421–430 of 475 posts
Google owns my soul. Their boxes know when I sleep, when I wake, how much I exercise, what I listen to, my innermost thoughts, my chats with loved ones, what I watched on Netflix last night, what my company does, the flu I have at the moment, what the hypochondriac in me looks up in the middle of the night, what I buy, whom I call, what I spend money on, where I spend it... I nominally pay for these services, but I s…
Not sure if I'm the only one but I don't see a perfect solution on the smartphone part: - iOS is privacy focussed but walled garden and overpriced and impossible to repair. - Android is affordable and hackable but Google powered. - Cyanogen alternative: not easy to access and remain dependant to the Play Store to get apps (so back to Google power)
I'm impressed with the direction Google is taking, and how they've pivoted in the face of public awareness of privacy concerns. I like the Google products and services that I use. There are some that I miss (Reader) and some that just confuse me (Bookmarks), but the core works for me. Based on commentary I've seen, I may be the only person on Hacker News to think so. Regardless, I'm hopeful for the future.
FWIW, I agree with this sentiment. Google did not need to give this stance at I/O. It appears that they're being as transparent as they can about the fact that our data is their business model. I get it: our online privacy is important. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to remain truly anonymous on the Internet, and this is mostly thanks to Google. However, the converse could be Google using our data for mal…
* Google are brave for admitting they have your data!
* Sure it's bad they have so much data, but they can be so much more helpful.
Your reply's funny in a way, because if you jump from the beginning to the end it reads like "I get it: our online privacy is important" and then you give N reasons why it's not. And why Google's awesome for the internet (with capital I).
Google at the end of the day is gobbling up information on billions of people from mobile phones, browsers, e-mail, ads, their search engine, their web analytics, their smart home devices and classroom laptops, Google voice service, captchas and almost anything one can think of. The fact that so much information exists in one place is dangerous in itself, they don't have to actually do anything evil.
But they do anyway: they lock people out of their online lives, out victims to their stalkers, manipulate people into handing over their data with dark patterns, subvert or take over web standards, conspire to keep employee salaries low, sometimes serve malware through their ads, crush competition by illegally promoting their properties on search, illegally prevent Android suppliers to use Android as they wish and so on and so forth.
They've been found guilty in a court of law multiple times on both sides of the ocean.
The only good things they might have accidentally done for the internet were done to cement their power.
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If people couldn’t be unethical at scale then Facebook wouldn’t exist at all and yet it does, so I’m sure the same would be possible at Google.
That's different. People can easily be unethical at scale when incentives align. What they almost never can be is coordinated at scale against the individual incentives - whether for good or bad.
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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.
Unless your behavioural data is enough of an outlier to identify you.
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This word, I don't think it means what you think it means. > should we ignore that gas leak in the kitchen because it hasn't killed anyone yet? No, but it's hard to see how using personal data to sell ads is going to cause a harm anywhere near as bad as a person dying.
> "...using personal data to sell ads..." again with the misdirection. look the other way if you like, but you're letting google choose the information you access and believe (even with ads). if you don't understand the power therein, maybe you should study more of your namesake.
There's no current concrete harm, and the potential for serious harm just looks unlikely to occur.
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This word, I don't think it means what you think it means. > should we ignore that gas leak in the kitchen because it hasn't killed anyone yet? No, but it's hard to see how using personal data to sell ads is going to cause a harm anywhere near as bad as a person dying.
>it's hard to see how using personal data to sell ads is going to cause a harm anywhere near as bad as a person dying No need for imagination, simply read history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Like, the US once rounded up Japanese people and put them in camps. Using your same reasoning, one could argue that the government collecting any data on race/ethnicity anywhere -- like, say, on the census -- is a slippery slope to interning racial minorities again. And yet, almost nobody really cares in practice, because almost nobody thinks there's a realistic chance of that happening again.
Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
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> I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature And yet > just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. > It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature. That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be usefu…
Apologies for poorly wording things. My point wasn't on the feature, but the culture that allowed the feature to be created. That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion. Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical…
> even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it
I don't see it as absurd, for the same reasons I've elaborated on elsewhere in the thread: the benefits are concrete and current, while the harms are nebulous/potential/abstract.
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I mean, there are a bunch of other search engines out there, and I still don't see how having even more would somehow 'solve' search for good.
I think Google is way more than just "search". No other engine knows everything about you. Knows what you read, what you dislike, your appointments, your travels, etc. While there are alternatives for search, it's only search. Everything else is scattered. Google lives and breathes through the mesh of services they offer. Search is at the core, but everything attached to it is what makes Google so different. It is a…