> Google+ broke our trust
Google Reader did it for me. ..and did it for every product where I'm on paying $. I have hardly used google+ and I haven't missed a thing.
Google+ broke our trust
141–150 of 251 posts
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shareholders and analysts don't have the patience for a 3-year organic rampup. They want promises and returns by the end of the quarter. This is what happens when you go public.
3 people together hold enough voting power to make all decisions, and those 3 people wrote in their S-1 that they have no intention to ever listen to shareholders and analysts.
Yet there we all were, on the eve of the Facebook S-1 filing, all asking Google what are you gonna do about social?.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#143> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…
I think there was a more thought-provoking part than the "broke everything it touched" line: Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products. Google, particul…
> There are plenty of alternative search engines, e-mail services, video hosting sites, mobile operating systems and browsers.
Really? And who knows about all those alternatives?
I realized how big Google was when I was reading a book and the author said "Google , ....", and it took me a second to parse that sentence. At first glance I thought he was saying something about Google corporation, but then I quickly realized he was telling to me look something up on the web. Google is synonymous with web search, and Gmail is probably synonymous with webmail.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because "Google employees might find out that pron interested in computers and dogs" is less sensitive than "someone might send pron to a Saudi Arabian prison to be tortured because pron talks to someone with the same last name as a suspected revolutionary"
>"Google employees might find out that pron interested in computers and dogs" This as an extremely naive characterization of what google knows about you. Google would probably guess that much about you if you had never used the internet, but had a few friends that did.
One thing I think many people miss in such privacy debates is that Google knows things about you that you don't know about yourself. (Clearly the sense of "know" in each case has to be somewhat different.)
For example, they probably know an enormous amount about your sleep habits (not just when, but where! ← from IP address data) and your travel (← from IP address data, not just Maps). There's plenty of noise in that data, but it's been collected over a long time.
They remember searches and interactions from many years ago that you don't. They might know about a fight or conflict with someone that you had in the past that you've forgotten. Thanks to Maps, they might know about excursions that you've taken that you no longer remember.
They may be able to determine things about the state or evolution of your relationships with other people when you're not consciously aware of those things yourself, in terms of patterns in how and when and how often you contact each other, and perhaps with what degree of affection or intimacy. (Obviously people often know a lot about the state of their own relationships, but they might not consciously notice certain kinds of gradual changes.)
If there are inferences that can be made from your searches, they might be able to make those inferences when you haven't made them yourself.
One example would be a disease that someone is trying unsuccessfully to self-diagnose (so they search for the symptoms), or a set of symptoms over a long period of time whose combined significance the sufferer never recognizes.
Another example would be a person who has same-sex sexual attractions that they haven't consciously admitted to themselves, but that are evidenced in some of their searches or search patterns or clicks on search results. (Or just other online activity; there was research about figuring out if people are gay from their Facebook likes, and there must be lots and lots of correlates.)
Clearly Google hasn't productized most of these inferences in the sense of making them available to advertisers to use for targeting. There are many possible reasons for that. Some inferences would require a manual analysis of data; some are too speculative and have too high a probability of error; some are too creepy or alarming to the user.
This actually makes me want to start a separate thread: What does Google know about you that you don't? (What questions about you can Google answer that you can't readily answer yourself?)
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand not wanting the NSA to snoop your correspondence. I can't understand letting Google do that for years, analyze it, profile you and sell that information to just about anyone, but then thinking that the NSA is the final straw.
I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.
> I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.
There are presumably technical differences in how this data is stored and processed over time, which may not be insignificant.
Delete data today and it might be wiped; delete data tomorrow and it might be parcelled into a company takeover.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#146What is the future of Google+? Is Google trying to pivot it into something different? Or Google+ will be just a platform (for login, profile info, etc).
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#147Re: Google+ broke our trust
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, amongst non-technical people, around 95%. Amongst techies? A strong 20%.
If that was accurate 95% of people would have stopped using Facebook when the NSA's wiretapping was uncovered. Last I checked Facebook hasn't missed a beat
Most of the non-technical people I know are very VERY upset with facebook and privacy, but are still using it in much the same fashion as they're still using their AT&T phone or Comcast cable despite their distaste for policy.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you name one organization of 50,000 people that is collectively smart?
Large markets are very smart. Smart is not necessarily nice. Without nice, incremental returns to smart may be negative. Furthermore, the terminal goal of a market is to give some group exactly what it wants. Such groups are often large, and their wants are defined by how their members act -- usually when others are not looking. A market does not care what anyone says they want. It's a wonder the damn things aren't b…
I'm having trouble understanding the first part of your comment. For the latter I don't understand what you mean by 'smart'. Without some forms of regulation, people would blissfully poison themselves with dangerous foods (for example).
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
News flash: Sergey now thinks that his working so closely on Google+ was a mistake.
Now that it's publicly dead in the water sure. But saying anything negative about your own products while they're still trying to push it as the next big thing? It'll never happen. Any executive that tried would be fired or sidelined. Public comments like that are purely a matter of marketing and PR, individuals (particularly senior ones) will always back the company message. This is why you never hear anything from…
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