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Google Fights Back

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111–120 of 475 posts

Re: Google Fights Back

#111

Google should fight back at last years promisses. Where is the feature of calling people automatically on google assistant? Last year they promised they would call my hair saloon for me, and it's all BS. Like everything they say every year, it never works in real life. But I see lots of "journalists" praising it, while criticizing Siri as useless. Where is their self driving car too? Never complete, they always promi…

I downvoted you because you are peddling outright lies.

Google Duplex has been launched and you can use it today to book appointments in restaurants that are not on any table booking platform. Have you tried it?

If you haven't, please do.

If you have, and you still insist on saying it doesn't exist, please explain what it will take to convince you.

(Edit: I went through your comment history and your comments pattern match to either a troll or an Apple shill, neither of which are welcome here. Please take this to reddit)

Re: Google Fights Back

#112

So if I am using an ad blocker and dont see any ads at all, dont I just _cost_ google, facebook, etc. money from using their services and having them store my data? What if the majority of people would block all ads? Wouldnt data collection become meaningless?

These scum companies use data gathered from your friends as well, so even if you block ads, they will still use data gathered about you to “improve” the ads your friends get.

Re: Google Fights Back

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a user. I appreciate it. It's puzzling that you think it's such a deeply unpopular feature. Third party bill reminders isn't a taboo or unexplored territory.

I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature, I think it's deeply unethical the way it was presented to me as a user. And it's not the reminder that bothers me. It's that I don't trust Google not to share the data they extract from my private communications. Financial information in particular can be used against you by a number of parties, and it's been used to discriminate against people in the past. When it comes…

> 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 useful" to "I don't think it's unpopular".

Almost like your initial position was absurd on its face, so once challenged you had to immediately back up to a softer, more defensible one.

Re: Google Fights Back

#114
post #7

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…

Indeed, the contract we sign is not “do I trust Google,” it is “do I trust Google in perpetuity.”

I can think of many, many outcomes wherein Google’s collected data is more valuable for uses other than “helpful”.

Re: Google Fights Back

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is already not Google. The "Don't Be Evil" corporation that valued open source rather than open-washing, that valued openstandards over "oops, we didn't mean to break that for you!" isn't here anymore. The company that bends over backwards, much farther than the law requires, to enable the surveillance state. I despise Apple. Especially on mobile. No SDCards, no headphone jack, walled garden app stores. Ugh ug…

I fully switched from Android to iOS when iPhone X came out in November 2017. I realised in the next months that the perceived "freedom to tinker" on Android is something hugely overrated. I could achieve almost everything I wanted on my iPhone -- it just took a bit of time to find the proper apps. Later Apple added the Shortcuts which is a very solid automation app. Many Android users also lament the lack of a visib…

I don't know if it falls under "freedom to tinker", but having a microSD slot saved my vacation once (well, the pictures of it anyway). We were out at a children's amusement park in the mountains with poor service, so just moving things to the cloud wasn't an option. Deleting apps from my phone to pick up space is of course an option, but also a silly one. Swapping out the microSD card, however, was simple and I just got back to taking pictures and videos.

I went iPhone -> Android -> Windows -> Android. I'd really like to get back to an iPhone for privacy reasons, but the storage situation really doesn't work for my family. Traditionally, it's been a low capacity entry model and then ~$100 to upgrade to each new tier, paying Apple's wildly inflated markup. The pricing is also way out of line with our budget. I was really hoping for a new SE model for my wife.

I'm fairly happy with my Galaxy S9+ now, but I really miss a lot about Windows 10 Mobile. I'll never forgive Google for doing everything in its power to make sure another mobile platform didn't become viable.

Re: Google Fights Back

#116

In the video, they say they have compressed translate, vision and speech into "just over 100kb." That seems pretty magical. Perhaps it is all server-side?

> Perhaps it is all server-side?

Probably.

> translate, vision and speech

To me, these types of technology are both wonderful, and particularly dangerous.

With Google Translate, I was able to read technical posts on a Russian forum, which contained a piece of critical information to the problem I was trying to solve. And with Google's speech recognition on YouTube, highly accuracy text transcripts are now generated at an industrial scale, and even in real-time, that enabled me to see parts of unintelligible speech in some videos which are otherwise impossible to understand. In the future, it's expected that these types of technologies would see greater applications, for example, using automatic translation in international conferences or private conversations is not a "far future" Sci-Fi idea anymore, and may eventually be crucial tools for a specific propose, or even play a central role in the human society.

> The implicit message was clear: “Yes, we have all of your data, but the fact we have all of your data is a good thing, because it allows us to make your life easier.”

On the other hand, due to the very nature of these types of technology, it's mostly impractical to deploy them locally, the only natural way to implement these is running them on Google's computers. It means soon enough, Google, would have access to massive volumes of information, not only personal, but human information, such as private conversations and communications. And unlike those cheap IoT devices you could refuse to purchase, using these services may be essential (e.g. being able to understand the conversations) to live in a digital society. And even if it's not Google, the information collected would be vulnerable from another service provider as well, in addition to a government subpoena.

To some extents, the search engine already showed the existence of these problems - it's not possible to run a search engine on your computer (I know there are some FOSS Proof-of-Concept projects, but they are what they are...), the search engine has to be operated by a large centralized provider which would be able to see and track everything you've searched. Meanwhile, you must use an search engine to find information produced by the human civilization.

In the future, it's certain that Homomorphic Encryption and Differential Privacy may be important and must-have solutions, but only for some very specific applications, they allow some computations and queries to be performed by a 3rd-party without revealing their contents or nature. Theoretically, if there's a future breakthrough in applied cryptography, you would be able to execute an entire blackbox program on someone else's computer without revealing anything.

But I doubt if there's a solution in general.

Re: Google Fights Back

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all true, but to protect yourself from all that, you're going to have to keep your data away from Apple as well (i.e no iCloud drive/photos/calendar/mail, etc) Not running algorithms for ad targeting doesn't make the data any more secure. Only end-to-end encryption does.

I thought that stuff was all encrypted, and Apple couldn't see it?

It is encrypted (except email) but Apple has the keys for the stuff I listed: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202303

Also, in China Apple handed over iCloud operations to a government owned company, including the keys.

Re: Google Fights Back

#118
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that stuff was all encrypted, and Apple couldn't see it?

It _is_ encrypted, Apple cannot see it. The parent comment is mistaken

I'm afraid you are mistaken: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202303

Re: Google Fights Back

#119

So if I am using an ad blocker and dont see any ads at all, dont I just _cost_ google, facebook, etc. money from using their services and having them store my data? What if the majority of people would block all ads? Wouldnt data collection become meaningless?

> Wouldnt data collection become meaningless?

Data is used for more than advertising.

These data silos are enormous blackmail machines waiting to be activated. There is tons of evidence of crime, adultery, extortion, and all the other fun things humans get up to in there.

Google, FB, and the other big surveillance outfits protect this data now. Who knows what happens tomorrow, or if that protection is "enough", or if $nation_state will grab what's stored in their borders, or...

Building these blackmail machines is incredibly dangerous, _even if you completely ignore_ the garden-variety privacy problems they cause for "little people".

Re: Google Fights Back

#120
post #7

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…

Can't we make the same argument about Apple. What happens when apple stops being apple, when they don't have the smart phone dominance and decides to venture back into Ads. Or who owns apple when someone else has to. I understand why anyone would want ios now but your argument is about the future.

The point the parent is making is that Apple doesn’t have your data in the first place, therefore if things go south, or they become nefarious, you’ll have to give them your data first.
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