Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might have something to do with incarceration rates in united states and ridiculously high sentences/consequences for essentially small offences. If something qualify as attack on personal freedom, those two things do. Corporation can not lock you to prison for some petty offense, unless it has cooperation from government.
You realize that most prisons are privately owned and actively lobby for excuses to imprison people, right?
Google+ broke our trust
201–210 of 251 posts
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Among other differences, your relationship with Google is consensual, or at least largely so. The most extensive data collection Google does requires you to explicitly interact with its properties; tracking via ads and embeds often enables the sites you visit to sustain themselves, and, even if you want to quibble about how "consensual" that is, is trivially mitigated via free, brain-dead-simple browser extensions. P…
>Put another way: you can enjoy the internet yet have little or no data go to Google. I'm not so sure about this. adwords/gAnalytics/some google tracking property is present on something like 40% of sites So they can see you leave one tracked property A, they may not know where B is, and then can pick up tracking you when visit C and then learn about B because of referrer data.
Please reread my comment; I addressed that.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#203I jumped on board early when I received an invite. I despised FB and was looking for for something that might actually resemble the tribe.net model of freedom and anonymity. Unfortunately, I was told that I had to use my real name and signed up accordingly. Everything was going along fine for about the first 9 months until I got into a small flame war with a woman in Canada about Scientologists (I used to work for so…
Google really asks for proof of real name if a single person reports you? I would imagine it only happens if a "ton" of people report you.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things that struck me when I worked at Google was that its early rejection of anything that smelled of management or process directly led to the emergence of "Just get things done" sort of mantra, but the scale of early screw-ups limited the ability to get things done only to 'trusted' (generally low employee # folks with a track record) people. I managed to push a project through, in spite of the fact tha…
> And all of that to say, that it takes both good people and good structure to make this happen. Yeah, and that's sort of the problem with absolute dictatorships in practice, even benevolent ones. Sometimes the dictator can get wrapped up in some "good idea" and they really need a diverse set of voices confirming or checking bad ideas at the door before, like in this case, a billion dollars or more of corporate value…
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Re: Google+ broke our trust
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think one thing that's now well appreciated is the network effects of the other bits of Google's product offering. - Search - try searching for something on Bing with somebody else in the room and get the "why don't you just Google it?" - Youtube, absolutely a strong network effect. I follow a bunch of retrogaming channels, and earlier this year Google's copyright monitoring processes and software lost its fool min…
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Re: Google+ broke our trust
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with "people could just create fake identities" is that they'd basically be permanently living with the fear of being caught by google and having their entire identity erased, and all the comments would just be "duh, what did they expect creating an alternate email address with a fake name?" That a bad policy is inconsistently enforced doesn't really make it any less harmful. Selective enforcement is more…
Well sure, as long as the real name policy is actively enforcable by G (which I doubt, but someone else apparently had to go through their enforcment practice), there's a risk. Then maybe it means that G isn't the right medium to express oneself anonymously and have an official virtual life. As I said, the only real problem is that policy. > It's much less offensive than the G+ real name policy, so that's a weird foc…
> I don't think we have the same definition of offensive (please correct me if my second language english is wrong). That policy was harmful, but I wouldn't qualify it as offensive. I think the article provides good examples where it was harmful.
I'm also not a native english speaker so I might well be misusing the term.
To me, it's not so much that it's harmful, but that the people it's harming, who are likely already marginalized, disadvantaged groups, are just entirely discounted and brushed off because they don't conform to some convenient but real-world-incompatible idea of how people live their identities. That harm and those people are apparently not as important as some business goal. That offends me.
Meanwhile, someone on the internet getting angry enough to use an insult like that is just a form of expression, it helps to define the emotional context of the writing, conveys some indignance, etc.
Why would an insult convey more offense than all the criticism in the article already does? I guess one might argue that abandoning a courteous "tone" of writing betrays a lack of respect. Imo the article already makes it pretty clear (especially towards the end) that respect has been lost, so the insult hardly makes that "offense" any worse. The author doesn't feel respected by Brin and feels exploited, so why would Brin be owed civility in turn?
It's also a particularly harmless insult that as far as I can tell has no vile connotations and implies nothing worse about the subject than that they're a jerk, so basically that they come off as disrespectful. It's pretty easy to convey that one thinks that someone is a jerk, or an asshole, or whatever, and it's usually considered okay to do so, so I don't see why being direct about it is more offensive rather than just, say, more abrasive or less polite.
In the situation of basically-helpless end user raging against the machine that is Google, I don't really think anonymity matters either. Unlike in a case of actual harmful harassment or abuse, I don't think Brin has a legimitate interest in discovering the whatever personal information about the insulting party, and if he thinks he does there are probably plenty of legal ways to go about it.
And anyway, whether the name on the article is the author's "real name" or not (contemplating which seems kind of ironic in this context), it's at most ~pseudonymous~, not anonymous at all. The name is definitely linked to a real identity, and anyway, authors have been getting away with completely made-up pen names for ages.
It's kind of strange to me that apparently it's more appropriate to insult someone if one puts one's real (however that is measured) identity on the line, given how wildly that varies in significance and consequences. That'd set the bar to entry at really unfairly different heights for different people.
That's a lot of words about this sidetrack, sorry for probably boring you, but I'm kinda fascinated by how people differ in deciding whether something is offensive.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#207I like to submit things like this to HN for a reason: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3106555&cid=41288357
And BTW I am thinking that the EU privacy policy fiasco is probably related. And to think that the EU courts recently ruled that current data protection laws requires that search engines must remove results on request.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#208To change status quo you need to provide enough value to motivate that change: Google Search: Search experience was completely disrupted. Since that moment people could focus on what they needed (no disturbing ads) and be more efficient. Gmail: Google innovated and simplified a lot email experience. You can easily measure the importance of Gmail to people by the importance of Gmail to the Google brand. Chrome: As an…
> I never understood what value Google was adding to social networks.
For me, the value was "intelligent conversation". It basically replaced HN for me until they changed the UI to be photo-centric and carded.
Ironically, it was when I added an HN circle that my signal-to-noise ratio dropped.
> Facebook at the time didn't need to be disrupted also.
Facebook has needed disruption since 2008.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#209> 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…
Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas.
Not in the case. Vic Gundotra was responsible that did not hold majority voting rights, who managed to convince the Google founders that did have it.
Re: Google+ broke our trust
#210I've been using G+ consistently for a week now after signing off from a competing social network. I thoroughly enjoy it so far. Why is G+ dead in the water? EDIT: Fatfingered a random exclamation point
People say that G+ is dead in the water in order to create a tangential economic justification for their actual complaint.
Their actual complaint tends to be valid, whereas their claim about the prospects of G+ is generally bullshit.