Secretly? Isn't this effectively the entire point of their business?
Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
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Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#82I have a personal gmail and a work gmail (G Suite), each using my full name, but both run in separate browsers using the same IP address. I always wonder if Google keeps a "master record" of people and all their associations, if not for security or to work with law enforcement.
Probably. I recall Project Veritas showing hidden video of a Twitter dev speaking about databases that link all profiles of someone (using things like IPs, fingerprints, etc. to stitch the relationships together).
I really hate changing the topic here, but I feel it has to be said sometimes.
It's _very_ frustrating when people immediately discredit someone or something because they don't agree with them, even if they don't have the full story.
Project Veritas does some good work, even if they're blasted in popular culture/mainstream media for being 'biased', 'alt-right', 'etc'. I bet you the downvotes you're getting are just because you mentioned Project Veritas.
They have some very out-landish views, but when they actually put people on the street or go undercover, they've revealed dirt on a lot of companies and people.
It's shocking to me to see society go from "let's look at ALL sides of the coin, no matter how egregiously offensive they are to me" to "fuck 'em, they're trash media, they suck, they shill and are racist, alt-right losers and I'm not going to look at anything they post because in my mind everything they do is bad!"
I don't even go to Project Veritas outside of what I hear in the media, but I still give it a fair look and make my own opinion.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#83(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
Yes, all that data helped Google perfect its amazing chat and video calling app strategy.
And because they didn’t perfect their chat and video calling app strategy, it’s fine for companies to have unrestricted access to personal data without any oversight.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#84(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
Regulations, a lot of times, tend to have the opposite of the intended effect. In this case, you'd need to define what is meant by "having data".
Is having an email or phone enough to qualify?
Maybe yes.
In that case, think of a rapidly growing startup, which breaches that mark (50% or whatever the law says) - and now has to comply with the law.
But the startup is not capable of compliance, because the law was made for behemoths like google.
This startup will go belly over and die soon.
Google's monopoly saved.
Alternatively, leaving it in the public domain for civil suits to be filed has a tendency of natural selection. If a company is TRULY big enough, and has that kind of data, someone WILL sue.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#85I have a personal gmail and a work gmail (G Suite), each using my full name, but both run in separate browsers using the same IP address. I always wonder if Google keeps a "master record" of people and all their associations, if not for security or to work with law enforcement.
Facebook does this to build shadow profiles of everyone, even if they are not Facebook users. I'm sure Google does similar things. They certainly could.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget Google Plus, and that email killer whose name I cannot recall.
Google+ and Wave were both doomed because they were invite-only. If you have to ration invites, it isn't much of a social network. Invite-only successfully created artificial demand for Gmail because invited users could immediately communicate with non-Gmail users. That didn't work for Google+ or Wave since they didn't interoperate with services that people already used.
If only Google would have had enough data to predict that!
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#87(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
"By knowing what people search for and modeling our behavior, they have unprecedented ability to forecast future events. I expect Facebook and other, lesser known companies do the same. I believe it is dangerous for a company to have this ability." I have thought of this as "search-based front-running". How much of it goes on, I would like to know.
One of my favorite articles on that front is where two Capital One fraud analysts used internal purchase data to invest in consumer-oriented brands. Yes, it became insider trading:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sec-capitalone-insidertra...
Key quote: The Huangs, who are not related, began with a $147,000 investment and together made more than $2.8 million from the trades, a three-year return of 1,819 percent, the SEC said.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#88How poetic. This lawsuit brought to you by Boies Schiller, the law firm that aggressively intimidated Theranos whistleblowers. I would argue that their actions contributed to the suicide of Ian Gibbons, as well as threatening his widow with legal action after his death.
>I would argue that their actions contributed to the suicide of Ian Gibbons [...] Anyone who has read Bad Blood [1] should have no doubt about this fact. They destroyed this man and lead him to suicide in order to try to save their house of cards. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/...
I finally got around to reading it recently, and I think that aspect of the entire saga was the most startling. Not the fraud, not Holmes' ability to spin to the public and her board, not the work culture that she and Sunny Balwani created for their employees, but the severity and frequency of the real and implied legal threats Theranos employed through Boies Schiller and associates on literally everyone that touched the company.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact that the user uses a private window or other means to indicates they don't want to be tracked probably makes this a more clear case. What about the fact that Incognito is so that "other people who use this device won't see your activity" and it doesn't do anything about tracking?
This is actually no longer true: Google recently added third party tracker blocking when you're in incognito mode. Of course, every other browser does this even outside of incognito mode, but the point stands that Google has actively added features to prevent websites from tracking you in this mode.
But they have actively disabled the abilities of add-ons to do the job completely. There's a lot of except-Google going on in Chrome.
I switched back to Firefox last year, and it's been a good change. uBlock Origin can do all of its job and not just some of the job.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#90Google is just a digital Eye-of-Sauron[0] and very difficult to avoid if you do any meaningful surfing of the open web. They have their fingers in many different pies.
There is even small subcultures on the web dedicated to avoiding Google by doing things like running 'degoogled chromium' and blacklisting various Google domains in their /etc/hosts file. Sadly all these mitigations don't work because Google already has a dossier on many people and even if you don't have a Google account, Google keeps tabs on you via fingerprinting or other means and knows who 'you' really are (using simple correlation and heuristics).
Then this raises the issue of: what can be done? I prefer to just be nihilistic about it and accept that Google already has dirt on me, despite my mitigations (I have a bit of history blindly handing over personal data to Google for a number of years). I think young people these days in 2020 have a great opportunity to implement mitigations and are better suited than me to browse privately, since I'm already contaminated by Google. (I still mitigate however, but it's not enough).