231–240 of 399 posts
USERS ARE THE PRODUCT.
We are the mice, google "Services" are the cheese, and the people, companies, advertisers, governments, technocrats, et al. are the clients/customers who pay google.
Google users are and never will be more than products. The customer is always right (not the product is always right).
Google are a deeply, deeply unethical company and all of their employees are complicit. On a more practical note, I live in apartment above a restaurant. My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home and wants me to post photos I take in my apartment to the restaurant's map page. Now that OSM data is as good as Google and Maps.Me is a good enough client, my next phone will be completely de-Goo…
What are these "Google" notifications? Is that a "Google" app generating them? If so, can't it be disabled or uninstalled? I don't have this on my Android phone but I've uninstalled or disabled everything Google related. And if you don't want to be tracked, you can also switch off Location History.
I don't get any of this on Android either, because I have almost all Google stuff turned off and replaced with F-Droid and open source. No Google Play Store, no Google Location Services, no Google Maps (ZaNavi instead), no Keep, no Photos, no Registration, no YouTube app. No Gmail (I use a Sonic.net IMAP server shared by all my computers, and K-9 mail), no Google account. Some of those apps bitch when you disable the…
I also look at it that rather my data be at just one company as much as possible and have chosen that company to be Google.
I just trust Google a lot more then say my cable provider to not sell my data to a third party. Fully aware Google is going to use to Target ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. One could argue that your memory is terrible because you know you can rely on those services.
This reminds me uncomfortably of someone I saw yesterday arguing that you shouldn't get a flu shot because it makes your immune system lazy. Memory is complicated and difficult. It can be trained, but we only have so much bandwidth for it. It's very nice to have automation to "remember" for us, so we can stop wasting that limited bandwidth on things that don't much matter, like details of our dinner experience, and s…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...
http://www.thedrive.com/news/8686/study-using-gps-navigation...
Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…
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 b…
I am here pleading, begging Google to give me (and everyone else) an option to set up a free of cost, always on VPN something like {this} but which you can enable on any network all the time. I don't mind Google having access to all my data as long as they are dominant. The problem in my opinion is the push back they are getting from advertising agencies (wsj is only a hired gun afaict)... I'm guessing one London bas…
I am in the US and our cable providers are now allowed to sell our Internet data on sites we visit. We use Google DNS instead of ISP because of this and hate how ISP injects into DNS with an ad and Google does not do this. Which they could and make a ton of money.
But our ISP still has routing data in where we visit. I would like my data to just be one place if possible and trust Google to be that place.
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…
Also, if they were behind a configuration option and defaulted to on, most people would be fine turning it off and forgetting about it. This seems to be about lack of control. It's good for developers to think carefully before they ship products that do things with no way of being told not to. EDIT: Welp. Apparently these settings exist. I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if y…
I'm not sure the original author knows that they can be turned off.
... or perhaps (if I'm being less charitable) the original author doesn't care; they don't want to be asked in the first place, ever (and are a touch naive about exactly how it is Google Maps gets the data it can vend to end-users).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if you turn it off in one place, it just starts happening in another: Yah. I disabled Google Maps tracking, then Google Search started notifying me about places I was near.
It's not Google Maps that's doing the tracking. He turned off notifications in Google Maps, not location history, which does the actual tracking that other apps consume. He agreed to location tracking when he first set up the phone because the first run setup explicitly asks whether he wants that on or off.
... as a wise man once observed, people talk a long game about how important their privacy is, but then empirically, researchers continue to discover you can get people to divulge a lot of personal information for a Snickers bar, if not less (survey-takers who just stand around in malls and ask people to fill out clipboards are an example of this---and while they are a dying breed, they're a dying breed because it's cheaper now to collect that information online, not because people have gotten cagier about divulging it).