Great stuff. However, while I'm happy that they're limiting third-party access to this data, given Google's business model, I still wouldn't trust them with it.
With this philosophy, I’d suggest you’d avoid paying attention to the trajectory of Chinese society, perhaps even more so now that Google plans to get in bed with the CCP’s censorship and dissident quashing regime...
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...
I too hope that Googlers block what their execs are planning to do in China, but we're not there yet, and it should give one pause that their leadership are onboard with doing this in the first place.
From the article I linked, which is an interview with a Googler who helped lead the resistance-
Interviewee:
...
They also tried to downplay the scope and involvement of the project. But that rhetoric dissolved when we found out that leadership had been lying.
Interviewer:
What were they lying about?
Interviewee:
From the beginning, they told us that Project Maven was a small contract purely for non-offensive purposes. They said that we weren’t building anything custom. They said that this was a one-off project only worth $9 million, and that it wasn’t part of any further collaboration with the Pentagon.
Those all turned out to be lies. On April 12, DefenseOne published an article that landed like a bombshell in the company. Drawing on conversations with Pentagon officials, it revealed that Project Maven was actually a pilot project for future collaborations between Google and the military. In particular, Project Maven was part of Google’s push to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.
JEDI is the military’s next-generation cloud that will network American forces all over the world and integrate them with AI. It’s basically Skynet. And all the big cloud providers want to win the contract because it’s worth $10 billion.
When we found out that Project Maven was an audition for JEDI, people started becoming extremely concerned. And as the media attention to the story increased, we learned a lot more. For instance, Diane Greene had told us that the Project Maven contract was only for $9 million, but internally they expected it to increase to $250 million per year. And they weren’t just giving the Pentagon access to open-source software — they were going to build a massive surveillance system that gave military analysts real-time information on people, vehicles, and buildings in a Google Earth–style interface.
Exposing all of those lies damaged leadership on this issue just as much as anything else that we did. That loss of trust really hurt them.
Don't assume people at the top have an agenda that are compatible with yours.
The fact we are enjoying a lot of peace and freedom right now should now be a signal for us to relax : democracy is a system that needs maintenance, not some legacy you can claim ad vitam.
It's our duty as a citizen to always doubt the intentions of those in power. Just like it's a flight intendent duty to check that the planes doors safety are engaged again and again. It's not a moral issue. It's just a technical requirement.
Not that we shouldn't keep an eye on them, of course. The great bulk of their revenue comes from advertising, which is all about selling users to advertisers. But I don't think Android makes the picture any worse.
The spookiness is even greater for those of us that know what it means to live under repressive regimes.
Honestly Android allows me to tune out of the internet business model a lot easier than iOS. Just dive into permissions and install a system wide adblocker. You can even bypass the app store.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...
Android and ios are both completely opaque operating systems... stop pretending they are not.
Don't trust Facebook or anything they own.
Google's business _is_ selling my information to third parties. Don't Apple have a better track record, and a more privacy oriented business model here?
No, Google's business is using your information as a tool to build products it sells to third parties. Actually selling your information, as such, would undermine that business.
Google business is no more about selling your information to other people than a ferryman’s business is selling his boat.
Your privacy against non-Google actors is Google's moat. They have every interest in protecting it.
Really? If we're going to be that pedantic, then it's probably more like " Google's business is using your information to build products it sells to third parties." They're not using my information as a tool, they're using my information (location, interests, browsing habits, searches) to sell a product (advertising). At that stage, they _are_ selling my data.
Thank you for the suggestion. We likely have different ideals about what a healthy version of the future looks like.
> ...selling your information to third parties...
Not what I said. Google’s business model is to extract and store as much information about consumers as possible, enrich and correlate it, and then financially exploit it. Currently the best way they’ve found to do that is targeted advertising.
By doing so, they make this extremely revealing data available to every government in every jurisdiction in which they operate, which is pretty much all of them. They work to normalize this surveillance as inevitable and unstoppable.
Additionally, while it would currently run counter to their business model to sell raw data, there’s nothing to legally stop them, if that business model should change.
Just like Facebook, Google are now very close to market saturation. To keep growth up, they’ll need to increase revenue per user. How will they do that? We don’t know. But there’s a relatively high chance that I’ll like it even less than what they’re doing now.
> ... dumb
:)