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Not OK, Google

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Re: Not OK, Google

#481

Post by falcolas »

ctrl-j wrote: post #359
r00fus wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you normally use your friends' wifi? I do that when it's family, but generally not with my friends (don't do LAN parties anymore). With LTE, I don't need wifi.

Wasn't there a story recently about android phones still being tracked and tracking wifi hotspots even with wifi turned off? I believe location services still works pretty well even with GPS and wifi off. I would imagine if you walk into a home with google's AI doodads all over the place, you're gonna be picked up.

Yes, there was recently a question of how Android knew someone's location with such high resolution, even when wifi and GPS were both turned off. The answer was a passive probing of wifi identifiers and using those against the Google SID to location database even when wifi was turned off.

There was even a note about this feature in the privacy policy, IIRC.

Re: Not OK, Google

#482

Post by marak830 »

r00fus wrote: post #394
marak830 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here. When I first heard about android, I imagined an open system I could tinker with like I can on my PC. Instead I get the current evolution. I want a 3rd party. The same thing comes to my every day of usage, I'm still on win 7, and short of leaving Linux(yes I should have already), I can't upgrade without becoming a product. I want what we all imagined and dreamt of, and I pay for it. What I won't do, i…

You can move to Mac, AppleID is not really required.

Without trying to look like an arse, why? I have been on pc since dos, I can hack my way around any pc.

I will fully admit I have not spent enough time in Mac to figure out the file system, but from what (little) I have seen, your not in control.

I like my pc because I can see what sub-processes are running, who is taking up how much memory, install things to where I want and if worse comes to worse, manually change how windows runs. (I apologise if you can do all that in Mac, as I said, I don't have the experience certificate - I bounced off it hard).

Re: Not OK, Google

#483

Post by winstrhammerman »

r00fus wrote: post #394
marak830 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here. When I first heard about android, I imagined an open system I could tinker with like I can on my PC. Instead I get the current evolution. I want a 3rd party. The same thing comes to my every day of usage, I'm still on win 7, and short of leaving Linux(yes I should have already), I can't upgrade without becoming a product. I want what we all imagined and dreamt of, and I pay for it. What I won't do, i…

You can move to Mac, AppleID is not really required.

Right- and updates, which require an iTunes account and registered computer, can be done by extracting the installer/update from another OSX system. Though not impossible, it does take some serious tinkering to prevent Apple from "phoning home" with every other click.

Re: Not OK, Google

#484

Post by kps »

rch wrote: post #261
ubercore wrote: post #11

Google Now has done the same for me, told me how long it will take to get to a bar I frequent. My reaction was quite exactly "Oh that's neat, thanks!" and I went and had a great burger that night. Totally OK for me Google. I respect that people have different privacy thresholds, but I think the fact that it's different for everyone is being lost in articles like this.

I met a good friend and current employer because Google Now told me about an event I might be interested in a couple of years ago. Of course it also once told me how long it would take to get to an ex's house from my current girlfriend's place. How about an 'OK, funny once' command?

  > How about an 'OK, funny once' command?
I hope that's a Heinlein reference.

Re: Not OK, Google

#485

Post by falcolas »

majewsky wrote: post #463
ctrl-j wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there a story recently about android phones still being tracked and tracking wifi hotspots even with wifi turned off? I believe location services still works pretty well even with GPS and wifi off. I would imagine if you walk into a home with google's AI doodads all over the place, you're gonna be picked up.

Makes you wonder how reliable airplane mode is.

Airplane mode doesn't turn off the radios, IIRC; it just stops transmissions.

Rumor is that even when your phone has been turned off, it can be turned back on remotely.

Re: Not OK, Google

#486

Post by mooman219 »

mojuba wrote: post #50
ubercore wrote: post #11

Google Now has done the same for me, told me how long it will take to get to a bar I frequent. My reaction was quite exactly "Oh that's neat, thanks!" and I went and had a great burger that night. Totally OK for me Google. I respect that people have different privacy thresholds, but I think the fact that it's different for everyone is being lost in articles like this.

One tiny caveat being that, Google (and others as well, to be fair) will be able to indirectly collect data even on the privacy-aware part of the population who don't use Google much. The simplest example being, even if you don't use GMail, still some part of your emails inevitably end up in GMail inboxes. Now also consider this: just being a guest in a Google-stuffed house means you are under surveillance. So no, it…

Google has top notch practices in my opinion regarding privacy. If anything I would be more worried about smaller companies with shadier practices and lower security standards holding my personal information. There have been seemingly illegal practices from companies like Sears with how personal data is collected and used. It's easy to throw shade at a big companies, write a sarcastic title, then get clicks.

Example: "Intuit’s TurboTax stores highly detailed financial data for millions of users who import their W2s, their banking data, info about their mortgages and more. Right now, all of this data is locked into TurboTax, but the company is now thinking about how it can do more with it by giving its users the option to share this data with reputable third parties." ... https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/intuit-wants-to-turn-turbo...

Re: Not OK, Google

#487

Post by _wp3r »

problems wrote: post #344
0xmohit wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that deleting location history actually deletes the history? Reminds one of the group of students called Europe v. Facebook [0]: Schrems described the file obtained through a legal request as a 500MB PDF including data the user thought they had deleted. The one sent through a regular Facebook request was a 150MB HTML file and included video (the PDF did not) but did not have the deleted data. [0]…

Definitely, and this is why it needs to be a global option to disable location history - just sending it to them in the first place is the problem!

Can't you simply disable the GPS radio?

Re: Not OK, Google

#488

Post by falcolas »

sangnoir wrote: post #239
pimlottc wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody was thinking about "the cloud" back in those days. Back then, your data, you programs all lived and ran on your own computer in your home. Most people didn't go online, and if you did, it was mostly to read and download data to use locally on your own computer. Connections were intermittent and slow. The idea that your own data would be stored online was almost unimaginable; even using network-depending applic…

> Our expectations of how "Star Trek AI" would actually be implemented were completely different than how highly connected cloud-based services like Google Assistant work today. The trope-namer (Star Trek AI) was a ship-wide AI - when considering the ship sizes, it definitely is closer to the "cloud" model and not limited to a private instances on officers' bunker/bridge terminals/tricorders. Perhaps a hardcore Trekk…

The AI for the Enterprise D was run from three computer cores on the ship (two in the saucer, one in the engineering section), made up of Isolinear Chips subjected to a small warp field (iow, it makes computes using light faster than the speed of light). Subspace communication bandwidth is too limited (and potentially affected by latency, since it had to travel through repeaters throughout the galaxy) to provide realtime cloud computing as we experience it.

There are some cannon exceptions to this (such as in Nemesis where the subspace communication interruption affected the star charts), but even then the functionality of the ship was not impacted.

The Star Trek ships are very analogous to our own ocean-bound ships, where satellite communication is possible almost anywhere, but they don't rely on it.

So, yes, the AI is completely confined to the ship.

Re: Not OK, Google

#489

Post by krupan »

bovermyer wrote: post #474
mojuba wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One tiny caveat being that, Google (and others as well, to be fair) will be able to indirectly collect data even on the privacy-aware part of the population who don't use Google much. The simplest example being, even if you don't use GMail, still some part of your emails inevitably end up in GMail inboxes. Now also consider this: just being a guest in a Google-stuffed house means you are under surveillance. So no, it…

If you don't care for the products or services, you could always opt not to buy/use them. That includes avoiding areas where Google appliances are present. I'm fine with trading privacy for AI-driven convenience, though I already have a phone I like and an Echo, so I have no compelling reason to buy these particular products right now.

And how are we going to know where google appliances are present or not?

Re: Not OK, Google

#490

Post by falcolas »

Programmatic wrote: post #471
bhauer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel your message is the most important in this thread because it's the crux of the whole concern about privacy and the cloud. Where technology has failed us most is in the utterly stagnant evolution and maturation of secure private networks. The following is a utopian notion, but had private networks seen as much R&D as the public clouds, they would be significantly less cumbersome than today's clunky VPNs. Imagin…

Let me preface this by first saying that I absolutely can't wait to have my own personal home automation, AI assistant, etc. on prem without the cloud: I think that as far as the nascence of these features goes, the cloud model will beat the on-prem features any day of the week for several reasons. Lack of configuration to set up, ease of use from anywhere without network configuration, etc. are table stakes. But the…

As we just learned with Yahoo, though, once the ML models have been trained, they can be disseminated and used without the need for "cloud-scale" data or compute resources.

And, for better or worse, Dragon's text-to-speech is pretty damned good after a rather minimal amount of training.

I don't think there's anything stopping voice and intent recognition from coming back to our personal machines other than the ability to keep making money from having it come up to the cloud.

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