Privacy concerns are good and should always be raised. But before panicking like anything remember who gave them the data in the first place.
Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
121–130 of 185 posts
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know they're doing a hard delete server side and not just flipping a delete flag?
AFAIK that is already illegal in the EU, and certainly will be under the GDPR.
To what extent is this, or will this be enforceable? Is there an obligation to securely erase data? If not, presumably someone could store user data on a log-structured file-system and disable garbage collection, or similar.
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#123The fact that Google stores deleted documents from my drive makes me kind of uneasy... why would they ever need this? Speaking of which, does anyone know if the contents of your drive is used for your ad profile?
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a lot of cases, from my understanding, disabling storing data about "your account" just stores data about you with an anonymous identifier. For example, voice search history you can enable or disable, if you enable it, you can see and listen to all your queries and delete them if you so choose. If you disable the history, Google still stores recordings of your voice and uses it to "improve their service", they jus…
A citation would be helpful, as I don't see voice mentioned on the help page for "Share usage & diagnostics information with Google" https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6078260?hl=en
Here's The Guardian stating it at the bottom of this article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/13/google-vo...
USA Today takes it a step further, and claims that "deleting" your voice activity merely converts it to the anonymous identifier, that Google keeps it either way: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/03/02/how-voic...
The better Google help article is this one, but it merely states changing the setting determines whether or not the audio activity is "saved to your account": https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020
I recall Google's articles being clearer on this point before, either I'm not looking in the right place or they may have obfuscated it.
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#125This is nonsensical: > The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. > Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents. This link [Google Takeout] includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve t…
Welcome to journalism, by definition journalists aren't experts in what they report. So, sometimes they'll just say stuff that's obviously wrong to anyone with any knowledge of the field they're reporting on. This isn't helped at all by the fact that even the best journalists are forced to put together stories in hours.
Even if they research a given topic, they're extremely susceptible to being swayed by biased sources. At best, they won't have time to truly understand what they're reading.
Try reading an article in any general-topic news outlet on any topic you are familiar with, or a narrow-topic news outlet for a topic you're an expert on. It will be bad 99% of the time.
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bear in mind, these companies know which ads they've shown you and when, for example, and at least in one case, buys your credit card transaction history to compare your purchases with the ads you've seen. Correct me if I am wrong but are you saying one of these two companies buys people's credit card transaction history and then compares people's ad history against the transaction history? If yes, that sounds real…
Straight from the horse's mouth: https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... "And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."
IIRC, this was announced as part of a program that uses double-blinded crypto that allows google to perform matching against this data in aggregate (Set intersection knowledge), but not individually identity of what a given user purchased, at the same time preventing the merchants from learning the identities of individuals either.
According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X).
Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue.
Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp...
About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care. That's the problem, right here. Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them. In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to…
I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.
> People just have different opinions.
Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces.
They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this way. Oh, and some people feel website x is secure because there is a green lock symbol in the URL bar. Some are more secure, because the green bar is a bit longer.
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is typical. As a techie, you're triggered by technical detail because you understand the technical details of that example that is intended to illustrate the size of the data collected. Rest assured that this happens all the time and when people read news about a topic that they are an expert on, they cringe all the time. For example, a paraglider pilot will get triggered if the reporter uses the word "Jumped" i…
Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness? I don't think so, I'd prefer we hold a standard of being correct and put the onus of education on the readers. They can Google what they don't understand. We can educate the public better to not be afraid of technical details. I agree with danarmak, this piece like so many o…
>Is it really the responsibility of a journalist to hold the hand of people not well versed in the topic at the expense of technical correctness
I think they don't have a choice but to do it this way. A typical news outlet will report on hundreds of topics a day and probably covering the entire spectrum of topics out there.
How likely it is that all of the readers will be well versed in all the areas of expertise that human race was able to achieve in the last few thousands of years of recorded history?
Also, these journalists[not necessarily this one but in general] are usually not experts on the topic that they write on and the better ones usually would consult with someone who is well versed on that topic. There's no way that the expert that the journalist is consulting with, will be able to educate the journalist, so he/she will dumb it down and then the reporter will dumb it down further and re-shape it in a form that the news outlet can sell it to its audience(right wing, left wing, alt-right, communist, highly educated ... whatever, they too are making a product for their customers).
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knowingly and happily give my information to Google, and I trust that they do not overstep their bounds when I tell them not to collect something. If Google ever gives me a reason to not trust them I won't. But thus far they have been okay in my mind and I'm happy with the services I received and the tradeoffs made with regard to my information. I fully expect more nastygrams and threats from people for saying this…
Do you think Google has never been hacked or compromised by an insider?
Do you think that major companies don't have systems to mitigate this threat?
Re: Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
#130I’m unable to see my historical Google location data on iOS via
https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb
I’m getting the following error:
“Location Services permission is not set to always. Timeline cannot function properly if you don’t allow Google Maps access to your location while in background. [Skip][Turn On]”
Seems like I should be able to see what historical location data they have without enabling background location.
Disclaimer: I work for Apple