221–230 of 463 posts
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Yeah no, I rather pay a fee for that
A paid version would be great but Google would have to figure out how to judge traffic levels without location data.
In fact, some of Google's traffic data is based off things like police reports.
Android users are pushed through a variety of techniques: Deceptive click flow Hidden default settings Misleading and unbalanced information Repeated nudging Bundling of services and lack of granular choices* Deceptive click flow is the click-flow when setting up an Android device pushes users into enabling “Location History” without being aware of it.* Hidden Default settings is [when] setting up a Google account, t…
This dark pattern seems to be spreading. Amazon recently pushed out an update to their (beta last I knew) web app that allows you to use their smile.amazon.com charity donation through the app. But in order to turn that on, you have to turn on all the notifications the app has, including their rather constant pushes of "deals I may be interested in". They're holding you hostage to their notifications because "it's fo…
Amazon's Prime Day and other efforts to sell me low quality garbage products are such a turn off. I don't typically think of Amazon like Wall-Mart but they sure as hell are trending that way.
This aspect of Google (forcing you into full surveillance mode before they will enable services) is the reason my wife is looking at an iPhone for her next phone. To the extent that others follow that move will be interesting to watch.
FTA: "Bundling of services and lack of granular choices - If the user wants features such as Google Assistant and photos sorted by location, Google turns on invasive location tracking." I unplugged my google home precisely for this reason. It wouldn't operate with all kinds of web and location tracking turned on. And when I turned them off it would only respond with something along the lines of "you have to turn on f…
Wouldn't help with location tracking, but might put your mind partially at ease if you own a creepy home assistant thing.
This dark pattern seems to be spreading. Amazon recently pushed out an update to their (beta last I knew) web app that allows you to use their smile.amazon.com charity donation through the app. But in order to turn that on, you have to turn on all the notifications the app has, including their rather constant pushes of "deals I may be interested in". They're holding you hostage to their notifications because "it's fo…
Somewhat more sinister, I think, is that they added a TTL on the Amazon Smile opt-in. Now, you must re-opt-in every 90 (I think) days. Fair bet that this small change substantially hurts the effectiveness of this charity and drives a whole bunch of money back to Amazon.
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That was definitely for their benefit of their workers rather than the greater society, and on the whole doesn't seem much different than the larger Silicon Valley companies of today. Take Facebook for example. They have a large utopian-esque campus for the benefits of their workers. In this campus they have bikes for getting around, free bars and restaurants (and an ice cream shop), an on campus doctor, bicycle repa…
> and in fact have somehow managed to convince CBP and USCIS to visit their campus to conduct Global Entry and Visa interviews instead of the workers having to travel to an office. Not to detract from your point, but this is a common service for employers above a certain size-- not some shady negotiation. My last few (not even close to FAANG) employers have all offered this perk.
I'm not a lawyer, but my take on this, is that this is a governmental agency in a GDPR country, triggering legal proceedings against Google for violating the GDPR.
It is going to be interesting to see how this pans out, and imo. this case is going to be a defining case on what the GDPR is in practice.
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It's fascinating how obviously smart people can rationalize their actions. Schmidt and Google claim to be "progressive" but that kind of rationale of "nothing to hide" would mean that every progressive movement would have been shut down in its early stages had this kind of tech and surveillance been available at the time because it went against what was currently judged as right by the people in power
What was the point of you pointing out Eric's claim to a particular political ideology after a statement of his intelligence? Are you somehow implying one is more virtuous / intelligent than another? If we changed that to conservatism does that your meaning or what you were trying to convey?
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This is disingenuous and unreasonable. The setting is unnecessarily restrictive. It's simple: "Do you want us to store your data on our servers?" Answering "no" should mean you store it locally, not that you don't store it at all. If you tell Google not to save your search history on their servers, they just disable it completely, when they could just save it locally. This is nowhere near a product problem. The setti…
> Answering "no" should mean you store it locally, not that you don't store it at all. If you tell Google not to save your search history on their servers, they just disable it completely, when they could just save it locally. This is nowhere near a product problem. The setting is per-account, so it's not like it'd be disabled on one device and enabled on another, so they'd get some weird UX, they just like crippling…
Very possibly.
> Supporting the use case you described, which is not used by the vast majority of users does not align with the incentives given to them.
I think you have causation wrong here. Users leave search history enabled because Google makes it unnecessarily hard to use the app with it disabled.
> Recently, Google updated its values (I can't find it externally but I hope you'll believe me). One of these values is "Respect the User".
I have no reason to disbelieve you.
> Ignoring whether the specific feature is the best use of engineering time even for this value, the reality is that values mean nothing without incentives.
If the values mean nothing without incentives, they aren't values, are they?
> You don't get a great performance rating for following the values, you get one for impacting some large percentage of users or improving the performance or conversion rates.
So what you're saying is "there's no incentive for allowing the user to have a good experience using the app without sending us data", or did I get that wrong? That doesn't sound awesome.
> Having users share location data, admittedly at the expense of privacy, provides a superior experience.
Especially when you don't bother providing a similar experience without people's data.
Ultimately, this isn't a question of "which would make Maps better, if users shared their data or if they didn't?". That's not your choice to make, so it's a question of "the user doesn't want to share their data, do we bother to make the experience good for them or not?"
If your answer to the latter is "No", I don't care if your values say "The User is the Alpha and the Omega, thou shalt have no other priorities before the User", it's a red herring because you aren't following your values, you're following the money.