> He's not creepy, just honest.
Maybe he is creepy AND honest? Possible?
Maybe he is creepy AND honest? Possible?
Google certainly swallowed a lump of creepiness when they bought doubleclick, that company the state of Texas had sued for stalking. One of the former upper figures there was hired by homeland security. Wonder what skill that was for?
It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position.
I'm kind of liking the Apple iAds thing. If done right, it could basically do away with accessing third-party sites when displaying third-party content. The user demographic could be typed simply by the kind of app the ad is in, and just being an Apple customer probably puts him in a more sought-after group of spenders.
Hmmm. I just had an odd thought. For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...
No I don't think that's the right question. I think Gruber really nailed it with this:
"Maybe the question isn't who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information."
Is it feasible for Google, Facebook or anyone else mining data at massive scale to operate outside the US/EU/a couple other countries? I doubt it. The infrastructure wouldn't even handle their websites, which would be a moot point since they wouldn't find 5 digits of the manpower they need lying around in whatever little country.
Ok, can we agree that the answer to Gruber's question is: "yes, obviously, someone needs to hold that information"?
The people that score the best on games are the ones not playing them.
And plenty of games are games of skill and not a good way to measure anything other than their reaction speed to visual stimuli.
When playing such games, I used to save, try various alternatives, and go with the one I liked best in retrospect. When I encountered a game that didn't allow for saving, I was quite bothered and worried about the game "calling home".
These days, I mostly wouldn't worry. A lot of kids slaughtered cities in fallout 2, or accepted quests from all sides so they could get in everywhere and steal the silverware. Few meaningful inferences could be made.
But the meaningless stuff, like red vs. yellow stimpacks? Doing market research with games? That might be worrisome, depending on your feelings about adwords.
Reality has always been creepy. Imagine living during the 13th century and the plague? Mega creepy.
The idea that reality is not creepy is a relatively recent invention (see Television, also Radio somewhat).
I don't see it that way, he's not creepy because he's honest, he's creepy because of what he's honest about. The fictional Gordon Gecko was greedy and honest, but we wouldn't say that being honest was considered greedy, just that being greedy was considered greedy and Gordon Gecko happened to be honest about his venality.
In this case, the CEO is being accused of creepiness for the beliefs he espouses, and he is honest about them. If the CEO of another search engine believes the exact same things but says otherwise, you're right we wouldn't consider him creepy yet because we wouldn't know. But the moment we find out, we'd consider that CEO creepy and dishonest.
Mind you, upmodded for forcing me to examine my beliefs carefully. One thing we don't want to do is give people/companies who don't say one way or the other a free pass. In other words, if another CEO says they're in favour of privacy, fine. But it would be unfair to pile on Eric yet say nothing about Ballmer just because Ballmer doesn't say anything. The right thing to do is to ask Steve Ballmer what Microsoft/Bing's stance is on these exact same issues. And ask FB, and Apple, and everyone else collecting data. Saying nothing should not be better than being honest.
If you were on a ship, and the captain told you: "It's hard, but at these rate we'll probably go straight into the storm", and then he turns and does nothing about it, or keeps going... I'd find it a bit creepy.
But that's very much a personal opinion. I agree it's not a fair adjective (as in it's too heavy) to use for what we are talking about.