Google Pixel Launch [LIVE]
youtube.com
youtube.com
it looks like a required university course at 8am. the background is not of the greatest resolution. the presenters are deadpan. the crowd is, less than enthusiastic.
last thought, google just went all in on the business model of "eroding personal privacy" to "capture value to increase shareholder value". the presenters are continuously driving home the point that the "google assistant is at the center of it all". there is zero pretension of your data remaining your data. HN is constantly having spirited conversations around Snowden and related revelations, but then seems to give a pass or benignly ignoring google's steady erosion of user privacy.
2) What makes you think the data is no longer "yours?" Unless you mean "Not yours as soon as it gets shipped to a Google server," in which case that's always been true of data sent to Google---do you consider Gmail "Not yours?"
2) "my data" is converted to "our data", where "our" is understood to be the user, google, and anyone google "partners" with under the ToS. to the things i value, that is an important distinction. let's consider: nudie photos, dishing ish on friends, personal IP, company IP, etc. no longer mine, now ours. important distinction.
https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Whisper_Systems
...just to name a few off the top of my head.
I agree that the excellent integration that Google or Apple products provide is not seen through the entire ecosystem of these other products, but it's being worked on and, to me at least, the progress being made is impressive.
I'm just not sure how one gets to where Google is on this without, for example, several human-decades worth of actual voice samples from "in the field" to train a multi-stage voice recognizer against, or an entire Internet's worth of search data and signal on how people navigate through and associate that data to build something like a knowledge graph. These may not be systems that can be open-developed into existence without a huge donation of data, money, mindpower, or all three.
i agree that it is perfectly reasonable as a product. however, this is there entire business model. it is why they provide free storage for photos. it is why they want to get hardware into user's hands. it is why they do not provide end-to-end encryption for their communication apps. to me that is a distinction with a difference. it is a philosophy, not a product. and as i see our society marching into the future with a technological infrastructure at it's core built on the philosophy that it is ok to erode personal privacy for the benefit of the private corporation, i worry.
i think we should all get out an protest. but not with pitchforks. i'm a strong believer in public discourse, public disobedience, peaceful protect, constructive criticism, and constructively building alternatives.
But yes, unless things change at the macro level, we're pretty quickly moving into a future ruled by corporations: health, energy, technology, etc, and that is scary.
In that context, I believe that it's important to prioritize "citizen" issues over "consumer" issue, and security over convenience. Google has done some awe inspiring work, much of which I believe Google could have accomplished without requiring a user to agree to a single ToS governing all Google products, without demanding access to all user data. Statistical methods have come a long way, and much smaller data sets coupled with more explicit interaction with its stakeholders/customers (out in the open, explicit conversations vs deep dives into data without notifying the sources of the data) can still enable almost everything Google is doing. The stuff that would not be enabled within that framework could still be accomplished by Google explicitly paying folks to provide data sets (paying people to read scrips or have conversations explicitly recorded for instance) for the express purpose of building up data sets to work against for deep learning related to NLP for Google's "assistant". Lord knows Google has the cash to afford such an approach. But, since Google's current corporate structure requires it to highly prioritize profits, it just takes the data from private conversations.
The argument then is, well, that's what happens when you utilize a free or subsidized service. Yes, that is what you get. But it is not the only way we could be going on about this business. We just have our priorities all mixed up, because of the systemic incentives.