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Google Fights Back

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Re: Google Fights Back

#291

Post by taneq »

amf12 wrote: post #157
pdimitar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I agree on the text input completely. Google's keyboard on Android is like a mind reader when you do swipe/gesture typing. If there's one thing I miss dearly in Android to this day it's exactly that.

iPhone has the Google keyboard in the app store. I use Swype keyboard though.

Does it upload everything you type to Google? "For your convenience" and "to improve our services", of course. It'd be ironic to switch to iPhone for privacy but keylog yourself in the process.

Re: Google Fights Back

#292

Post by LinuxBender »

areoform wrote: post #134
jchw wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words. My family history a pretty high risk of stroke, heart attacks, cancer, etc. but I would be open to defying the odds, if that’s going to happen.

Modern interventions like nicotinamide riboside and caloric restriction have evidence behind them and work. There are communities dedicated to this. There’s an entire world of people (and quacks) out there who can help along with your doctor. It’s worth a shot.

also a lot of work done by sens organization on age related illness and plans to reverse much of it assuming they get funding.

Re: Google Fights Back

#293

Post by Retra »

esoterica wrote: post #238
jtolmar wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You trust snail mail carriers not to read your mail. The digital equivalent of the envelope is encryption - the carrier is allowed to see the outside but not the inside. The function of encryption is lack of comprehension - the carrier still knows the exact encrypted bytes of your mail, but cannot comprehend it. We generally accept that this is already a useful proxy for privacy. Imagine a mail protocol that somehow…

That is a philosophically incoherent model of privacy. The singularity notwithstanding, computers cannot “comprehend” anything. Spam filtering and credit statement parsing are no different. It’s all just ones and zeros being shuffled around.

Everything is just bits of energy being shuffled around. There is no value in seeing computers as being unable to comprehend things, when comprehension is little more than maintaining an internal model of some processes. And computers do that.

Re: Google Fights Back

#294

Post by _bxg1 »

basetop wrote: post #280
_bxg1 wrote: post #131

Say what you will about Google, they're really good at PR. They and Facebook share the most indefensible tech business model in today's political climate (at least in the west), but Google does such a better job of obscuring and re-framing that fact than Facebook does.

Google is a few years older, wiser and has far greater political clout. Being older, google went through what facebook is going through a few years ago. So they are much more savvy and also much more powerful ( politically at least ). I suspect Facebook is spenting their billions buying lobbyists, politicians and media/pr as we speak, just like google did. And microsoft did before them.

I think the bigger differentiator is Zuckerberg's ego. It's made him blind to his own flaws and mistakes and deaf to criticism, and he's maintained an iron grip on the company's steering wheel. I think he may run it into the ground. Google's direction is much less monarchical, and more willing to adapt.

Re: Google Fights Back

#295

Post by busymom0 »

britch wrote: post #262
busymom0 wrote: post #166

I think this is all just a PR stunt and Google's business model goes against user privacy. It's quite interesting the way people are more willing to trust Google than Facebook with their data though. I think this might come from Google actually offering more "useful/needed/can't live without" offerings vs facebook's more vanity based services. For example, Google takes your very privacy sensitive location data but al…

It is possible for most people to live their lives without Facebook's Apps. It is not possible for most people to live their lives without some form of Google, whether it's search, email, drive, maps, docs, or calendar. It's almost impossible to function today without using Google or interfacing with someone who is using Google. People are more OK with Google because there is no alternative.

Don't forget YouTube! I sort of agree but I think this is changing for better as competition improves. If I were to rate google services in order of importance and lack of decent competition, it would be:

0. YouTube 1. Maps 2. Search 3. Email 4. Docs 5. Drive 6. Calendar

I put YouTube as 0 as it is at the very top of the list. There's virtually no comparable competition for YouTube and that's why Google is also getting away with abusing their power with YouTube trending feed, censorship, demonetization, clickbait etc. YouTube really needs some proper competition but I really doubt any company will want to take over this massive infrastructure. I don't consider Twitch to be a competition for YouTube for non-gaming content.

Maps is the only one which I cannot live without. Apple Maps has improved drastically in the last couple years though but in Canada, they are still not as good as Google. But they seem to be on the right track.

DuckDuckGo is pretty good actually and I think most people can get the job done pretty well with it. For email, there are okay competitions and I still have an alternate yahoo email but they have been going downhill in last few years.

Docs is one place where Microsoft Office is good but Docs is superior if online collaboration is needed.

Dropbox is superior to google drive imo, especially since I am on iOS and Mac.

I have never used Google Calendar as I use iOS offerings and it does pretty well.

I think if Apple can improve their Maps and if Siri stops being so useless, it would be for the better and will help take away some power from Google. And somebody really needs to compete heavily against YouTube.

Re: Google Fights Back

#296

Post by ProAm »

pier25 wrote: post #286
ProAm wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I did mean commodity, but a personal commodity. Essentially when you are born you are born into a certain level or amount of privacy. And slowly as you age and use technology, everything you wished to remain personal or private is slowly given away or sucked away, stolen, etc.... It's near impossible to remain a private individual in today's world. And privacy is something that once gone you can never get back. So…

A philosophical question... but what do you think is the objective value of privacy?

Ultimately freedom (as a human) and opportunity.

Re: Google Fights Back

#297

Post by bduerst »

antpls wrote: post #205
TulliusCicero wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, Google does not sell personal data. They use personal data to sell ads.

They also forward personal data to government agencies when asked, like it or not.

So does every other company when subpoenaed by the government. If they didn't comply, we would be complaining how a corporation feels they are above the law.

Re: Google Fights Back

#298

Post by lern_too_spel »

The author is naive about monetization. Google should not care if making a better product hurts its existing revenue sources. If Google doesn't do it, someone else will. A smart company worries about having the best products that people want to use first and about monetizing those products second, and unlike a startup, Google has the luxury of being able to wait to monetize new products until the ecosystem around them becomes clearer.

The author's simple-minded reasoning is why Microsoft was late to the Internet search engine game.

Re: Google Fights Back

#299

Post by darkwater »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #210
blub wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I'd reverse the question: why are you surprised that people are surprised? You think everybody has time to read the dozens of pages of legalese in Google's privacy policy, which anyway doesn't actually specify in which ways they abuse one's information? It also sounds like you need to organise your life a bit better. Google's notorious for their screw-ups and service closures, one day you might miss an impor…

"why are you surprised that people are surprised?" It'd be surprising if there wasn't a clear or direct causal path about how Google found that information. For example, imagine that you paid for a hotel room somewhere in Thailand by cash, didn't carry your phone with you at the time, didn't log in to any electronic device, and still Google inferred that you stayed there, THAT would be surprising. On the other hand,…

It wouldn't be "surprising" if the mail parsing were done 100% client side, with a 100% certainty that no data is gonna be sent back to the mothership. But since it's done 100% server side I cannot honestly know what they are going to do with that data and knowledge.

Re: Google Fights Back

#300

Post by skinner_ »

Larrikin wrote: post #193
pgeorgi wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from outside, there’s no way to prove that a particular ad was served to you because of your data instead of another factor they use as input for the algorithm Create an account, use it to excessively look for tea pots until you predominantly get ads for tea pots. Store the cookie[0] that encodes your user id. Delete the account. After the advertised account retention period, try the cookie again in an otherwise sq…

I don't believe for a second they keep the data at a company of Google's size. But they don't need to anymore if they just feed your data through some neural network training that outputs a black box filled with weights. They can legally show your data is gone but now their model knows that people with similar browsing history, location, etc have a weak signal for tea cups. You'll get the occasional ad for them if th…

And that is fine by me. Using my behavioral data to train an underfitting model is very different from actually storing my behavioral data. Sure, the word 'underfitting' does the heavy lifting in my previous sentence. But I don't think that overfitting is even feasible at this scale. Google does not train models that just memorize the habits of 3 billion people. Such a model would be useless.
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