I can't quite understand this "privacy problem". What's wrong with just accepting Google's TOS, use it for what it's worth (doing "public" stuff), and making room for "private" operations elsewhere? Aren't higher levels of "privacy" just a browser profile/user profile/machine profile away any more?
No longer loving Google
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: No longer loving Google
#102I think Tim O'Reilly has the right of it: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fWJtC2mb...
Re: No longer loving Google
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't Sergey and Brin have 10x voting rights? I was under the impression that common shareholders couldn't do a darn thing to them.
The problem is its not just who has the most votes, but in the US, companies have a legal obligation to do what is in the best interest of the shareholders (even minority shareholders) over all other claimants. California just created a new corporation type that allows 'public benefit' to take precedence over shareholder interest: http://www.alston.com/environmentalandlandblog/?entry=4488
no they do not. not only is this not established in law (in fact, congress has made it harder for civil suits to be filed), they are almost never brought unless there has been a large drop in stock price (not for tepid or slower-than-desired growth), the ones that are brought are usually dismissed, and the ones that are not dismissed are almost universally settled.
take a look at, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
Re: No longer loving Google
#104Like any anti-Google post lately, this one has been reflexively upvoted, but if you look at his reasons for not loving Google, they're pretty thin. The Kenyan episode was obviously one rogue branch with insufficient oversight; as soon as the guys in Mountain View found out what was going on, they stopped it, and with a minimum of the sort of corporate doublespeak you'd expect from most big companies. The changes to p…
One reason for which I don't like Google anymore is that they broke their primary promise, which they were emphasizing more and more around 2004-2005 (if I remember correctly): to make most of the world's information easily accessible and shareable, and, why not?, trying to make a difference in this world. In my ideal world the Wikileaks info would have lived in a Google sub-domain, climate change discussions would h…
Don't stop dreaming.
Re: No longer loving Google
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that's the most worrying sign. In the past Google won by making what people needed. But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook. That hasn't made Google evil yet. It's just the first step down the road to mediocrity. Which may lead to evil in the long term, because to make lots of money despite being mediocre, you generally have to d…
> whenever Why doesn't it happen to Apple, then? Apple is much much more successful than Google, and, arguably, more "evil". What I think people react badly to, is hypocrisy (real or perceived). Apple does what it says and doesn't apologize. Google has this whole blurry theory of "not being evil" which many of its own actions prove false, hence the backlash.
"High trees catch lots of wind" (Dutch proverb)
"it" manifests itself differently for Apple. Apple, not being in the content hosting as much as Google, gets attacked on its environmental (Greenpeace) and its social (Foxconn reports) stances, not necessarily because it is behaving badly relative to its peers, but also because it is a more visible target.
Re: No longer loving Google
#106I think in the past the 'Don't be evil' thing as an informal company ethos was ok, and people respected that as a target. Then they started using this as a stick to beat their competitors with and it had the result of putting their own conduct under greater scrutiny. Now with the SPYW stuff, they look pretty hypocritical and appear to have abandoned their principals in order to play catch up. They might not be evil yet but the trajectory they're on isn't promising.
Re: No longer loving Google
#107And if a big company like Google can't avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can? A company owned by actual persons, i.e. a privately owned company, can better avoid turning evil. There are lots of world-changing privately owned companies, especially in Europe. Profit seeking by committee (a.k.a. board and stockholders), turns companies into un-ethical, maximum-profit seeking machines. Even more so, s…
True, public companies are driven more by quarterly results, but they can also be more accountable and transparent. Private companies can be as equally evil as public ones.
FWIW, I believe private companies tend to be better run and usually operate with a longer or more rounded perspective. In this sense, I would favour being a stakeholder of some sort in a private company over a public one.
Re: No longer loving Google
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I think a lot of where Google crosses the line is becoming clearer now. For example, personalized ads in gmail. Try to opt-out of personalized ads in gmail, seriously go and try it. You can click the button, but they won't actually opt you out. At least not how you'd expect. You'll still get personalized ads, but they just use a different heuristic for how to personalize (based on the current email). How hard is…
This has been a core facet of gmail for years. You get free email + storage - they post contextual ads on the right. The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms. >> Haven't made t…
The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms.
I'm talking about something else. I'm talking specifically about the "option" of opting out of personalized (and there is a well hidden option that Google has for this), but it only changes the algorithm. You still get personalized ads.
When I signed up for GMail when it first opened, this was not the case.
>> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it.
Yeah... sure
Is this hard to believe? I just created a hotmail account. I need to try it on all my devices first. And then of course get my forwarding accounts switched to it. If all goes well I'll switch. The main concern is lack of imap so I'll use Exchange ActiveSync -- but since I don't generally use that today, I need to make sure it works fine.
But there was a time when GMail was untouchable. Now its a service I can't wait to get off of.
Re: No longer loving Google
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a personal story of when someone stopped believing Google, not a deep analyses of why Google is "evil". For me Google stopped being credible when it did a 180 on net neutrality. There were good reasons before that, and there were certainly good reasons after that, but when someone or some company loses the benefit of the doubt is a personal thing. What currently pisses me off most about Google is their blatant d…
In my humble opinion, and I apologize to any Facebook engineers who read this, but Facebook has touched off an ethical race to the bottom with regards to users, their privacy, and their information that can be sold to advertisers. It seems obvious in hindsight, but it's too bad nonetheless.
Facebook was always in the game of collecting private data and exploiting it. It's in the nature of their product, you pretty much sign up for that up front.
Google offered services that didn't explicitly require users to register personal data (with some exceptions, like Orkut), and only much later started collating and exploiting all the information they gathered by observing.
The latter is much creepier. It's the difference between someone asking you to fill out a form with very personal information and someone who's spying on you through binoculars.
Also, Google betrayed people's trust with their whole "don't be evil" thing. Most people never trusted Facebook very much to begin with. Many of us trusted Google. Betrayal pisses people off more than just being screwed.
Re: No longer loving Google
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because a company is for-profit doesn't mean it has to be "money-driven" in the sense that the term is being used here. In fact, for a company like Google for which many of its users have relatively low switching costs it only makes economic sense to do whatever it takes to keep the users happy and enthusiastic, even at the expense of some short-term profit.
OK, I did not understand that the term was used here as driven by short-term profit at the expense of ethics.
Well that's just my interpretation too :-)