61–70 of 85 posts
I used to be pretty much in favour of opt-out for stuff like this, but I think at this point the industry itself has managed to prove that it can’t be trusted with anything but legislation guaranteeing opt-in.
As an ex-Googler it makes me sad that an internal discussion leaked like this.
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Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. Note that if your location history (precise every five minute location stored to your account) is off, Google won't even suggest a locally-stored list of previous locations you used with Maps. Which is an absolutist position that is usability-wise incredibly frustrating.
> Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. I would rather have the ability give a custom location instead.
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Do you think that the same governments which are against cryptography will actually look after your privacy? They'll probably require a pop-up that asks: "Is it okay if Google keeps your data, or should we just send it to the NSA?".
I feel that arguments along the lines of "why should we have governments protect consumers on 'x' if they willingly do 'y'" aren't really helpful, and feel akin to whataboutism. For example, yes, I expect "The Government's OSHA" to enforce worker safety laws, even if "The Government's Police" later winds up brutalizing workers during a strike. The Government isn't this unified entity, it's more a collection of dispar…
I noticed fairly recently that YouTube has undeniably started tracking my watch history even though I've had watch and search history turned off forever, and it's still turned off with (apparently) no data in it. On the front page, there are constantly recommendations of videos which I have just watched (not liked, commented, only watched). Old, new, whatever. Videos which would be quite random if I hadn't just watch…
Well Chrome does have an installation identifier that was/is transmitted only to google properties. That would explain the behavior you describe. Google says it is only for tracking experiments and tests, but I doubt even they know what everybody is doing with it, and perhaps you were a member of an experiment where they used it to track you. "Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID" [0] An article…
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Do you think that the same governments which are against cryptography will actually look after your privacy? They'll probably require a pop-up that asks: "Is it okay if Google keeps your data, or should we just send it to the NSA?".
I'm not sure what cryptography laws have to do with anything. But in this false dichotomy, I'd much rather the NSA have the data. They have far less power and influence. Google censors dissidents and shapes public opinion each and every day.
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I feel that arguments along the lines of "why should we have governments protect consumers on 'x' if they willingly do 'y'" aren't really helpful, and feel akin to whataboutism. For example, yes, I expect "The Government's OSHA" to enforce worker safety laws, even if "The Government's Police" later winds up brutalizing workers during a strike. The Government isn't this unified entity, it's more a collection of dispar…
I think you're right that my point is something close to whataboutism (though not exactly whataboutism), but yours suffers from something similar to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.[1] [1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
If a government is simply a large institution or cluster of institutions that perform many roles and have a purpose towards the same end, then the claim of "whataboutism" is simply nonsense and trusting one portion of a government and not another is at least somewhat inconsistent, and this "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" seems clear when a person can go straight from criticizing the government's treatment of striking workers to advocating for workers protections from this same government.
I think "the government" doesn't exist as a unified entity in any meaningful way aside from maybe linguistically. The government, in my view, is more a collection of organizations that often have outright antagonistic relations to each other, and interests that are fundamentally in contradiction. I don't really view a regulatory body and the NSA to be meaningfully part of the same organization (I'd say there are plenty of private businesses that are more closely "part of the NSA" than some oversight board.) Claiming that the perceived misbehavior of the NSA should prevent us from advocating for consumer protections is clearly whataboutism according to this frame. This view would make this "Gell-Mann amnesia" accusation appear incoherent, since we are talking about disparate organizations with no meaningful connection to one another.
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I think you're right that my point is something close to whataboutism (though not exactly whataboutism), but yours suffers from something similar to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.[1] [1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Thanks for the recommendation, interesting read. I suppose how one lands on this topic is based on how much continuity one believes there is in a "government." If a government is simply a large institution or cluster of institutions that perform many roles and have a purpose towards the same end, then the claim of "whataboutism" is simply nonsense and trusting one portion of a government and not another is at least s…
Perhaps we should expect different parts of the government to act with varying motives, but similar competence.
I think the government organizations attempting to ensure backdoors in encryption are acting deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of easing investigations. Thus, I think the privacy regulators will act deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of protecting consumers.
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Thanks for the recommendation, interesting read. I suppose how one lands on this topic is based on how much continuity one believes there is in a "government." If a government is simply a large institution or cluster of institutions that perform many roles and have a purpose towards the same end, then the claim of "whataboutism" is simply nonsense and trusting one portion of a government and not another is at least s…
You could make the same argument about different subject areas in a newspaper; saying that the different editors are antagonistic towards each other, and have varying levels of competence. In the cases of both newspapers and governments, there is a similar oversight and management structure across the organization, as well as unity in source of funding. Perhaps we should expect different parts of the government to ac…
> I think the government organizations attempting to ensure backdoors in encryption are acting deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of easing investigations. Thus, I think the privacy regulators will act deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of protecting consumers.
I just don't see any good reason to make this leap. Furthermore, I don't see the utility of arguing against consumer protections simply due to the perceived misbehavior of an intelligence agency. Europe passed the GDPR, and despite its many inadequacies, it has positively impacted the privacy of European citizens, and proves that some ground could be made by way of consumer protection.
Privacy regulations aren't so pie-in-the-sky that they aren't worth fighting for. That's simply an unreasonable concession in my view.