Google’s become an obsessive stalker | Hacker News Reader

Google’s become an obsessive stalker

theregister.co.uk

I find it curious the tone of some responses on this issue. Google (and not just google; FB, Bing,Baidu) snooping is not a petty issue that will just go away. It is a matter of deep concern at par with any existential threat mankind has ever faced; up there with climate change and nuclear war. Never before has mankind had to face such an assault to privacy. The data google collects is the next best thing to reading its users minds. This is all the more scary because

1. It is a private company 2. state actors have a vested interest in aligning with google and other such companies and (as the article points out) will deliberately lapse in their regulatory obligations.

The privacy wars are on and google et-al have won the opening skirmishes. I predict that in response to rising public awareness (not outcry, there is no outcry) google and other invaders of privacy will come up with algorithms that tone down recommendations and mask the amount of data being captured without actually reducing it. The citizenry will be lulled into false complacency and the encirclement will proceed apace.

Large unbridled Corporations with unchecked power have proven through history to be venal and predatory. We are witnessing the birth of a new phase that will leave a scar on mankind and make the sins of the Church, Hitler, North Korea and every other despotic regime that has tried to limit human freedom through the ages look amateurish if we do nothing about it now.

What? Existential in that it could literally end our species? Nuclear war and climate change sure, but info collection? How is this not totally hyperbolic?

In my outrage, I admit to unconscious hyperbole. Substitute grave for existential. But the point remains that if we succumb to this, humanity will be unrecognizable in 3 generations. Perhaps in some way that counts as an existential threat?

humanity will be unrecognizable in 3 generations

It's hard to see why this particular thing is going to make any bigger change than those that have happened over the last 3 generations. Or those to come from other reasons: bio-engineering, implants, VR, AI etc.

Also, I'm unclear why you seem to assume this change is bad?

Not the OP, but the central idea is 'Information is Power'. It has existed for a long time in the books of all the powerful people and is essential to the very fabric of our universe (not hyperbole; information, entropy, debates about conservation/loss of information instead of mass inside blackholes [0] and such).

Once you have all the relevant information about someone or some system, then you essentially control them. If I know everything about you, how can you ever hope to have an even footing with me?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

This is a good point. But Google's services make a person a more powerful agent compared to others: one can navigate quicker, find better services and access information faster and more accurately.

So yes, there is a trade off. But humans have been making trade-offs forever - civilization itself is one big compromise. Domesticating cattle meant human could not move as quickly and as fast as they used to. But they lived better and longer.

I don't see why information trade-offs are somehow different.

> This is a good point. But Google's services make a person a more powerful agent compared to others: one can navigate quicker, find better services and access information faster and more accurately.

Google could provide most of those services without tracking individuals.

> I don't see why information trade-offs are somehow different.

Because it is about power. We, as humanity, have plenty of experience with power trade-offs. We have so much experience with it that we have names for structures with centralized power, like "monarchy" and "dictatorship". Our experience with those trade-offs hasn't been particularly good. Maybe we should learn something from that.

One concern is that it is a cleave plane between the haves and the have-nots---in this case, the haves are "Those with nothing to hide."

In a future where these technologies are ubiquitous, the person who has to go off the grid for perfectly sane reasons---domestic abuse, witness protection, leaving behind a past that makes one a pariah---will find it that much more difficult. Not only will they no longer have access to the convenience of services that have tuned around their interests and desires---address books that know their work and home, voice recognition that knows what they sound like, personal assistants that can pull useful / valuable information out of the soup of the Internet and surface it to their benefit, etc.---the lack of these technologies in someone's presence will mark them as someone "with a past."

There's the potential that people will look at you a little funny in the future if you have a smartphone with voice recognition disabled, or you're always typing in addresses by hand to a self-driving car because it doesn't just know where you want to go today based on past habits.

I grew up without a TV, and people looked at me funny.

I think the domestic abuse thing is bad, and I know Google has been burnt by that once before. But they fixed it once, and I'm not sure that it is something that is unfixable for any substantial reason.

Some people have always rejected technology, for both good and bad reasons. One can usually think of some very compelling case why a particular piece of technology is bad.

That still doesn't mean that the change is bad overall (indeed, the things the person is missing out on sound very useful). And nothing comes close to making it a "grave threat to humanity", or - like I said - a bigger change than something like implants, let alone CRISPR or AI.

There's the potential that people will look at you a little funny in the future if...

I'd say "potential" is being charitable at this point. We're now in a world where prospective employers have been demanding access to candidates' social network profiles. We're now in a world where national governments seriously propose requiring anyone visiting their country to disclose all of their social network profiles in advance. Privacy-minded individuals have objected strongly to these kinds of practices, not least because of the inferences that might be drawn if someone didn't provide such details (honestly or otherwise).

I see this beyond the issue of tracking. It is one of relentless collection of data. Google is a private company, even if it were a government, it has no right to all that personal data. It collects it because it can.

With a little imagination it can become clear that so much data cannot be a good thing. Can the information be used to repress political opposition? Can it be used to enforce an agenda of say eugenics? Can a business be given undue advantage by promoting its "recommendations"? Can minorities and their views be suppressed?

In a few years with the maturing of AI to fine-tune the processes we will all think alike,behave alike, conform alike, to the wishes of our overlords who know who we are, where we are, what we eat,what illnesses we have who we f..k, what religion we practice, what books we read, and so on ...

Maybe that fellow Orwell was on to something.

See also fixermark and jtrip below

On one hand we have people claiming that filter bubbles lead to the collapse of civilization, and on the other we have that the same services will lead to conformity.

Based on current trends, it seems like the filter bubble problem is winning. So maybe an all-knowing AI Google would be what saves us? ;)

The alternative view of course is that there won't be one AI, there will be many. And they will compete to please people more so people are more likely to use their services.

If you want to go hyperbolic again, Brave New World is how it ends. Personally, I'm more than happy to trade information for services that work well.

> I'm unclear why you seem to assume this change is bad?

I guess the idea is to stop assuming you know what the data will be used for. My office manager bought a book then several months later took a trip to NYC. She was pulled into a room and interviewed about it before they let her go, specifically mentioning the book, why she bought it, and asking why she was traveling to NYC.

Is this unreasonable use of data capture? I dunno. Seems okay, right? But it is an example of threat-assessment based on you bought a book. What if you instead had access to every email/text/web-search/webpage-i-have-accessed ever? Not to mention purchases. Of course credit cards are the same way.

Surely posting THIS thread is just as threat-indicating as buying a book, and even more telling because you have my words to back up your assertions. Ought I not have posted this HN post? Will it come back to haunt me? Computers don't forget. They'll never let me forget this post, or any other, and use it as justification for my future actions.

Examples only seem to weaken privacy conversations, since one inevitably internalizes "how likely am I to be caught by that?", but here goes anyway:

If I mention "Snowden" in a post on HackerNews/Reddit/email/Facebook ought I be denied a security clearance? I don't know, but the capability is there already. And of course you have to mention the cliché: If there were a Facebook in 1930, the collection of the Jewish people would've been trivial, and extraordinarily efficient. Heck, throw in today's public face recognition and you could net an entire population. You wouldn't even do it loudly. You'd just quietly identify nexus points in the community and start quietly working to discredit and weaken them. Help them lose their job, discredit them, have'm transferred to another city, hire a prostitute to help ruin their marriage... whatever it is that naughty folk do to get their way as quietly as possible.

I don't feel like these things are shocking, hard-to-execute, or so fabulously ficticious that one ought eye-roll at it. They're simply what any moral-less entity would do to stay alive/in-power/in-control.

The capture of the data is only slightly offensive to me (my library knows a lot about what I like to read, too). Using it to hassle me when traveling is much more odious, in my mind mainly because there absolutely isn't any kind of data showing that "people who read title X were 10% (or even 1%) more likely to commit some atrocity." That's just nonsensical. So yes, technically easy to implement, but why?

If someone did brain surgery on you to turn you into a bundle of delusions (or insert something similar here, plausible or not), would "you", as you currently cherish "you", still exist? It's not like any of our body tissues are terribly inspiring or important in the great scheme of things. It's rather the things that are directly threatened, our ability to think on our own, to be a person. Physical destruction? Meh, doesn't upset me, not in light of the heat death of the universe. A sane humanity getting destroyed by a comet would be more dignified than our current outlook.

An unexamined life isn't worth anything, and an examined life is not compatible with where we are currently heading. Imagine that story of the naked emperor without that child. For me that's like some kind of event horizon -- if everybody fell for it, and stayed stuck to it, there is no story there, no history, no people in it, nothing going on. There isn't even a "there" there, if there is no hope of it ever changing.

Changes to information regimes do have profound effects. Their consequences are quite difficult to predict, and not necessarily good or evil, though that depends on deeper issues as well.

The emergence of the printing press and spread of knowledge, both official doctrine (the Bible), literature (Cervantes' Don Quixote was the first modern novel), ideas (Montaigne's Essays), scientific thoughts (Copernicus and Gallileo), and many, many pamphlets, shocked Europe for the next several hundred years. Keep in mind that a copy of Gutenberg's Bible, new, was the equivalent of about $4,500 based on one recent estimate I've seen -- expensive by modern standards, but previous, hand-written copies of books were the equivalent of handcrafted meticulous art-pieces. A scribe might be able to complete one or two books per year, and had to be fed, housed, clothed, etc., for this, as well as educated. Producing the vellum, inks, quills, etc., used, and candles (for any work beyond daylight hours) also has to be factored in. See: http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/how-long-di...

With the dawning of the industrial age in the early 1800s, mass literacy became a thing. In England, literacy rose from ~40% to near 90% over the course of the 19th century, through publicly-subsidised education, required for the new, highly-skilled factory jobs. Paper became cheap, and presses faster (a few thousand sheets per hour), enabling yet more dissemination of information. Among the consequences, mass movements of the public, independent of demagogues, pressing claims, including the Chartalist movement in the 1820s - 1830s in England, and the Year of Revolutions, 1848, throughout Europe and Central and South America, in which 50 nations saw substantial rebellions.

The early 20th century saw loudhailers, which enabled the voice of one person to reach the assembled ears of tens or hundreds of thousands of people at once. Transport (busses and trains) could assemble them. Radio allowed a single voice to reach, instantly, an entire nation at one time. And declining printing costs allowed single books or manifestos to be distributed en masss (Mein Kampf, Mao's Little Red Book, The Road to Serfdom, etc.), often subsidised by a propagandist. The rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and World War II, were a partial result, as was the spread of Maoist-Leninist Communism throughout China -- a difficult region to unify otherwise.

Television and mass advertising gave rise to live televised debates and speeches. Kennedy beat out Nixon in 1960 in large part due to the former's far better visual appeal on black-and-white television. Castro could keep all of Cuba tuned in to hours-long diatribes. Vietnam was litigated as much on American (now colour) televisions as in the jungles and rice paddies of south-east Asia. American technical competence was proved in real time via the Apollo Moon landings, and impeached by the Challenger explosion.

The corporatisation and commercialisation of media beginning in the late 1970s, but accellerating in the 1980s and 1990s, cheapened the product, silenced dissenters (particularly Noam Chomsky, though many others -- who've had little if any voice on either commercial or noncommercial television or radio), and enabled first right-wing talk radio, in part an outgrowth of what had long been a rural Christian revivalist movement in the US, then CNN's live, 24/7 cable news, and Fox.

The Internet gave voice to the voiceless, but more voice to the already empowered. Most particularly those who could act with impunity. Distortion, especially of political and economic discussion, from monied interests, Russia, China, Israel, and numerous fringe, crank, and terrorist groups, is manifest -- these are organisations which don't and won't play by the usual rules. Eyeballs-driven, advertising-supported Interent sites only feed this dynamic, one of the more substantive criticisms of an ad-based Internet I think can be made.

Francis Bacon gave us the phrase "knowledge is power" (actually "scientia potentia est"). With due respect, I believe the gentleman wrong: knowledge is a power multiplier. It amplifies the existing power differentials amongst parties.

It's also true that the ruling elite and popular movements have differing constitutions, capabilities, and weakensses. The former have organisation, capability, assets, and control, but suffer from vulnerability. The latter have resilience and adaptability, but little by way of organisation or even common interest. It's interesting to note that the idea of a popular revolution is a quite modern concept, dating largely to the 19th century. Previously, regime change was far more a matter of one oligarchy displacing another, though manipulations of mass sentiments might play a role.

For references: Edward Bernays (and Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self), Plato, William Ophuls, Marshall McLuhan, Jerry Mander, John Kenneth Galbraith, Joseph Nye, Neil Postman, Noam Chomsky, and of course, many others.

For a good laugh, hunt down the "Your interests" / ad preferences page while logged in to Google. Out of the 18 things Google believes I'm interested in, maybe 4 sort-of fit, the other ones were mostly stuff I'm pretty sure I never even searched for once.

I'm not sure if Google's staggering incompetence in all things user-facing is a pro or a con, though. On the one hand, you could make the Stasi argument and say that people just think the company actually has meaningful information on them - but on the other hand it clearly has the potential of being even more dangerous, especially considering the fact that Google data is presumably being funneled straight into governmental intelligence as well.

Exactly. Currently, it doesn't bother me, since the 'your data' and 'your interests' and such for me are so random and sporadic.

Of course, I also don't walk around with everything turned on, checking in at every location, posting reviews about everything. I just conserve my battery life and use GPS only on the rare event I need to do a long distance trip or have to find someplace especially tricky.

Maybe it is different for the English?

Slavoj Zizek had a great talk with a talk show host from the Netherlands precisely about this matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os

Fun watch imo. There's also another session between them two.

An 80-minute talk. Zizek tends to wander a bit:

Slavoj Žižek + Paul Holdengräber "Surveillance and whistleblowers" - International Authors' Stage Det Kongelige Bibliotek 71,767 views

Published on May 19, 2014

I'M WATCHING YOU PART 1 - part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZiFWZpYds

4:48 Danish pornography

5:40 There is no harmony in the univers

8:44 David Lynch and the crawling excess of life

11:17 God underestimated us

19:40 Why do people read Stephen Hawking?

21:14 Surveillance and whistleblowers

22:40 The most dangerous freedom

30:40 The necessity of vulgar humor

35:24 The public persona

37:45 The connection between Pussy Riot and Snowden

41:58 Never allow intellectuals in power

47:30 Julian Assange, a spy for the people

53:46 There are only two different kinds of persons in the world

56:38 Right wing wisdom

57:39 People only want the appearance of freedom

1:01:51 The complicity of liberal tolerant capitalism

1:07:42 The European dream

1:13:50 Unjustified paranoia

The Slovenian star philosopher Slavoj Žižek in the first of two conversations on surveillance with the popular and charismatic interviewer Paul Holdengräber, director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library.

The Black Diamond, The Royal Library, Copenhagen 18 May 2014

Video: http://www.videoakademiet.dk

or maybe they aren't telling you exactly what they think of you just yet.

Just looked after reading your comment and it's actually pretty accurate for me.

We are witnessing the birth of a new phase that will leave a scar on mankind and make the sins of the Church, Hitler, North Korea and every other despotic regime that has tried to limit human freedom through the ages look amateurish if we do nothing about it now.

Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total. Are you really suggesting that "large unbridled corporations" have proven through history that they will kill more than 240M people?

The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI. Is that what you are referring to, or something else?

Killing millions of people is horrible, but taking away the privacy of billions is terrifying as well.

And while obviously murder is worse than stalking, we don't really know where things will end up. We are in uncharted territory with the new information collection society we live in.

Tobacco killed 100 million. Sugary drinks alone are linked to 180000 deaths/year. (And of course big sugar lied to us http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-ind...).

So, yes. Anything in the name of profit.

If capitalism went away, sugar and tobacco would still be a thing. For example, tobacco shortages sometimes caused economic unrest in the Soviet Union.

Yes, clearly murder and forced starvation is totally equivalent to people making lifestyle choices that reduce their lifetime.

Clearly anyone selling soul food is just as guilty of murder (hate crimes?) as the guy who shot up that church in Charleston. And don't get me started on those murderous Punjabis, putting ghee on everything...

It's not the thing that's being sold that is the problem. It's the systematic ways that the peddlers lie and game the system that prevent us us from making the choice in "lifestyle choice".

Seems they got to you too. Or perhaps you're one of them.

People are lied into drinking soda?

Yes.

Oh okay, moving along then. I just thought people drank sugary drinks because they liked it. Silly me. But you're right, it must be because they're oblivious to the fact they contain sugar, I mean what with the fact the media completely silences that subject... and it's not even written on the bottles. Fucking corporations amirite.

Analogy: swap out sugar for smoking. People smoke because they like it. And because they can't stop. One of the reasons they can't stop is that there are massive industries devoted to ensuring that they don't (witness, for instance, the rising levels of nicotine in cigarettes, presumably intended to make the product more addictive). I mean, what with the fact that the media completely silences that subject… and it's not even written on the packets with giant health warnings and pictures of blackened lungs. Corporations, amirite?

The above japery is to demonstrate that to a large extent, your sarcasm misses the point.

So your contention is that people can't stop smoking. Unfortunately that's contradicted by a fair amount of evidence. I'm going to go ahead and consider your theory falsified.

By all means continue to think that it is easy to stop smoking (no-one disputes that it is possible; the relevant point is whether it is easy, as I hoped was clear from the start), but as is often the way, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page contains the appropriate information. Of all attempts to stop smoking without assistance, between 3 and 6 percent are successful (though the article later suggests an average 7.3% success rate).

Stopping with chemical assistance, the success rate rises to about 30%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_cessation

It's strange that yummyfajitas' post is flagged and killed, presumably for asking a legitimate question in a sarcastic way that rubbed some biased and oversensitive moderator the wrong way.

Contrast to this post, which accuses of him of being "one of them", presumably part of a conspiracy to spread apologia for poor food choices on a hacker interest forum!

An absurd claim, insulting, illogical, of no service to the conversation, but remaining alive and upvoted. We can see further content-free insults in replies to this post. This is the first time I've seen a post killed for reasons that are obviously wrong. In addition, they are wrong in a dangerous way, killing mere rhetorical sarcasm while allowing actual insults, of negative worth, to run wild.

> oversensitive moderator the wrong way.

Moderators didn't touch his post. His post was downvoted by users, and flagged by users.

I'm not a mod, so I don't know this, but it's pretty clearly what happened.

If you think it shouldn't be dead you should click the timestamp and then click the [vouch] link.

Thanks, I didn't know about the flag/kill procedure or the vouch link.

The corporations in this instance are essentially exploiting bugs in human biochemistry ("we like fat and sugar even when we've already had enough resources"); people are making these lifestyle choices at least in part because the corporations are actively influencing the choices.

Once you grant that the corporations are at least partly complicit, it's just a matter of multiplication. If the corporations can degrade enough people's quality-of-life, then in principle yes, they can ultimately have been Worse Than Hitler (TM).

So the question is actually, "To what extent have the corporations degraded people's lives?", and if you really must be binary, "Are the corporations Worse Than Hitler (TM)?". You are simply not addressing the actual question; you have answered the question, "Is murder equivalent to someone making a certain lifestyle choice?".

Anyone who owns a business containing the word "patiserrie" or "boulangerie" is exploiting the same bugs on a smaller scale. They regularly influence human behavior with the wonderful aromas they spread in their immediate vicinity.

So again, I ask: if Hostess corporation is genocidal, is La Bouche d'or merely a serial killer?

I'm asking for a little more than just whether a corporation could in principle be worse than Hitler (the specific claim lordarminius made), I'm asking for an actual plausible mechanism by which that could happen.

what about when president trump starts forcing Google to use its AI to detect Muslims?

Or have their cars drive them across the Wall, or to the nearest detention centre.

It could be identifying you as part of a group then excluding you from job/status/money/influence.

The future is subtle damage, not necessarily heads-on-pikes evil.

This subtlety is exactly what I fear the most. Detailed personality profiles are being created about you. You can't modify them and you can't argue about their accuracy. Potential employers, romantic partners, and friends will be able to read these and shun you.

> Nazis killed approx 40M people. Communists add another 100-200M to that total.

Without wanting to start a political battle here, this is not behavior that is limited to political systems. Western democracies have inflicted their fair share of death and carnage as well, though because they are "our team" we tend to see our behavior as justified and the other teams' behaviors as unjustified.

Humans with sufficient power will always eliminate any potential threats to their power, and do what they feel is necessary to expediently reach their goals...once that course of action has been successfully justified. That justification happens via one of or a combination of two ways: 1) rhetoric, propaganda, coalition building, education, etc. (various means of influencing those that might present road blocks to accept the behavior), and/or 2) possessing sufficient power that challenging the behavior is not an option.

Once corporations are able to politically justify eliminating those that stand in their way, they will...all humans in history with sufficient power have done so, and that is never going to change. Many large corporations already have more wealth than half of the nation states on this planet. That is a lot of power. The cornerstones of future political justifications are happening in things like TPP effectively raising the corporation to the level of nation state in some regards.

It will happen, it is only a matter of time. Initially it will be the ability to capture and imprison those threats to their power, and eventually it will lead to war and killing. This is the nature of our species. It's not going to change.

>The only mechanism I can think of by which google might even approach this is by creating evil AI

If you control people's access to information, you control people's minds, albeit indirectly. Its a simple philosophy that has kinda-sorta worked in China. You can get large scale approval from the public for pretty horrendous things like the US has done, simply by controlling what gets seen on cable news/mainstream media, etc. If Google is the gatekeeper of all information (so far it isn't), and they're ultimately controlled by the NSA or CIA, then we're screwed. So how many people has the US killed? How many of those wars could have been avoided if the public weren't fed lies?

You know why murder is bad? Because it keeps a person from living their own life. So yes, fucking with billions of people for x years, at best just influencing them a bit, at worst exploiting them rather extremely, soaking up 90% of their time so some psychopath can buy an additional golf course, absolutely does amount to a whole lot of murder. Remember early capitalism? Children in mines? So when someone gets exploited and then dies of diseases, or lives as a sick poor person for decades, is that not a sibling of murder?

There is something as the walking dead, there really is. As Nietzsche said, the last man lives the longest... but the question probably is, do they actually live. People seem to become more timid and more neurotic, instead of more alive, more defenseless rather than more skillful, they suffer "information overload" rather than being more informed. That's just anecdotal, but I'm amazed at just how many weak and stuck up people I meet each day, and how young so many of them are. Between their parents being fools or having no time for them, and them being sprayed with the mental equivalent of fast food everywhere else, sometimes even reaching into the education systems -- all that does have an effect. You might say we're being gaslighted on a global scale.. and mixed, dishonest signals hurt even the strongest people, others they can drive positively insane.

And they are only emitted by the unhinged, too. Only broken people, or people in broken moments (same difference really, even though I speak of "types of people" I ultimately do mean types of behaviors and habits etc., I think everybody can theoretically change but it's easier and more satisfying to be self-righteous) want power for the sake of power, all rationalizations and neat excuses be damned, that's what is at the core of it and it matters, and they are slowly molding us in the image of the screaming, empty abyss that is their personality.

Would you rather live for 2 weeks as you, or for 50 years with very strong dementia? If you set aside how strongly I feel about this, that I have chips on my shoulder and pet peeves; do you at least see my point in principle?

For totalitarian systems, murder is not an end in itself. Making people, their individual agency, their unpredictable "spark", totally obsolete, by murder or other means, THAT is at the heart of it. And in that sense, we live in a world that is becoming so totalitarian it might not even afford us the honesty of murdering us.

It's even scarier than that. Both Google and Facebook got into politics. Both were caught manipulating results to favor their political allies.

Even if you like the politicians they have today it's still a serious issue. A huge step towards an Orwellian Nightmare.

As far as I know the Google claims were shown to be false. Have I missed something?

A recent one

https://sputniknews.com/us/20160912/1045214398/google-clinto...

NOTE: The site is an organization sponsored by Russia. But the researcher is well respected with a Ph.D. from Harvard. His 2015 paper was published in PNAS and reviewed by very respectful people. This article is a preview of his upcoming paper.

Where did you see this proven to be false???

It's sad how critics and whistleblowers have media blackout in USA and only can do it via Russian agencies or Al-Jazeera.

Well respected? Robert Epstein is the idiot who served malware through his website and when Google displayed a warning about it, Epstein didn't try to fix the problem, he instead went legal and news nuclear claiming Google was trying to censor him.

There's absolutely nothing scientific about that article. It's entirely cherry picked examples. I tried similar queries and got completely different results, often negative.

And he lacks basic understanding quite often. In one example, Google pulls a Hillary image instead of a Trump (or both) when referencing the 2016 election in a fact card. He doesn't even think that image is simply the first to appear on that page.

Heck, I type "next president" into Google right now and I get a fact card with Obama as the image and "5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win" by Michael Moore as the top result.

Politics also got into Google and Facebook, don't they have to share most of their data with the Government [1]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#E...

Sigh. Continued belief in debunked conspiracy theories is one of humanities worst traits. The moon landing was real, the earth is not flat, and Google is not manipulating search results.

Google regularly manipulates search results in their best interests. They even modify their browser to behave differently around sites which they want to discourage or demote. And Google is proud of it. Regularly informing people of how Google will prioritize sites using Google's mobile framework or Google's definition of what's mobile friendly. Or preferring and promoting HTTPS websites, which are more expensive to operate and primarily from users with larger disposable income, over potentially equally valuable voices without. Far outside of content quality and relevance, the only things that should matter, Google regularly manipulates results to reward or punish behavior they want from the entire Internet.

When the chairman of Google's board is directly funding a startup with the mission of electing Hillary Clinton, and a Alphabet subsidiary CEO is one of Hillary's former aides, and Google has an incredible shield from prosecution under the current government leadership, I think we can safely assume Google considers it important to it's interests to ensure she's elected.

The article often cited isn't really a solid proof of Google manipulating results, but that doesn't mean it's true that they aren't. And of course, with Google's search algorithm one of the most guarded secrets at the company, some of the only code that regular rank and file Googlers aren't allowed to see, even you, a Googler who's failing to disclose your bias here in these comments... can't prove otherwise.

Are you trying to parody a debunked conspiracy theorist? You are good, but your "isn't really a solid proof of Google manipulating results, but that doesn't mean it's true that they aren't" line that gave you away as a parody account.

Hey, this is the realm of easily provable fact. If Google isn't manipulating results: Prove it. It's easy to do, just open source the algorithm.

Long as you can't do that, you're not really doing much to advance the conversation. Just being a paid shill for your employer.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/One_single_proof

The cool thing about linked logical fallacies as an argument point is that, like Bible verses you can find one to support every side of an argument.

"Thou shalt not quote logical fallacies unless one has read its definition first" -- Argument 10:1

There's no proof that Google is manipulating search results, and when anyone fabricates a new possible manipulation it is immediately debunked. And yet you still want me to prove the negative. I'm not asking for a key proof, I'm asking for any proof.

Is not Google proud of their tradition of manipulating presentation to encourage behavior? Outside the already listed examples above which refer directly to search results, I recall a proud blog about how Google figured out they could manipulate their own employees into eating healthier by rearranging the food on the buffet in the cafeteria.

Given the clear relationship of corrupt influence in our government by Google (feel free to try and "debunk" this one, please), can you not accept that it is not just reasonable, but prudent to be skeptical of Google's search ranking motives?

I mean, your employer has literally actively gotten involved in overthrowing governments in collaboration with Hillary: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/google-built-tech-to-sup...

I personally am generally hesitant to factually state "Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton", because, as you said, I don't see conclusive evidence. But acting like people are wrong to be suspicious is not much better. If I were to make an educated guess as to whether or not they are, I'd be inclined to guess that they are. You work for a company that makes Comcast look positively cuddly by comparison.

The fact that some bad articles used bad evidence does not prove Google is not manipulating search results, it's merely the http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fallacy_fallacy at work.

Let me try to summarize your argument.

1) Google posted about putting healthier snacks closer to eye level in employee kitchens.

2) Unsubstantiated claim that Google has a corrupt influence on the US Government.

3) Google Ideas helped create a visualization of Syrian officials who publically opposed the government for the newspaper Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/syriadefections...

Therefore, Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton.

It is difficult for me to believe that you take your own arguments seriously

You might want to read up on http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Strawman because when you believe that you should write your own version of someone else's point, in a manner that doesn't represent the position or the logic therein, you may in fact be putting up a strawman to try and discredit the other person.

"Unsubstantiated"? Do your own homework on how many Congressmen are in Google's pocket: http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/?q=Google+Inc&cx=01067790...

EDIT: Sorry, your company hid most of their donations under their shell corp this year: http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/?q=Alphabet&cx=0106779074...

Not to mention Google literally having bought out one of our previous FTC Commissioners, who was paid to fabricate "academic studies" that supported Google's legal positions, which Google then used as "independent" evidence of their claims. During his FTC term, the investigation of Google's conduct mysteriously disappeared, despite the staff at the FTC recommending a case proceed. (And almost every other civilized country has opened such a case against Google. Why's the US silent on the matter?)

You work for a criminal organization that uses deception and manipulation as basic operational currency. And you expect me to take your arguments seriously?

I think I can help clear up one point here at least. You confused Shell Corporation with Holding Company. There is nothing "shell" about a multinational conglomerate.

As to your other points, I'll refer you to my original post.

Nothing you posted adequately contests anything stated here. The difference between Alphabet being a shell corp or a holding company by definition is almost meaningless since everything that isn't Google is a hilarious failure. If anything it seems designed to shield Google's reputation from all their failing projects, but most nobody is buying it.

Jane's addiction's song "Stop" opens with the the following spanish words.

"Senores y Senoras Nosotros tenemos mas influencia sobre sus hijos que tienes. Pero los queremos"

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we have more influence over your children than you do. But we love them."

Speaking of addiction. Youtube, and the internet in general can be very addicting for young children. I created smartmadre.com (beta only!) to help parents manage their children's internet addictions. The 2 core features are.

-Learning system that will deactivate your child's access to time wasting websites. In order to get internet access back, the child has to spend a few minutes earning points on readtheory.org, quizlet.com, khanacademy.org or typingclub.com etc..

-Optional youtube monitor allows parents to see in near real time what videos a child is watching and what ads youtube is showing your child.

Parents have a right to decide what content is not appropriate for their child. SmartMadre.com aims to provide affordable and simple to use tools so that parents don't need a computer science degree to control network traffic in their own home.

Hey, thanks for the read theory.org link. That's a handy site!

Bear in mind at least some of the responses are by Googlers who aren't disclosing that they're Google employees at the office. That's also where most of the downvotes come from.

Yeah. Its a free forum and anyone can downvote as they see fit. But if he/she thinks because they house the beast they are safe, they are wrong. When the beast needs feeding it will eat and it wont discriminate. We are all in this together

"He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount."

And this is something just about everybody who has a big brother they both love and fear should pay attention to:

> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.

-- Hannah Arendt

Characterizing all data collection as 'snooping' fits in well with the 'existential threat' narrative, but I don't believe data _collection_ to be the threat you describe. Data misuse certainly is, but there's a distinction that needs to be made there, as I'm not fully convinced that the slippery slope of "collection must lead to misuse" needs to be a universal truth.

Rather, I consider the _collection_ of broad data, carefully used, to be almost pre-requisite to the advancement of our species. Whenever I imagine future technologies they're all based on better use of data. "That car over there has a broken taillight - send them a message." "Pick me a movie I'll be interested in in this moment." Or data mining my personal history to make note of conversation topics I wanted to follow up on; promises I made in the moment.

To some degree, society will (and already has) reset our privacy expectations; not everything we've held as protected need always be, at least in general. What we haven't done yet though is figure out how to enable useful collection and some level of relaxed privacy constraints without opening the door to potential abuse. Which is the risk I think you're worried about - it's not that Google is abusing the data they have _right now_, but that they eventually could, and that you find that risk more compelling than all the value they're delivering now. (Which, to be fair, I cannot say is incorrect). But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater - I want the promises of the future, and it's just a question of how we can safely get to them :).

I am completely mystified by a these sort of articles and the deluge of apocalyptic warnings -- specially when applied to the web in the context of data being used to make money.

(I do share data leakage and privacy concerns).

I use an Apple phone, so I can't comment on the mobile targeting scenarios re Google.

However, I have been using Google and its web services (email, search) for over 10 years now for both work and personal use. I have bought maybe 2 products as a result of their ads. After installing ad-blockers, I simply get no advertising now. None. Zero.

The same applies to Facebook. I use the mobile app almost exclusively and see no ads or simply ignore the promoted stuff. None of it seems to be location based. For example, I enjoy whisky but when I open the app in the middle of a whisky store, I get no ads or promoted links.

So where is all this data matching and targeted advertising? How effective is it if any person with a modicum of intelligence can take simple steps to avoid seeing all the annoying crap?

To me it seems that these companies, specially FB, are working on a foundation of sand -- the companies are built and run on the basis of "we can sell intelligent advertising" and the marketing execs fall for it and throw money at them without any measurable results. Google has a more solid use case (they searched for it, so show them an ad that is provably relevant) but Facebook....? Seems like a house of cards in the long run...even if they can implement merciless targeting they are afraid of doing so as it would result in backlash.

Meanwhile, the tech behemoths use this shifting sand to conjure money out of nowhere and continue fueling the computer industry -- with some good benefits re. facility to share stuff with people you want, hardware improvements, contributions to open source, advancements in AI, research, etc. I guess just enjoy it while it lasts...

For me -- apart from dreams of a society where we treat ourselves and each other with honesty instead of sleaze, and what synergistic effects that might have -- the main issue by far is that once the data is there, once the channels are established, it takes very little to use them for other things. I can't find it right now, but reading either Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner I stumbled across a bit where it's pointed out that the dream of a Gestapo officer would be a map that shows the relations between people. Maybe I misremember it a bit, but not much.. it was something that really was uncanny and creepy, because it wasn't written with future technology in mind, the kind we already have spanned the planet with. It showed out that we're far beyond what even the people worried about Nazism 2.0 could dream of. Yay, what a treat for us.

The current state of things is a wet dream for for totalitarians in some ways, you can simply record everything now and then use whatever algorithms you like on it later. Some of the people who warned about the technology and our apathy even back then might say it's way too late now. The fact that we now say "Is it even a problem? Why worry about something that might not happen?" kinda shows something doubleplusungood is going on. Once the only thing between you and a totalitarian hell is how the wind blows, with no other recourse than hoping for the best... well, that's kind of a vacuum, nature abhors and is filling it.

Found it.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Honestly I'm mostly fine with Google providing me services and skimming a bit of info on me in exchange, but I do find it annoying that after a recent update to Photos, my phone asks me every time I take a photo if Google can "have it" for Maps. Fuck you Google, no you can't.

Somehow it's quite different to know they want to take something from my phone and make it public, vs. just using some metadata for their statistics. At least they ask first. But it really does feel rather "stalky" after the 5th time or so it's happened.

Furthermore, the Maps TOS is one that demands the sort of indefinite total picture use rights that everyone complained about to have changed for fb, Flickr etc.

Interestingly, that prompt has made me more likely to take pictures of the outside of a location to share. I think that suggests it is likely that it is working for their purpose, which is to add tons of photos of obscure locations.

I understand the prompt I get from Maps that I'm visiting a location and adding a shot could be helpful, especially when volunteering as a "Local Guide", but IIUC the GP is talking about taking private shots in the Photos app and being prodded into putting it online? That's a bridge too far on the intent because the process is just not the same.

Spot on. And they don't provide a "never ask me again" button, as far as I can remember. (I can't check without driving off into the country side and taking a photo to verify...)

To be clear though it is when I take a photo with the Camera app, and I think it's Maps that detects this and asks me. But it's automatic, amounts to the same thing. It may be because I live in a country with relatively fewer tourists so perhaps their photo count around here is lower. (Chile. There are definitely tourists, but it's just not Europe.)

Regardless, I basically just find it a bit rude.

edit: dgacmu, thank you! Done.

Maps --> Hamburger menu --> Settings --> Notifications --> Your contributions --> Turn off the slider for "Adding your photos" and/or "Adding the first photo"

I tried this and found my version doesn't have the "Your contributions" section, but it has "Show contribution reminders," described as

"Be reminded when you haven't contributed recently [...]"

hahaha! as if I'm under some agreement to regularly contribute...

You can turn off those notifications from in-app settings.

Probably. One day I'll have to spend half an hour digging in to the settings in Camera, Photos and Maps to disable it. I tend not to take the time when I'm out in the countryside on vacation, which is when it happens.

But not kill them device-wide in Android.

Meaning what exactly? Turn off notifications globally? Turn off location based notifications globally? No platform leta you do the latter AFAIK.

I think I've managed to switch it off now but my phone started prompting me to tag and share every photo I took at home with the name of a business that used to be based in a building nearby. Highly annoying, especially as there is no business there and hasn't been for several years AFAICT.

But also yah - my photos, in my home, get out of it.

> and skimming a bit of info on me

Is it really a "bit of info" though? Or is it your complete physical movements made with your phone, every web address you type in, every website you travel to (and search for) from Google search, every site you are are shown an adsense ad upon, your detailed browsing habits via Google Analytics, the entire contents of messages transcribed by Google Now, every app you purchase and use...

They appear to have controls to limit how this data is used today - a very good thing. However, we also have to trust every employee at Google now and in the future, as well as any company which Google subcontracts out to now and in the future, and any company which may eventually acquire Google, (not even thinking about Governments) to also respect our privacy with regards to this data.

Can they connect my google searches on my PC with those on my phone? Are they able to identify maps stuff coming from the same phone as my searches? Are they also able to collate incognito searches?

I'm not exactly hugely bothered - but I assume not being signed into google limits them to cookie based aggregation?

If you're not signed in, the connection may not be explicit. But with a minimal amount of effort, they could easily connect the two. If you've ever used your phone on your home's WiFi, at a minimum they'll have a high degree of correlation via the IPs.

I'm of the opinion that if they can extrapolate your age, ethnicity, gender, location, health, and "interests", then they can easily join two "disconnected" profiles.

Yes and yes, respectively. They openly correlate your physical presence in retail shops with your web browsing, so as to count web-to-physical conversions for that shop's advertising.

The latter two (piercing the Incognito veil) are technically straightforward, but I doubt they do it. Google is pretty tightly bound by a certain set of ethics. By their lights, that creepy McDonalds experience is totally OK, but ignoring explicit privacy settings is not legit.

This is why they bother with dark patterns like making it inconvenient - but not impossible - to turn off Google Play's access to location data. They could just ignore you, but they won't. I'd bet they do collect and keep the information for some time [eg for anti-abuse], but deliberately don't use it. (And consequently feel very proud of how ethical they're being, compared with others in their industry, and how terribly unfair it is when people complain about them but not the sleazier ad networks.)

As I see it, the "advertising creepiness" problem has two factors. One is black-hats explicitly extracting information you're not sharing (eg Evercookie, canvas fingerprinting and friends). The other is grey-hats like Google, Facebook and MS, whose access to that data is perfectly legitimate in that you gave them permission (what, you didn't click through the three small buttons within 30 days to withold your WhatsApp contacts from Facebook? Too bad!), but whose market dominance and dark patterns make giving them that data less and less of a free choice. Conflating the two is easy but unhelpful.

> Or is it your complete physical movements made with your phone

You can turn off location tracking on your phone, can't you?

I did and I'm perfectly happy to miss what I'm missing.

BTW I'm still able to find myself on a map and look at what's around. Google Maps don't require location tracking for that.

Yes, but I have two thoughts about that:

Defaults matter.

They still track what IP you connect from, and can correlate this to a physical address. I can connect to google and get search results tailored to my physical location, even if location services is not allowed for their site.

Perhaps. However, I'm in AZ, and the 'tailored search results' are usually the midwest or silicon valley.

I think it depends entirely on what your ISP is handing over for location data. Mine clearly doesn't hand over anything useful.

I've disabled GPS on my Android device, but there is no way to turn off all location tracking on a cell-based device. Google may still have a strong indication of location information based on IP data and cell tower geocoding databases, particularly in conjunction with known WiFi location maps.

But on the other side: you cannot turn off requests for location information to be requested repeatedly on browsers or devices. Firefox (my primary mobile browser) surfaces dialogs for this information repeatedly. Every last fucking update of Google Maps, until I deleted and disabled the application in frustration, demanded location information.

So you'll still be bombarded with requests, and you've only got to fuck up once for the direct link to be re-enabled.

And despite that, you can be tracked to within a fraction of a km, and often to within meters, by other means.

if thats the price for all of googles services, I'm down with it! the data collection, or rather the advertisment it enables, is what is paying for all that android development and searchengine servers etc.

That said it would be a cool idea to have a "google premium" where you pay a fee every month to keep all your data to yourself and don't recieve any ads

> if thats the price for all of googles services, I'm down with it! the data collection, or rather the advertisment it enables, is what is paying for all that android development and searchengine servers etc.

That not only completely destroys some of your fundamental rights, but also creates a selective pressure to force others to do the same.

meh, still better than developing a OS and a searchengine by myself! if I thought otherwise I wouldn't use any of google's services. neither should you if you are so concerned by the data they collect. checkout pwniephone, duckduckgo and hushmail: your data will no longer belong to google!

What a lot of people don't realize is that commercial use of the Google Maps API is super expensive. $10,000/month even for something pretty simple and small scale. I was pretty unhappy to come across that price tag on a recent project knowing that all of these street view captchas for Google are just free labor for them to profit from.

"No means no."

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/ayk2DF43...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/GKL5b4Cp...

(I've since removed/disabled Google Maps on my Android device on account of that behaviour.)

It's similar to Waze (another Google owned company). On my iphone, most apps allow you to give location permission with three tiers of access: 1) Always, 2) Only when I'm using the app, 3) Never. I'm ok with them using my data when I'm using their app. It's a trade. But Waze went and limited the options to 1) Always or 3) Never. Letting some app know where I am at all times is unbelievable. This was the point I was most thankful for the my phone's permissions granularity. None of that opt-out BS.

This is the kind of thing I was interested in when I made Googley Eyes [0]. Googley Eyes makes a record of whether the pages I visit do or do not send info about me to Google. Of the 11,571 pages I visited over the last couple of months, Google knows about 52% of them.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/

This whole thing seems to be based on that rather inaccurate article from the other day about not being able to deactivate location tracking on android, despite it being rather trivial to grab any recent android phone and verify that you can in fact block individual apps, including google maps and the play store, from having location access, and you can also deactivate location history from the location history menu (I honestly don't even remember if it defaults to on but i don't think it does?).

If the assertion is that you can't trust these privacy toggles then we're getting into extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence territory.

disclaimer: googler, although i'm an iphoney one not an androidy one

I stopped using Android because despite having disabled GPS and location tracking I received a notification that I was X minutes from work, right after I left the front door.

That was the last straw; I've stopped using Google products and services entirely.

It's actually very easy to disable location tracking across all your Google devices and services.

https://myaccount.google.com/ and click Privacy.

I did this and also cleared the (kind of cool, really) history they'd built up over the years. It took maybe 10 minutes.

The amount of data Google had collected was impressive. It showed vacations I'd forgotten about, airports I'd transferred in, that kind of stuff.

The cost to this is bigger than you think though: Google software becomes so useless with it disabled you might as well just get someone else's software entirely.

For instance, Google Maps can't even, on my local device, show me the last couple places I searched for. Because if it isn't on the cloud, Google won't store it at all. This is what initially drove me off to HERE Maps a few years ago.

I've also had searches unable to even get me in the general local region, because if I won't let Google track my every move in their history, they won't bother to figure out what state I'm in for a search I'm running at the moment.

That makes sense. From an engineering standpoint, supporting local caching and cloud means they have to write (and maintain, and debug) every algorithm twice. Or, they can write it once to take advantage of the cloud and cross-service integration, and people who don't want that feature-set can use another, less-integrated service.

Perhaps they are putting their chips on the assumption that the quality of service that can be provided with data integration is going to exceed alternatives.

I too am annoyed by the lack of search history in Maps if you don't enable "Web & App Activity" tracking for your entire Google account.

Local search history caching is not a difficult feature to have. They omit it for a reason, so that you will be encouraged to link a Google account and enable search history tracking.

This is a frequent pattern with their privacy controls. There's no granularity and services become all or nothing. I just did the privacy checkup thing they offer and for the "Web & app activity" part there's just a single checkbox. Waze wanted my location either all of the time or it wouldn't work, with no "Just when I use the app" option. (As an aside, I was kinda horrified by the things Google had just assumed were ok. Opt out is a dark pattern.)

I'm curious: What did they assume was okay that horrified you?

Google can be a huge troublemaker in countries with weak privacy laws.

If I google my friends name, I can see their college grades, most legal occurrences (from company incorporation to lawsuits and alimony) and probably the equivalent to their SSN.

Has Google made this information public? Or are they just indexing it?

They have turned it from "can only be found by a dedicated person" to "anyone can find it".

Societies usually ban that difference.

"Societies usually"?

I know a few European cultures, most notably the Germans, make a big deal about this difference, but I'm not aware of other cultures where distinguishing between public-but-obscure and public-and-indexed is a thing.

In my opinion it's a terrible distinction to make, as it gives users false comfort about what's actually unavailable to the public.

Even the US seperates stalking from taking a picture of random people in the background of a landscape picture.

The difference between "public and indexed" and "public but obscure" is huge.

It’s also the same difference as "taking a photo of outside" vs. "permanent video surveillance of everywhere".

The US has remarkably weak privacy laws, does it not? As in there aren't really any laws on data retention, pseudonymization etc. let me know if I've got the wrong impression.

It's interesting to look through the data Google collects about you. If you use voice search on a mobile device, check out https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?restrict=vaa&utm_so... to see the history of audio snippets it's collected from you. It's neat to see both what the voice-to-speech system heard and how it interpreted it.

(Note: this can be disabled [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020?hl=en], but Google is collecting it de-anonymized to build a voice model of you specifically so that speech recognition works better on all the devices using Google Voice APIs. It's being done to improve the way the service works for you).

To be CLEAR: You can shut off your voice history being tied to your Google account, but if you use Google Voice Search, Google owns your voice recordings. Turning off the history merely means they permanently keep all recordings of you with anonymous identifiers.

Keeping your history on, allegedly, means you can delete them manually, if you remember to, but turning your history off guarantees you can never tell them to delete the recordings, and they still keep them.

Google Photos for iOS is horrible about this - there are only two location settings, (1) no location services or (2) always on. The sensible default would of course be (3) on while I'm using this app. There's absolutely no reason for photos to be (literally) tracking us while we're doing non-photo things other than better-monetizing us for advertisers. Even if we nevermind the privacy implications, stop burning my battery.

> Google Photos for iOS is horrible about this - there are only two location settings, (1) no location services or (2) always on

Can't you just select "While using this app" for location services for any app on iOS?

No, you're limited to the choices the app developer presents to you, and Google Photos presents Always, which you can reject to get Never. I hadn't even known it was an option previously, as they're the only app I have (had in the past) that requests permanent ongoing location. And I didn't even notice what I'd agreed to until my location services indicator wouldn't turn off, and I had to track down what was triggering it.

I cringe when I see someone's phone and they have GPS turned on. I can't understand why anyone has it on 99% of the time. It's another service to drain the battery and offer questionable value in exchange for tracking.

Maybe once a month I turn it on for a few minutes to get my bearings if I'm walking in an unfamiliar part of the city.

my lovely android phone tends to get it turned on by... wait for it... google play services, just out of blue. it even warms me that shutting it down may cause instability. pfff

there were days when google was not this passive evil company. i guess over time and with such a growth, one cannot fully avoid it. more reasons to support smaller companies!

Funny. Mine never gets turned on automatically and never did. Whatever apps require it would alert me that I need it.

As of late I have had my GPS permanently on. I like going back to my location history and seeing where I was at a certain date and time. I dont know why. LOL

That's terrible. On my Galaxy S4 it never turns on unless I turn it on or explicitly allow an app to turn it on.

Devil's advocate here : Awareness API.

By making apps aware of your physical condition (are you walking, standing, running, at home, at work, etc ... ) we can make them smarter.

For exemple : -don't notify me about the daily techmeeting when I am in another country in order to give a talk.

-automatically start recording my run when I start running, not 10 minutes afterwards when I remember to open the app.

It needs to be presented and explained to the users (actually the GPS permission is necessary for any detection tied to the user's location) but it can make apps way smarter.

https://developers.google.com/awareness/

Yeah, sounds like a dream for advertisers and not so much for users. This two examples certainly don't sell it over increased battery life and privacy for me. I think it should be opt in and I'm sticking with iOS.

It is very heavily recommended to opt in your users in this service (and mandatory to ask the user's permission for the location detection anyway, the most costly by far privacy & battery wise).

I am not sure how legal it would be to collect this kind of data without asking for the user's approval first (not that it would stop all devs of course).

Glancing at the doc, I might be mistaken, but it looks like on iOS, just like on Android, you don't need to ask a permission in order to access to the accelerometer.

You can do the first thing just with cell based location tracking, offline, and no data given to any other service, no battery wasted.

You can do the second just by checking for the significant motion sensor.

>cell based location tracking, offline, and no data given to any other service

Awareness uses cell based location tracking (along with GPS when necessary)

And yes you can do everything here by coding it yourself, that's not the point of the API.

The added value of the API is that it coordinates the requests of all the apps on the phone in order to poll the sensors as little as possible and allows you to create complex conditions (like walking OR in the park AND headphones plugged in) while balancing them for battery useage.

> The added value of the API is that it coordinates the requests of all the apps on the phone in order to poll the sensors as little as possible and allows you to create complex conditions (like walking OR in the park AND headphones plugged in) while balancing them for battery useage.

Then it should be open source, publicly verified, OR it should be sandboxed and have no network access at all.

I can get to/from work four different ways. I want to know which way is the fastest. It gets tiring turning GPS on on/off every day just before using Maps.

That is a conscious and deliberate UI/UX decision.

It could (and should) be possible to specifically activate location services, or to otherwise indicate your location, when using an application which specifically requires it. For, say, 5 minutes. Or 15, or 1 hour.

Turning this into a chore is just a cattleprod moving you along the gate to that chute dumping you in the "GPS always on" mode.

I am hypersensitive to such manipulations, and take a hard turn in the opposite direction.

I use a Lenovo A859. You CANT turn off GPS permanently. By some algorithm it turns on by itself at intervals

I had no idea. I don't know how that's acceptable. Now I'm suspicious that mine is getting turned on without the phone telling me it's turned on.

Well, that's another strike against Lenovo.

I'd been a customer for 20 years.

You CANT turn off GPS permanently

What country are you in?

I don't understand the angst about GPS in the USA, it's unavoidable. It's part of recent cellphones, period. The FCC effectively mandates it!!!

Read about Wireless Enhanced 911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/911-wireless-services

Basically, the only way to implement the more strict requirements the FCC mandated back in 2011 is use GPS. Given that it's needed for emergencies, it makes more sense to preemptively use GPS to at least periodically track location, rather than desperately trying to get a fix when an emergency call is initiated.

When I walk into my local Home Depot, the top notification on my phone is a link to an interactive store map. I personally find that kind of feature both unobtrusive and incredibly useful.

Andrew is the reason I stopped reading The Register, about ten years ago, due to his incessant rambling about Wikipedia. Shocked to see he's found a new corp to hate.

Oh, he's always hated Google. During the original Oracle vs Google case he was shilling so hard I just assumed he was getting brown paper packages full of cash from Larry.

Of course some of his criticisms are valid and Google is guilty of some of the accusations he levels - but there is zero attempt to provide any context let alone any balance.

First, it's an op-ed, it doesn't have to be balanced.

Second, we passed the point of "balance" long ago. A balanced take could be made when you could conceivably avoid being tracked without Herculean effort. This is no longer really possible and even the slightest consumer pushback results in articles with titles like "Do Consumers Have A Right To Opt Out Of Advertising?" [1]. We're so far into extreme privacy invasion territory that a sane "balanced" take would still be a rollback to early 2000s adtech.

Edit: the pot is boiling and you're saying that the balanced response is asking that it be turned down to a simmer. We're getting cooked either way!

[1] http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/consumers-right-...

> First, it's an op-ed, it doesn't have to be balanced.

The distinction is very subtle in their home page layout. It's formatted exactly like a story - it's listed under 'Top Stories'. Other than the content (which is typical Reg fare) the word 'Comment' is the only indicator that it's allowed a free pass on basic journalistic practice.

The Skyhook stuff is curious. He intentionally muddles up the facts in that case (which was mainly about anti-competitive behaviour and over-aggressive protection of their business model) with the Street View 'over collection' - which was fairly heinous but a matter that I still tend to suspect was more likely to be cock-up than conspiracy.

That section of the article doesn't really state it's conclusion which is fortunate as all it aims to do is create a sense of paranoia in the reader.

> Android phones now examine your location and invite you to rate the cafes you’ve been to. Most of the guesses are correct.

This issue is fairly murky as you can tell by following the Twitter conversation: https://twitter.com/musalbas/status/775261347122671616/photo...

See this response in particular: https://twitter.com/fpgeek/status/775301036823150592

I'm not terribly surprised if an app that is granted location permissions can use my location. The person who tweeted that seemed to think that uninstalling Google Maps should somehow prevent location tracking.

I agree most people won't think to turn off this tracking, and there is a place in the market for a phone that has 'privacy as a default' but I personally (and many others) would still continue to use other devices because I am currently happy with the tradeoffs.

That doesn't mean I'm not cautious and fairly vigilant. But this frog hasn't yet felt the need to leap out of the pot.

EDIT - re-reading the above I realise my overall point isn't clear.

The Orlowski piece is based on a lot of fairly unrelated snippets and doesn't really make a clear coherent argument that one can really engage with. I would agree there is cause for concern and a reason to be vigilant but this kind of writing doesn't raise the level of debate or help anyone form a clear view on current dangers. I usually react negatively to any Orlowski piece as I've seen what he is like on matters where I do have some existing views and a certain degree of background knowledge. (previous commenter mentioned his anti-Wikipedia crusade but also his obsession with defending strong IP laws - google for 'freetard orlowski'). In short he has some axes to grind that align nicely with the PR aims of various companies with deep pockets.

> brown paper packages full of cash from Larry

Had to pause for a minute and work out which Larry you meant.

Good point. I hadn't thought of that. The one with the yachts...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1346157/Google-found...

http://www.superyachtfan.com/superyacht_musashi.html

Which Larry with yachts?

Is he wrong though? Google is trying to collect basically everything. I still haven't heard a substantive argument about why this is ok.

What is wrong with the argument that says it's OK because they require your permission to collect anything?

They never asked for permission before collecting and aggregating everyone's web activity with GA.

They don't ask permission. They offer a cool service don't tell you what they'll use that information for. Go through [0] and [1], and you'll probably find at least one thing you didn't explicitly opt into. That fits my definition of not requiring my permission. They have to ask.

[0] https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/

[1] https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

> you'll probably find at least one thing you didn't explicitly opt into

Didn't you explicitly agree to Google's privacy policy [1] when you created an account? Are you saying Google is using your data in a way that is not described in their privacy policy?

[1] https://www.google.com.au/intl/en/policies/privacy/

It felt really one sided.

No mention of the fact that from what I have seen Skyhook solution was beyond shitty and absolutely drained the battery (I had the pleasure to test a Samsung phones using their services a while ago) .

No mention either of the wifi snooping being seemingly a mistake : Google wanted the wifi hotspot id but took too much data by capturing longer data packets than necessary. That's why IMO they only got a slap on the wrist.

I stopped reading the article after that.

He seems to also have an pro telecom company agenda, given his rants about Tom Wheeler and the poor companies that can't abuse their position...

For me it was the pro-copyright anti-GNU advocacy.

But fundamentally the Register is a tabloid newspaper; occasionally funny, always sensationalist, and ridiculously prejudiced.

Given that the mission of the register is "biting the hand that feeds IT", I would not see this as hate but rather as an opinion that is unpopular among programmers (see corn-pone opinions).

Oh lord, it's Orlowski? That explains the shrill hyperoblic tone and fact-free environment (for a comparison, he's a shrill, hyperbolic climate denier too). His writing drove me off The Reg entirely: if the editors endorse that level of rubbish, the whole site is suspect.

> his incessant rambling about Wikipedia. Shocked to see he's found a new corp to hate.

Wikipedia is not a corporation.

I find Google increasingly resembles the obese man in the Monty Python sketch [1] and like him comes across as a creepy, unpleasant and odious entity.

Its insatiable mining of human actions only sinks it uncontrollably further into its gluttony making it more and more oblivious and distant from anything human reducing them to mere actions and patterns.

There is no place for human niceties like privacy here. It thrives on dehumanization and the impersonal. Every single action is simply another data point to be analysed, patterned and consumed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXH_12QWWg8

> What the FCC did this year, with little fanfare, was cripple telecoms companies and wireless networks from doing what Google and Facebook do. That’s a very odd decision. If behavioural advertising is so bad consumers need an opt-out, how come you can opt out of your ISP's profiling, but not Google’s. How could that be?

Because you have a choice to use an Android phone, Google mail, and Facebook. Many people do not have a choice which ISP to use, especially for broadband. Android/Facebook are opt-in services.

Call me a fanboy, but since I've switched to Apple devices I have no desire to switch back. Yes they're missing a lot of nice things that Androids have, like customization and SD slots and what have you, but the app ecosystem is much better and the entire OS doesn't creep on everything I do (at least not in any way I can tell), and every app is a deluge of advertising. I've gone to pretty great lengths now to remove Google from as much of my life as I can. Still stuck in Chrome though, just because there doesn't seem to be anything better.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted; the point around these services being opt in seems valid.

Android is a global monopoly.

But Apple is about as bad and invasive in its data practices. You prefer their controlled integrated system, but that doesn't make Apple any better wrt data snarfing.

Wow. No.

Apple makes it a point to do as much data processing as practical on the phone. They don't override your preference to not have your location tracked. They are developing new ground in differential privacy so when they do collect data, it's both useful and not personally identifiable. They don't do underhanded tricks with cookies to circumvent your browser privacy settings. And they're not in the business of selling you to advertisers based on your private data.

In short, there's no comparison between Google and Apple.

Does Google not have any interest in differential privacy practices?

That would run counter to their business model. They want to know exactly who you are.

They have used it to help anonymize data when collaborating.

I think they'd have a lot more trust if they explicitly gave information on their data retention periods.

Google was first to ship differential privacy in Chrome.

Citation needed. I can at least turn off or opt out of Apples data collection. How do I opt out of google reading[1] my email when I communicate to someone who had a Gmail account?

Edit: [1] and by reading I mean: reading the contents of my email and forming a profile about me even if I don't use Google services.

The same way you opt-out of Apple or Yahoo! reading your email when you communicate to someone that has iCloud or Yahoo! mail.

You're confused. Google reads all incoming emails to enhance its ad targeting, Apple doesn't [1]. I don't have to opt out of Apple reading my mail because it doesn't read it by default.

Still waiting for some facts instead of rhetoric about how "everyone's doing it".

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/

"iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether."

Apple,Yahoo!, Google and every mail sever READ all the emails.

They are read for anti virus purposes, categorization and for full text search.

You're conflating reading email for the purposes of providing an online email service with reading email for the purposes of building a profile of a user to help target advertising.

These are very different. In the former case, if I delete an email, its metadata is gone too (indexing, antivirus, etc.). In the latter case the email provider is literally building a dossier of my personality, preferences, and contacts that persists regardless of how much email I delete (or even if I delete my whole account).

To put it another way, Apple reads my email in the trivial sense - so the email itself can be stored, displayed, and searched. Google reads my email in the intimate sense - so it can learn more about me and augment my ad profile. These are not at all the same thing, and confusing the two is dangerous because it lets privacy invasion off the hook as just "providing a service".

You original

> How do I opt out of google reading my email when I communicate to someone who had a Gmail account?

Perhaps the one confusing and using wrong terms is not me.

You're right I should have clarified that I meant I don't want Google to read the contents of my email and form a profile about me even if I don't use Google services instead of just saying "read".

Edit: I still haven't heard any justification from you for why it's ok for Google to do this nor any evidence that Apple does the same thing.

I didn't said that Apple makes a profile, I have said that Apple/Microsoft/every mail server reads ALL the emails.

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated "Ads based on your interest". Notice no where in there does it say that these interests are based on your emails.

Gmail does a lot of stuff that requires email parsing: * Spam filtering * Search indexing * Applying rule based filters * Priority Inbox * Picking up automated emails corresponding to receipts, flights, or calendar appointments and making them available to search or see in Google Now. * To train the Smart Reply feature

One primary reason Apple doesn't do this is that Apple doesn't have a cloud based email service. They are forced to do everything on device. I have about 10Gb of email in my work account and 16Gb of email in my personal account. Do I want to sync 26Gb of email to my phone, tablet, and desktop, all so that they can do purely local indexing, filtering, and other smart AI based features? If I'm a user in a developing country on a 2G or 3G network, do I want this to all happen locally, or in the cloud?

There are tradeoffs in all scenarios, and the theorized nasty things from all of the speculated profiling going on don't seem to be very apparent. And if all of these profiling is going on, then why is what Google thinks I'm interested in so often wrong? Perhaps there's a disconnect between what people imagine Google "could be doing" and what they're actually doing.

Apple has iCloud email service

Wow, you're right. It's so under the radar, I don't know a single person who has ever used it, or mobileme before it. The point still stands though, in the sense that Mail.app is written with the assumption of IMAP/Exchange as the primary use case, and so they have to assume local processing unless they implement proprietary protocols/IMAP extensions. I don't think you get credit for starting with a legacy POP/IMAP client, and then say "this was architected for local processing for your privacy", in the sense that, it already existed that way because most Mail clients prior to Gmail had to treat the MTA as a relatively commodity store. (you're claiming credit for doing something that was always that way by default) If they launch a rewrite-from-scratch end-to-end client for a proprietary email service protocol, and offer features on parity with gmail, but all with offline processing, then it's worth talking about.

Apple is in the same position as Microsoft with the PC. Microsoft wanted the PC to be the center of the universe, the center of the home, and all processing to take place on it, because that meant MS Software would be in control. Cloud based processing commodifies your platform, as the Web helped commodify Windows and paved the way for the iPhone and Mac to be viable and usable (since most of the apps people wanted to run were now web apps)

Apple wants the iPhone to be the new central hub of everything, because that drives sales of hardware and drives lock-in to their proprietary walled garden. By coincidence, this aligns with enhanced privacy, but Apple is beholden to Wall Street just like Google is, and if there was a new product which threatened to tank their stock, and they had to compromise "principles", you'd start to see a weaseling away.

When Apple reaches saturation with their primary business, the iPhone, and they need to drive huge growth, they'll diversify into other areas. If they are driven into services, they will inevitably run up again the issue of having to process inherently personal data in the cloud.

I think you're assuming more from Apple's privacy statement than they say.

"We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers."

How do you get from a phrase like that to "... if I delete an email, its metadata is gone too (indexing, antivirus, etc.).?" In particular, the antivirus and indexing data---particularly any manual signal you provided to Apple on whether you thought that email was spam---is likely retained to improve the quality of their service for you and other customers.

They said they're not building a profile on you to sell to advertisers. It'd be really surprising if they aren't building a profile on you to improve things like, say, Siri's understanding of your interests, or Maps' understanding of your area, etc. So is the third-party advertising where we draw the line?

It seems I stand corrected (although none of us has posted references). I'm disappointed about being downvoted for being potentially wrong, though, as that's not what it's for. I'm OK to update my thoughts, athough I have reservations. I looked for what made me think this and it's Apple's pretty dire history of security holes and secret data tracking. For example, from reputable sources: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-spies-on-yosemite-searc... https://pando.com/2014/07/28/apple-hit-with-class-action-sui... https://www.wired.com/2015/11/how-to-get-rid-of-the-iphone-m... http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/04/how-apple-tracks-your-l... http://www.cultofmac.com/132610/it-took-apple-3-years-to-fix...

I appreciate your follow-up, although you're still conflating data tracking under your control vs data tracking under Apple's control.

* https://www.wired.com/2015/11/how-to-get-rid-of-the-iphone-m...

Wired is pointing out that the phone keeps a history of locations. Not Apple. Again, very different from Google's practices.

* http://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-spies-on-yosemite-searc...

This one was disappointing, and as the comments indicate, contrary to Apple's customary sensitivity around privacy. Also trivially disabled, again, unlike the location tracking the Register is describing here which cannot be turned off.

* https://pando.com/2014/07/28/apple-hit-with-class-action-sui...

Sounds more like a lawsuit driving by misinformation. Show me facts, please.

* http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/04/how-apple-tracks-your-l...

Again, purely data stored on the phone.

* http://www.cultofmac.com/132610/it-took-apple-3-years-to-fix...

Embarrassing, undoubtedly. Again, not Apple data collection.

> Also trivially disabled, again, unlike the location tracking the Register is describing here which cannot be turned off.

The tracking absolutely can be turned off. The register's original article is somewhat confused on this.

(disclaimer: googler)

Interesting. Important and good to know, thanks.

Regardless of specific events, you need look no further than their business models to see the difference:

Apple produces and sells premium devices (arguably fashion pieces) at a premium price. They make their money at the point of sale.

Google produces and contracts with manufacturers to produce devices, and provides services. They make their money with ads.

These are both widely known and accepted things, and these mean that Apple has a vested interest to NOT scrape your data, where Google has a vested interest to scrape as much of your data as they can.

You have a choice what phone to use, but OEMs and app developers have no choice but to use Google.

> Still stuck in Chrome though, just because there doesn't seem to be anything better.

I think Firefox is better. It cannot be trusted to sync one's passwords between devices, but then neither can Chrome. Other than that, I think Firefox is by far the better browser. It's fast enough, standards-compliant and made by people who love web browsers.

Firefox leaks ram horribly though. Not that Chrome is a ton better, but it's a little better.

Firefox has never used anywhere close the memory that Chrome does for me.

This is... stupid.

SkyHook had originally come up with the idea of wardriving (as it was then called), and building up a global Wi-Fi location database from the Wi-Fi hotspots. Google took out an evaluation licence from SkyHook in 2005, figured out how it worked, and then allegedly copied it. SkyHook sued for IP theft in 2010 and finally settled the case for $90m in 2015. The company was taken over by TruePosition, a Liberty Media subsidiary, in 2014.

Well, no. There was a settlement, sure, but it's hard to imagine what IP Google "stole". Does anyone really think it is hard to workout the WiFi location thing? I could do it in a few days, and I don't have a background in signal processing.

If behavioural advertising is so bad consumers need an opt-out, how come you can opt out of your ISP's profiling, but not Google’s. How could that be?

https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin

Is the author really advocating that ISPs should be allowed to sell ads on traffic they see?

>Is the author really advocating that ISPs should be allowed to sell ads on traffic they see?

What? It is blatantly obvious from both the tone and content of the article that the author is advocating that google and the like be banned from selling the same kind of ads ISPs are.

Can someone explain why Google Maps needs/wants access to a phone's camera?

Oooh, another Orlowsk's "report" against Google, I'm shocked

Reply on news.ycombinator.com