some of us do not subscribe to the "ends justify the means" theory I don't think that this is the case here. To be an "end justifies means" the writer would have to give a false information on an information that is relevant to the core of the story. Does it really matter what's the size of some digital data? Would it be O.K. if Google collected 100Mb of data but totally unacceptable if that was 5Gb? The size of th…

My point was exactly that the size is irrelevant - because the data being measured is irrelevant to the story.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#147

This is nonsensical: > The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. > Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents. This link [Google Takeout] includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve t…

Google has tons of data on you that isn't available in Takeout as well. (So does Facebook.) Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen.

Indeed. They have lots more data about you that they don't consider to be your data. They think it is their data.

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#149
post #31
post #4

But I willingly give my data to Google - they have (for some reason or another) kept my trust. Facebook broke my trust with data I didn't know they had collected.

Let us reserve our judgment on Google for now. But FB is far worse than what you say here. Suppose I group people into 1. Those who actively use Facebook and willingly tell it everything about their lives 2. Those who actively use Facebook and unwillingly tell it everything about their lives (who don't know what data it collects) 3. Those who once actively used Facebook 4. Those who have never created a Facebook (or…

Google also has a lot of category 4 data; although I don't have any Google accounts I am well aware that they track everything coming from my IP addresses, and from any of their cookies that I inadvertently allow through.

All Google's posturing about 'review and manage your data' is meaningless to me in that regard. Why can't I ask them to delete everything associated with my IPv6 block, for example?

Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also did it some time ago, but I have a feeling, with nothing to backup my claim, that they still log, store and analyse all my activity but just don't show it in the dashboard. I don't know how targeted ads are (because of ad block) but youtube doesn't suggest me anything based on watch history so I guess I might be wrong here.

One thing I like to do is just leave them all on, but minimize my contact with Google's services. Then I check in every few months just to confirm they haven't collected anything on me.

Off topic - I am actually working on a framework to automate the process of self-hosting these services on some VPS. I might open-source it once it is in usable shape. But some things just have no real alternative(like maps and android)
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