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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

bradfrost.com

211–220 of 399 posts

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just their fiduciary duty: it makes the product better for end-users. Crowd-sourcing data on local businesses gives them a lot fresher and more granular state than they can get with an army of paid scouts.

There are apparently many, many 'end-users' who feel it does not make a better product for them, but thanks for being such a brazen apologist for shady practices.

Quantify "many many," and compare it to the user count that enjoys having Maps know fine-grained detail about the neighborhood because volunteers answer the questions it asks.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#212
post #195

Two things that happened to me: A) I walk into a store, get a notification from google photos asking me "I see you're at store X, wouldn't you like to take some pictures?". Possibly to use as part of google maps. Thinking back I think this is when I started de-googlifying my life. B) I get a notification from google maps asking me "you're travelling to place X soon, wouldn't you like to download an offline map, just…

And I started using Google's phones because I could see the potential for things like B. Hell yes, I want my phone to be aware of things in my email inbox. I want it to be more aware.

That's great. Different people want different things. My phone no longer does that :-)

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paying Google customer here. The fact that I'm giving them quite more than a dime doesn't make me exempt from stalking. What's your point?

Are you paying for the reviews?

No, and I never pay attention to those reviews. They typically don't match the actual experience.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're an advertising company that gets most of its profits by collecting personal information about people and trying to manipulate them into buying things. Sounds pretty unethical to me.

Are billboards or radio stations or television channels unethical to you? Because they are also trying to "manipulate" you into buying things. Advertising is not inherently unethical. I want people to buy my product so I need to raise awareness of it, encourage people that it is the best, make them feel like they need it. I would even go so far as to say that Google's default anonymized model makes this far better. M…

IMO advertising systems that have this intimate of knowledge about you are immoral because they undermine a consumer's agency well beyond traditional demographic-level or local advertising.

Google didn't just look at the fact that you were searching for tents online to serve you that ad. They looked at how old you are, what time of day you are most susceptible to clicking on ads, who your friends are and what they like, your address, your preferred colors and letters... It's possible that they figured out you just broke up with your SO and use shopping as a coping skill, so it was time to pull out the big guns. Google probably doesn't even understand exactly why they served that to you. And that's a problem.

> Doesn't sound too unethical to me especially because it is all one big opt-in.

Google serves me ads and tracks my behavior even if I never use a Google product. And there's no way for a user to decide whether or not they're okay with this on the web at large (unless you install an ad blocker). That doesn't sound opt-in to me.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pay the user for it with increased Google Drive space, a free subscription to the NYT, etc.

More like robbing people of their time.

If the user doesn't like it, she can turn it off. If the user likes it, she gets paid with free services. All other users get the benefit of free information about the business, whether they have location tracking on or not. I don't see the problem here.

Some Google products are stupidly designed, but this one looks like it's doing the right thing.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#217
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there was a single option that offered all of this at a reasonable price, you would see a lot of people moving to this. No, people would still go for the free product, killing the other option. If Google charges $1 per month for no tracking whatsoever, I'd bet that the vast, vast majority of the population wouldn't pay.

That's an open question that Google could solve by providing said option. One dollar a month for the complete suite of google tools with no tracking or ads whatsoever? Sign me up, right now. I pay 10x that amount to Spotify for a decent but less useful service. Hell, I'll go to $2/month.

> That's an open question that Google could solve by providing said option. One dollar a month for the complete suite of google tools with no tracking or ads whatsoever?

"No tracking" only, not "no ads". No ads would be far more expensive.

But you can actually do it: buy a corporate account from them and then use an ad blocker. As simple as that.

Now go and put your money where your mouth is :)

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#218
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you purchase a phone with an OS provided by what you believe to be a deeply unethical company?

I get your point, but what else would you buy? I have an iPhone, but only because my employer pay for it, it's simply to expensive. The alternative is that most of us wouldn't have a smartphone. But you're right of cause, people should boycott Android phones that track them to the extend Googles currently is.

If you're on a budget, Apple still offers a revamped iPhone 5S as the iPhone SE, which starts at $349 off-contract.

Despite being a pretty low-end phone, that's not a low-end smartphone price point by any measure, but it's certainly much less expensive than Apple's higher-end options.

The used market is also a possibility if you're on a tighter budget.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#219

Hm. I find google map reviews fairly useful, and so don't mind contributing. I don't know why my phone figuring out if I'm near a restaurant I would like is creepy? It's nowhere near as creepy as find my device, which everyone seems OK with.

You're probably not thinking adversarially. Most of us aren't. Most of us love all the features of technology.

However, there are bad apples in society, seeking shortcuts through taking from others and harming them. And there are guardians in society, constantly looking for vectors that a baddie can cause harm to protect them.

One emerging vector is the combination of market data to target individuals for threat and harm. E.g. you piss someone or a group off, whether by insulting them, simply the act of driving or eating meat, supporting a political party they don't, etc. Then, that person or group purchases batches of insufficiently anonymized marketing data, combines them to narrow down to your profile and uses it to hunt you down.

E.g. restaurants. Someone could buy location, restaurant and driving data, filter by several clues they discover about you, then stake out locations where you'll be.

Now that I've explored the personal-revenge factor, consider a different type of threat: economic survival. An adversarial corporation could use details about your psychology gleaned from timing information, nutrition profile, age, DNA/race, internet comments to influence you and larger groups in unethical ways, such as encouraging you to live unhealthy lifestyles, presenting carefully selected news items - not to harm you necessarily, but to perpetuate their own gain at your cost.

And this doesn't even have to happen to you personally. It can happen to targeted groups estimated to have vulnerabilities in any domain: middle-class, new home-owners, teen-agers. And the baddies' efforts all increase in efficacy the more information we leak.

So stop giving away all your information!

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#220
post #42

I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I want to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I want to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My mem…

All those things can be done locally on the phone only and without any server-side data processing. Without investigating into Google/Android terms of use I can bet they are NOT done locally (I might be wrong, this is a guess).

Ultimately it’s the consumer’s choice whether you want to buy your personal mobile device from a company that makes+sells phones for a living or from a company the sells ads for a living (no bad feeling against ads) and also makes+sells phones on the side to augment those ads.

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