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After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

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Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#61

Concerned that google has so much info ( https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity ) I visited https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols to turn off Web & App Activity, but left Voice & Audio Activity on. This breaks my google home. I do not want Google to save 20 years of search history so I can use a stupid google home. For the first time I'm considering Apple's device. This is a dark pattern Google

I'd give them the benefit of the doubt here. It's probably just because of the voice control, which can be presumably used for web search. And they personalize the web search with your history. It looks more like poor engineering than a dark pattern.

> It looks more like poor engineering than a dark pattern.

Poor engineering and sensitive data are a bad combination.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#62
post #44

Concerned that google has so much info ( https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity ) I visited https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols to turn off Web & App Activity, but left Voice & Audio Activity on. This breaks my google home. I do not want Google to save 20 years of search history so I can use a stupid google home. For the first time I'm considering Apple's device. This is a dark pattern Google

I’m waiting for an answer to this: will the least invasive platforms end up the least intelligent?

what's so great about "intelligent" platforms? They're constantly doing something wrong or at least useless.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#63
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their tools are 10x better than anything else for many cases, so you're simply doing yourself a disservice to not use them. I think that at this point that's basically only true for mapping, and they are losing ground on that, slowly. You've got stockholm syndrome.

I'll bite. What's actually better than: * Gmail * Search * Docs And all of the Integration that works cross platform for all of those.

It's not apples to apples, but for me, Fastmail is way better than Gmail, DuckDuckGo is as good as Google Search because its privacy features evens out the uneven score from search result quality, and a blend of iWork, markdown and latex is much better for creating documents than Google Docs.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#64
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There has to be a framework that everyone has to follow. Imagine we had no laws against theft and you would get into trouble only if you overdid it by some undefined standard

No, it’s more like people leaving shit all over your property and when you go pick it up they come back and want to charge you with theft.

No, it's like inviting people over for a casual party and then recording everything from 15 different angles, including in the bathroom, and then hiring a few people on every street in the town to photograph everyone walking down that street so that you can cross-reference those photos to your candid bathroom shots.

And then you let some other people get those photos because "Chad who was at that party said it was OK with him".

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#65
post #21

The key here is the reccomendation engine. Is an automatically-generated reccomendation an endorsement? If someone is watching "non-extreme" material and suddenly gets a conspiracy, far right, or propaganda video suggested to them, what responsibility does Google have for that reccomendation? To what extent is it possible for people to "self radicalise" from Youtube? (I've experienced this myself; an innocuous gaming…

https://algotransparency.org/index.html

This site shows Youtube's most recommended videos. It is quite revealing.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#66
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My feed often randomly recommends "SJW owned compilation" and "feminism fails". I had the same videos queue up in mine and nothing I watch seems even remotely related to that. My YouTube usage is pretty "family friendly" so it struck me as particularly odd to see such blatantly divisive hate videos. I've even seen weird ads about deep state conspiracy stuff on there too. Their algorithms seem totally broken because…

There's definitively something wrong with the Youtube recommendation algorithm, it is much less intelligent that people assume. For some reason YouTube want's me to watch Bill Burr and John Oliver. I tried multiple times to tell YouTube that I'm not interested, only to have the same content pop up in my recommendations a few days later. The again I have the same issues with Facebook. At this point I fairly sure there…

Maybe we're statistical anomalies but I agree. The recommendations are always crap so I find new content from humans recommending it to me, not machines.

And I've never seen an ad for something that actually inspired me to click it or buy anything.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#67

If you frame the question as "how much value do I get from X in exchange for my data?" I think the answer is clear that Google > Facebook. G Search, Gmail, Analytics, Docs, YT (original home of Khan Academy) etc. all contribute to my learning and productivity...with FB the total opposite.

You're right. This is an important point to keep in mind to maintain perspective.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#68
post #62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m waiting for an answer to this: will the least invasive platforms end up the least intelligent?

what's so great about "intelligent" platforms? They're constantly doing something wrong or at least useless.

The level of frustration in trying to get Siri to do something when you can’t use your hands is quite something. I’d like something a bit better.

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#69
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My feed often randomly recommends "SJW owned compilation" and "feminism fails". I had the same videos queue up in mine and nothing I watch seems even remotely related to that. My YouTube usage is pretty "family friendly" so it struck me as particularly odd to see such blatantly divisive hate videos. I've even seen weird ads about deep state conspiracy stuff on there too. Their algorithms seem totally broken because…

Where do these appear? If it's in the Recommendations, you can delete them, then a link appears called "Tell Us Why", and in that dialog you can see which video in your history influenced that recommendation (and tell it to stop recommending stuff based on it). It's always worked quite well for me. I have zero crap in my recommendations.

The problem isn't just my reccomendations, it's those of my fellow citizens, voters, and potential lynch mobs.

(Also, I don't get the information on why a video is reccomended to me - is it country-specific? I was googling for how to find it and ironically came across a huge thread of complaints: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/7Sf7E...)

Re: After Facebook scrutiny, is Google next?

#70
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. What's actually better than: * Gmail * Search * Docs And all of the Integration that works cross platform for all of those.

>* Gmail Protonmail. Encrypted, ad free, and no one reading your email. >Search Duck Duck Go. Google is actually well past it's prime on this front. Their per-customer result filtering is now so aggressive that the filter bubble they apply to you is now an active impediment to web use. I generally find that I cannot replicate a google search on a different computer with the same search term, and about 20% of the time…

doesn't protonmail still not support full-text search of your mail?
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