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Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

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Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#91

Post by octoberfranklin »

tedk-42 wrote: post #41

Your convenience at the expense of your privacy. I personally think it's great that I can lookup what I did two months ago thanks to Google services. I adblock and disable as much ad tracking as possible but I'm pretty happy with how useful google services are for my day to day errands. It reminds me of places I went two years ago that I couldn't remember without it. I find it strange people complain about it, yet st…

> Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy.

Technology is becoming more capital-intensive MUCH more rapidly than the total amount of capital in the economy is growing. As a result, the economy can support fewer and fewer choices as time goes on.

We're already at the point where there are only one-and-a-half companies selling LTE modem chips. All the good phones use Qualcomm's chips. The only other producer is Realtek, whose chips are only used in (AFAICT) extremely low-end phones sold only in developing countries. Qualcomm can backdoor your phone's modem chip with total impunity. Perhaps they already have.

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#92

Post by aboringusername »

izacus wrote: post #63
tabs_masterrace wrote: post #57

The number of government requests for user information is actually scary: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governmen…

Not only that, but here in Europe we've gotten laws lately where the ISPs and companies like Google are forced to retain data for just such requests. (This data retention is, of course, excluded from GDPR as well.)

I don't actually consider that a problem, in fact, it's a feature and not a bug.

You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant.

You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome.

They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access.

I live in Mexico and love Donald Trump.

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#93

Post by Hnrobert42 »

meibo wrote: post #3

Is posting such baity non-journalism on here nowadays a way to farm karma? This doesn't give anyone actual value, most of the things listed are common sense and if you use Google Maps, you are probably already aware of it. I'd wager that some people use Maps exactly because these features make it convenient.

Given the other comments, this is not obvious to everyone.

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#94

Post by JimDabell »

submeta wrote: post #25

I am about to delete Google Maps on my iPhone. Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features? Edit: Done. Deleted it. Now if only I had an alternative to Garmin Connect. Love my fitness watch (Garmin Fenix), but hate the way they collect data about me. And no alternative.

> Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features?

Most of them are valid on iOS as well, however if you go to Settings > Google Maps > Location and pick “While Using the App”, Google will only be able to track your location while you have the application open, so they can’t track everywhere you go as described in #3.

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#95

Post by Hnrobert42 »

yreg wrote: post #45
vixen99 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try not to imagine everyone sees the world through your eyes.

This is hn, I expect the content of the article to be obvious to everyone here.

The other comments show this is not obvious to everyone.

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#96

Post by feralimal »

randomsearch wrote: post #46
feralimal wrote: post #42

If this is a surprise to you, it shouldn't be. Phones (android or apple) are sugar-coated tracking devices. The point of them, is that they externalise the internal. They were planned to make your private information into a commodity. It also shouldn't be a surprised that no action will taken against them. Corporations are the government. Well, 'they' might even put up a show of pretence in "punishing" a corporation.…

> They were planned to make your private information into a commodity. Are you seriously suggesting then when Apple launched the iPhone it was a plan to spy on you?

Did you ever wonder about the discrepancy in tech that occurred at that time the first iPhone appeared? We were all using desktops or fairly clunky laptops. Then, out of nowhere, we have touchscreens, cameras, maps, etc AND the power of a desktop machine, in a device that's 1/20th the size! It was such a staggering leap! I think phones were technology that was so far ahead of what we were prepared for, we had no means of defence.

With regards to the aims of Apple, Google et al - yes I think they wanted to spy on us from the start. It has always been about better governance of the masses. Corporation owners think they own us - everything we are provided with is only done with a view for them to apply greater governance of us. Historically, it would have been expedient to use stories (religions) to do this, then debt, and now technology.

Bringing us to the present, if you ask me, the virus we are apparently experiencing, is just a pretext. It is just another story, that leverages us into a technocracy. They want to boot up a technocratic system that we will all live in from cradle to grave, unaware and unable to do anything about our circumstances. This has been planned since the 1930's - IBM shared work space with Technocracy Inc as it was known then.

We are spending our time online, shopping online, isolated, dependent on corporations for the news, our food, intermediating our experiences, etc. We are sold on the future, Elon's neural lace, augmented reality, smart metering/cities, etc. I'm not joking when I say it seems to me that these plans are so progressed, and everyone is so on board, that the human experiment must surely come to an end soon. It will be a great reset, but we're not going to like it.

PS Here's a good article from 2016: https://www.technocracy.news/global-smart-grid-technocracys-...

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#98

Post by aboringusername »

randomsearch wrote: post #46
feralimal wrote: post #42

If this is a surprise to you, it shouldn't be. Phones (android or apple) are sugar-coated tracking devices. The point of them, is that they externalise the internal. They were planned to make your private information into a commodity. It also shouldn't be a surprised that no action will taken against them. Corporations are the government. Well, 'they' might even put up a show of pretence in "punishing" a corporation.…

> They were planned to make your private information into a commodity. Are you seriously suggesting then when Apple launched the iPhone it was a plan to spy on you?

Yes. They could add E2EE for all their products (including iCloud), but that wouldn't be acceptable because terrorists and illegal images.

Tim Apple is likely in bed with the NSA. For sure everything is backdoored and in 20/30 years time there will be some heroic Snowden type who'll leak what everyone has known but gets called a foil wearing conspiracist.

Grapes are delicious.

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#99

Post by andrepd »

izacus wrote: post #55
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the LineageOS devs say that their project does not aim to completely de-Google the OS, only remove Google Play Services and some Google applications like Maps. Thus, geolocation, DNS and login portal detection in LineageOS still use Google's servers.

Ugh, that's very disappointing then, I've always advised Lineage to people who wanted to deGoogle their phones :/

To be fair, lineage+microg is probably the best you can get while still keeping a reasonable level of convenience (that is, still running android and most popular apps).

Re: Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers

#100

Post by aboringusername »

t0mas88 wrote: post #14
aboringusername wrote: post #8

To be fair, most of the time users' are consenting to this. If you disregard the opportunity to read the privacy policy and just click "I agree", you really can't be too surprised at what information you allow these apps to access. I'd suspect mostly every human on earth is in some database somewhere, and that will become a normal facet of life. Even the second you're born a record is made, as well as the rough time…

At least Europe has made progress and prohibits the "it's in our 20 pages privacy statement" approach. The user must be explicitly informed and then provide consent. If it's unclear what you're consenting to, the consent isn't valid.

https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement

Yup.

(Note: I went through an EU country in their region picker, went to sitemap and this is the URL I got).

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