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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

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Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#81

Post by Zhenya »

Mizza wrote: post #18

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…

Ethics? What are they doing? Showing you ads for things you're most likely interested in while giving you useful service?

Don't like it? Don't use them and block their JavaScript trackers.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#82

Post by Anderkent »

geofft wrote: post #64
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #15

The idea that you'd have any location privacy while carrying around a cell phone is absurd. Both iPhone and Android devices record location history, and your network provider always has a rough guess of where you are. It may be annoying that Google is very persistent about trying to build its maps dataset, but the suggestion that it's not happening on other devices is crazy.

There's a huge and meaningful distinction about the technical ability to violate your privacy, and actually doing so, and trust (slash non-creepiness) is largely about not doing so when you could. For instance, the fact that my roommate can open my bedroom door at any time does not mean that I have no privacy when making phone calls in my room; it means that I have privacy because I trust my roommate not to do so, ex…

Why do you think whether your phone asks you if you want to send a restaurant review is in any way related to whether your phone provider is using your location data maliciously?

In fact if there's any relation wouldn't it be the reverse? If you're using the location data unethically, you wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that it's being gathered.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#83

Post by jfoutz »

bootloop wrote: post #54
fenwick67 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is so obnoxious. No Google, I won't do free work for you. At least offer me some store credit.

Do you pay for their service? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think they paid as much for google maps on their android phone as an iphone user pays for apple maps, right?

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#84

Post by someguydave »

geofft wrote: post #64
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #15

The idea that you'd have any location privacy while carrying around a cell phone is absurd. Both iPhone and Android devices record location history, and your network provider always has a rough guess of where you are. It may be annoying that Google is very persistent about trying to build its maps dataset, but the suggestion that it's not happening on other devices is crazy.

There's a huge and meaningful distinction about the technical ability to violate your privacy, and actually doing so, and trust (slash non-creepiness) is largely about not doing so when you could. For instance, the fact that my roommate can open my bedroom door at any time does not mean that I have no privacy when making phone calls in my room; it means that I have privacy because I trust my roommate not to do so, ex…

Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at the very least. The phone company almost always records and retains that information. Similarly, you cannot communicate to anyone on the internet without using an IP address, which your counterparty must know and nearly always retains.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#85

Post by fenwick67 »

bootloop wrote: post #54
fenwick67 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is so obnoxious. No Google, I won't do free work for you. At least offer me some store credit.

Do you pay for their service? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I look at the ads they serve me so yes I do pay for their services, just not directly.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#86

Post by aiiane »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #65
saulrh wrote: 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…

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…

Maps app -> Settings -> Notifications -> Your Contributions (and uncheck boxes as desired).

The controls exist.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#87

Post by FreakyT »

This issue reminds me of a key permission iOS gives control over while Android (even post-Nougat) doesn't:

The distinction between allowing an app to use location while the app is open versus anytime.

Android makes no distinction between these two states, which opens up the ability for many apps (not just Google's) to enable automatic stalking mode. Take Yelp, for example. I do want it to be able to access my location so I can easily lookup restaurants nearby. However, on Android, once you give Yelp the location permission, it'll start popping up notifications about things near your current location, which is just creepy. On iOS, you can restrict it to only be able to see your location when using the app, which is what I want for most apps.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#88

Post by bob_theslob646 »

The real question is: is this creepy or ingenious?

The reality is that their products are the best because they are able to crowdsource the masses for practically free.

Google Maps- How do you think they are so good with traffic and or know when a place is busy? [Google admits it tracked user location data even when the setting was turned off](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location...)

Tensorflow- All those captchas you had to type and click? Yeah they were used to digitize books and build an amazing clean image dataset. [Google Inc. Acquires Carnegie Mellon Spin-off ReCAPTCHA Inc.](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/google-inc-acquires-carnegie-mel...) (https://techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/recaptcha-using-captchas-t...)

Some of it may be unethical, because they do not do a great job of explicitly stating what they do with your data, but some of it may be for the greater good.(intentions are not bad.) An example is traffic. I think in this case, I would like them to know so that they can warn/tell others, to save others time.

It is the wild wild west when it comes to data privacy laws in the U.S compared to the E.U, because there are none and (currently) it is easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#89

Post by kajecounterhack »

hateduser2 wrote: post #45
cloudwalking wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, what makes Google so "deeply unethical?"

Well I feel like it’s kind of easy to guess what they mean. I’m sure it’s related to spying and data hoarding and tracking and privacy issues and their incentives are highly misaligned and encourage unethical anti consumer behavior.

As far as centralized companies go Google is one of the better ones. It's unfortunate that so much power accrues to only a few entities. But slamming Google is like slamming a side effect of a bigger problem: many markets are naturally winner takes all and vertical integration confers enormous benefits.

I don't see much of a way around this but many feel stronger regulations to protect consumer data should be enacted to safeguard us against bad private actors. Saying "I'll use something else" isn't always a viable solution.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#90

Post by Animats »

kibwen wrote: post #32
laurent123456 wrote: post #13

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.

If you try to disable many Google-provided apps on Android, you're presented with a scary-looking screen warning you about system instability, and it's legit. If I attempt to disable Chrome on my phone, for instance, it causes every single app on my phone to crash upon any interaction whatsoever, including third-party apps like Signal. Funny how Chrome is more inseparable from Android than Internet Explorer was from…

I have Google Chrome turned off, and it works fine. I have Fennec, loaded via F-Droid as my browser. You have to have some browser, but it doesn't have to be Google Chrome.

One thing that seems to help is that, when I get a new phone, I turn all this stuff off before connecting to anything or even putting in a SIM card. So Google never gets a chance to control the phone's connections to the outside world.

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