Google Fights Back
stratechery.com
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I nominally pay for these services, but I suspect it makes me a vassal instead of a serf. Google consumes. Google contemplates. Google cognates. Google knows. Google sees me while I will never get to see it.
At face value, as long as Google is Google, everything is okay but what happens when google is Google no more? When it goes to join the great corporate farm in the sky? What happens to the exabytes of data they’ll have gathered by then? Who will own it once Google is Google no more? What will happen to our lives once the data changes hands a decade or four from now?
Are there any contingency plans for the largest dataset on Earth? Do we get to know these plans?
Who the fuck owns MySpace now?
Say what you will about Apple (and I’ve said a lot), at least I know where we stand. I have switched to iOS and I recommend that you should do the same. At the very least, Google will no longer know when you sleep.
But anyone who thinks he's wrong - Remember into whose hands Java fell.
Google will probably bury me.
Google already have many, many advertising partners to whom they gladly provide your location and other data. But they anonymize it, so you are safe ;)
For now...
>Who the fuck owns MySpace now?
It's all deleted. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/18/18271023/myspace-music-vi...
Epidemiologists? Researchers? Academics? Governments trying to model future disease response based on historical trends?
Just off the top of my head.
My future health care provider might. Maybe they’ll spike rates by figuring out how often I’m ill using this data.
Maybe I will marry a congressman someday and the sext that I sent today to my BF will be used to blackmail us.
Maybe 30 years from now, people will be able to use my youthful indiscretions as leverage.
Maybe I won’t get certain jobs because of where I’ve been or whom I’ve accidentally been close to in the location data.
Maybe my sleeping habits will lead to higher life insurance rates.
Russia and private actors have already personally targeted millions of people using highly directed ads to move an election using publicly available data. Imagine what they could do with Google’s data. Target congressional aides? Target the POTUS’ mistress (or mister)?
In the hands of a Caesar or a Napoleon that data is the power to reshape the Earth, smite your enemies, eviscerate any obstacles and remake the holder into an invincible demi-god.
> My future health care provider might. Maybe they’ll spike rates by figuring out how often I’m ill using this data.
You seem to be perhaps a little too optimistic about your life expectancy.
If I’m truly lucky, it could be a century. It’s something I try to work for. I have 2X chromosomes, am nominally healthy with CR and replicating the best anti-aging treatments of our time (retinoids for skin, exercise, nicotinamide riboside etc). Barring the unforeseen, my genes and efforts will probably lead to an extremely long healthy life span.
From your HN comments, it feels like the world would be a poorer and darker place without you in it. People like you make a life worth living and a long one worth striving for. If we all take care of our health (with a little chemical help along the way) maybe we’ll all get to see what’s next together? :)
Not running algorithms for ad targeting doesn't make the data any more secure. Only end-to-end encryption does.
It reads "For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information" and then immediate shows a giant table of data that is NOT end-to-end encrypted, but not labelled as such -- it's only inferrable by its omissions from the next section of the document.
or can't seem to differentiate between what Google does now ...vs what might happen with Apple in the future.
Also, I didn't say anything about what Apple might or might not do in the future. I made a distinction between worries about ad targeting and security issues that come with storing data in the cloud without end-to-end encryption.
How can you be sure? End to end encryption is not a guarantee when you're inputting your key into a closed source client to store and retrieve the data.
Also, in China Apple handed over iCloud operations to a government owned company, including the keys.
By implication, all other data is not end-to-end encrypted. That includes iCloud drive, photos, calendar, contacts and mail.
Specifically listed as encrypted in transit and on server:
- iCloud Drive
- Photos
- Calendar
- Contacts
Only mail is not according to this support article.
Edit: I see the omission now. These things are not listed under the end-to-end section.
I do make one exception to this, in that I have a long-standing business arrangement with a company that manages my mail and web server, but I am paying them for a specific service which they have been completely reliable about providing, so I feel generally comfortable with that.
I feel badly for people who haven't had the advantage of growing up with all this stuff and are therefore having to learn these lessons the hard way. Lots of painful experiences out there.
It seems like there aren't very many people who really care about privacy... and they would be easy to single out and punish.
On that note, enjoy your semblance of privacy now... while you still can!
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.de/video-china-train-warns-citiz...
But what's the definition of "other peoples' machines?"
If you run Windows 10, it's not really your machine. You don't have full control over it, do you? It updates and reboots when Microsoft tells it to, not when you tell it to.
If you use a smartphone, that's not your machine, either. If you can't read and write every byte of storage from the baseband processor to the video chipset, but the company who sold you the phone can, then that means it's their machine, and not yours.
If you use a Linux box or a Mac, I hope you never plug an Ethernet cable into it, because that effectively turns your machine into a dumb terminal on a system that isn't yours, just as the Oracle (Corporation) foretold.
"Keeping it to yourself" gets a little less practical every year, it seems.
My devices all connect to a wifi router at home that I bought and configured myself, which bridges to my ISP's modem. Has it been hacked...? Well, I hope not. I do the best I can. My laptops have all been ThinkPads running Linux, for years. I love the maintainability, and the fact that I can turn off wifi with a physical switch is a nice bonus. I'd like to try out a Purism laptop someday, if I can ever afford it.
I take comfort in the fact that nobody really cares what I am doing and I am not worth the effort of a focused attack. If I ever got involved in politics or activism, I might manage my risks differently. It is frustrating for me that the world continues to drift further away from the way I'd prefer it to be, in this arena, but my desires are extreme, so I suppose that's to be expected.
Maybe someone will try to blackmail you and your congressman husband, but both of you will just shrug, because no one cares at all about nudes. Not even you, after a few more decades of information wanting to be free and becoming free and public.
Maybe it's better that you didn't get those jobs and you find something else. With all the extra data out there, maybe there'll be a service that'll match you up with doing something you really want to do that fulfills your soul instead of sucks it.
Why do you suppose that with more information election manipulation will be one-sided in favor of certain manipulators over other manipulators or even suppressors? I'm told FB does a great job suppressing all kinds of data from spreading, I don't imagine they'll get worse at it. We also have all the other manipulators manipulating in exactly the opposite direction as any particular manipulator you want to call out. Seems like a wash.
Your concerns all boil down to big maybes about mildly increased financial burden and people increasing their sensitivity to private info being exposed despite decades of trends implying the opposite. In the hands of a Caesar, this isn't the power to reshape the Earth at all, especially when it's never going to be in the hands of one entity.
Then why are there so many tech companies obsessed with "changing the world"?
None of your rebuttal did anything to negate the fact that big data can be and is used as a weapon the likes of which the world has never seen before.
Like getting ghosted after a job interview. You will have _no idea_ what caused the rejection. Or, as to your examples, you will have no idea if and/or why you're getting charged more.
They deleted 12 years of music uploads, not everything. Username, email, bio, friends, etc. still exists somewhere, but who owns it? What do they intend to do with it?
Reveal my Top 8 when I run for congress?
Like when I started getting push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my exact balance due, which they could only have gathered by parsing my emails from the bank. It's easy to resolve that by changing the contact info/settings with the bank, but just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd.
It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature.
Financial information in particular can be used against you by a number of parties, and it's been used to discriminate against people in the past. When it comes to the collection of that data by scanning private communications, the ethical alarm bells should have been ringing, and the fact they collect that data should be disclosed and be opt-in (or opt-out).
If it's a matter of "if you don't pay for the product you are the product" that's not true - I did pay a lot of money for their product (I own a Pixel device), and if they offered an email product that I could pay for with the solace that it wouldn't be reading my emails, I would.
How was it presented to you in a way that you found deeply unethical? As I understand it shows up as a soft notification on your phone.
Years ago, I looked at my Google dashboard. They knew when i filed for taxes, how much was owed/reimbursed, my medical history. NONE of which I consented to Google using.
Google is constantly eroding the expectation of privacy we have wrt to our emails (and probably other things that are expected to stay private, if you are on android), and this bothers me on a fundamental level. And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore.
I am a mixture of shocked and saddened that the HN crowd (at least so far, hudging from the comments) thinks it is a-OK for this to happen.
And that is where you are wrong. You DID consent to this use of the information in your email when you signed up with Google as your email provider. They don't exactly make any secret of the fact that the emails in your account will be data-mined, both for the various assistant features they offer and for their own business purposes, including marketing.
It is not Google's fault that you failed to consider the obvious implications of that consent.
> And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore.
You have plenty of options. There are email providers other than Google, and means of communication other than email. Encryption is also widely available for those motivated enough to use it.
No, I (not the original poster) didn't. I signed up with a Gmail account years before any of this existed, and I never would have guessed they would do what the original poster is concerned about. At no point was I informed that this type of stuff would start happening. I figured it out by reading a lot of tech news that the average person does not. As such, I've moved away from Gmail, but there are probably millions of people who aren't OK with it, but don't know it's happening.
Whether or not you realized how the information could be used, you did consent for Google to have that information by choosing them as your email provider. Anyone with a modicum of understanding of how email works would realize that the content of any unencrypted email is readily available to the entity which receives and stores the email, along with the sender's email provider and the operators of any services it might pass through prior to final delivery. If anything this is even more obvious with webmail services. The only reason people are upset at Google here is that Google is more up-front than the average free email provider about the extent of the information they have and how it can be used. They didn't have to reveal what they know or provide controls over it or use it to offer services for their users' benefit. Sure, they also use it for advertising—but that was always part of the deal, since long before any of these other features existed. Yet it's these aspects that benefit the user that people seem to complain about the most, because it highlights aspects of the relationship they wouldn't otherwise have bothered to consider.
And look where we are now. Not only is it expected (!!) but people are telling us to suck it up, this is how it’s always been (it wasn’t) and it’s our own fault because we didn’t read the ToS. When did this become the norm, and when did it even become acceptable??
One more point I’m concerned about is that Google is changing the standard of what is acceptable for an email provider, to read your emails and use them how they see fit. This is something people casually gloss over. Would you be equally as upset if UPS or FedEx looked inside your packages and then bombard you with adverts, or sell the data to someone else?
Those packages are sealed. Emails are not, unless the content is encrypted, in which case Google wouldn't have access either. UPS and FedEx are welcome to what information they can glean from the outside of the package. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that packages are routinely X-rayed or subjected to other non-invasive scans, either. Certainly packages crossing an international border are frequently opened and searched by Customs, whatever the carrier and sender might prefer.
More to the point, when you send a package with UPS or FedEx that is a paid service carried out under the terms of a pre-agreed contract. The conditions under which a package may be opened, and how any information about the package may be used, are dictated by that contract. Email is a much less formal system relying on anonymous intermediaries; neither the sender nor the recipient is paying for secure end-to-end delivery. Frankly, there is no reason to assume any email is truly private. You have no idea how many distinct parties may have access to it before it's delivered to its final destination. That's true even if you run your own mail server, let alone relying on a free service offered by an advertising company.
One last thing. Do you really think Google is setting precedent here, "changing the standard of what is acceptable"? Businesses offering free email services to the public have always data-mined users' emails for advertising purposes. Google is just more up-front about it, and more inclined to use at least some of that data-mining to provide add-on services of actual value to most users.
And yet
> just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd.
> It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature.
That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be useful" to "I don't think it's unpopular".
Almost like your initial position was absurd on its face, so once challenged you had to immediately back up to a softer, more defensible one.
That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion.
Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical to scrape private financial information and then present it as a nifty notification, and even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it.
> even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it
I don't see it as absurd, for the same reasons I've elaborated on elsewhere in the thread: the benefits are concrete and current, while the harms are nebulous/potential/abstract.
Counterpoint: I find this feature super useful. (and I know a lot of other people who do as well).
I'm guessing the multiple people telling you they think the feature is useful won't change your mind about "nobody could possibly want this", though.
You say it as if it's a revelation or discovery, when Google is very upfront about surfacing relevant information and reminders based on your inbox.
On more than one occasion, this feature has helped me take actions on pending work items like payments, renewals and so on.
You don't want Google to show you ads, fair enough. You don't want Google to surface for you (and only you) useful information that helps you organize your life.
It almost sounds like you just want Google to give you hundreds of dollars of compute, storage and service out of the goodness of their hearts.
I think both you and Google would be better off without each other.
It also sounds like you need to organise your life a bit better. Google's notorious for their screw-ups and service closures, one day you might miss an important payment because they turned off the feature or you end up on the wrong side of an A/B test.
It'd be surprising if there wasn't a clear or direct causal path about how Google found that information. For example, imagine that you paid for a hotel room somewhere in Thailand by cash, didn't carry your phone with you at the time, didn't log in to any electronic device, and still Google inferred that you stayed there, THAT would be surprising.
On the other hand, literally parsing out an email (AND even linking to it, you can click on the notifs to take you to the relevant email!!!) and showing you the result doesn't in any sense qualify as surprising.
No, but I do think that everyone who gets a service for free should by default assume they don't have much privacy. That is not a huge burden to assume.
I've used a paid email provider since before Gmail existed. They've not been blocked.
I know there are the occasional posts on HN about Gmail blocking their servers, but I doubt it's anywhere close to the norm.
Or "you have been served with a summons to appear at... See transportation options" (beta soon?). When a company has so completely lost sight of what its customers see as creepy that it advertises creepiness as a feature, it has lost its way.
That they use millions of computing-dollars to extract this information and store it.
Supposedly spam detection does not need to understand the numbers in your bank emails. Supposedly it needs mostly information about you previous contacts and spammy patterns from the rest of the internet.
The point being that you cannot misuse the information you do not have. Google is very good at thinking of a lot of this kind of quality of life functionality, they do not seem to realize how creepy and disconcerting they can be.
> Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.
What is even this supposed to mean? also the information "kill on sight" on your profile of a terrorist association is just one bit, do not worry about that. The fact that they are digital does not mean that the data won't affect your life nor that human or machine will take complex decision based on them.
My point is that they already have the information, so any potential misuse or abuse is possible regardless of what types of parsing they're doing. It might just be inconvenient.
There is also a security issue, I trust google to keep my email secure, I trust less google to keep my profile metadata secure as selling it is its main business model.
The digital equivalent of the envelope is encryption - the carrier is allowed to see the outside but not the inside. The function of encryption is lack of comprehension - the carrier still knows the exact encrypted bytes of your mail, but cannot comprehend it. We generally accept that this is already a useful proxy for privacy.
Imagine a mail protocol that somehow lets you encrypt everything but the part necessary for spam identification. The carrier is able to apply some algorithm to determine whether it's spam, but no other information. I'll assume everyone thinks this sounds good (though impossible). Because encryption is just lack of comprehension, an algorithm that is only capable of parsing an "is spam" feature from email has the same level of privacy as this hypothetical. But an algorithm that is capable of parsing "your credit card payment is overdue" is able to comprehend something else, which is a different level of privacy.
(Of course, encryption is better than "They're not running anything that can parse this," because it says "Nobody can parse this.")
The answer here is privacy laws and auditability.
My issue is that federal law regulates what information my bank can share with 3rd parties and allows me to opt out. The ethical thing to do is at least hold oneself to a similar standard. If I had worked on those projects I would have made it policy to ignore emails from healthcare providers and financial institutions outright, since there is far more harm that can be done than good.
I have no problem with data collection when it's done responsibly. But I get the feeling that most developers/engineers working on these features have warped senses of ethics and don't consider the large scale implication of what they're doing, or if they do they just ignore it. Either way, it's the blatant disregard for privacy that bothers me.
Nonsense. It's a totally reasonable ethical viewpoint to assume that a user who opts in to their financial institution to send their data to Gmail has opted into Gmail reading that email and trying to provide awesome features on top of it. It's not like Google keeps it a secret when it does this kind of stuff. This is the bread and butter what Google is, and anyone not interested in that kind of thing should choose another email alternative.
Google taking privacy seriously means they treat the data you share with them with respect. In this situation it is you, as a person who does not trust Google, who is apparently not taking privacy seriously when you opt into sending them your financial records.
Do you think customers have absolutely no responsibility over what applications and services they choose to use?
I realize the downvotes will come... But also take the time to let me know what I'm getting wrong.
I understand why anyone would want ios now but your argument is about the future.
Provide a source. Apple is pretty transparent in its iCloud security overview[1] and iOS Privacy Whitepaper[2].
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
[2]: https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
Meanwhile take a moment and review Apple's stance on privacy and security before you continue [1] [2] [3].
[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/manage-your-privacy/
[2] https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/
[3] https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
The "Don't Be Evil" corporation that valued open source rather than open-washing, that valued openstandards over "oops, we didn't mean to break that for you!" isn't here anymore.
The company that bends over backwards, much farther than the law requires, to enable the surveillance state.
I despise Apple. Especially on mobile. No SDCards, no headphone jack, walled garden app stores. Ugh ugh ugh.
I have applications that does E2E for contacts and calendars that I'll have to find an iOS solution for.
I loathe the notch.
But my next phone will be an iPhone.
Google collects so much absurd amount of data - that all the Proton-mail, DuckduckGo, Wire/Signal, Firefox (loaded with adblocking and tracking plugins) apps in the world can't keep you totally from it as long as you're on Android. You disable things, you opt out of stuff and it just keeps on collecting anyways.
And i don't believe for a second the data they're allowing you to "autodelete" genuinely gets deleted. It just gets removed from your view.
People can't simply get rid of their cell phones. At minimum, I need one for work.
A lot of the secure applications I use have a linux app of some sort (DEB, AppImage, Docker) but I fail to see how any of that is going to work on a phone.
I certainly don't see how a docker container would be good for battery life on a phone either
ProtonMail - for example - on Linux, requires a bridge application in order to talk to a IMAP capable email client.
Etesync requires a bridge in the form of a docker image.
Wire has an AppImage that I'm certain won't work well on a mobile screen. Signal has a DEB for Debian based environments and I doubt that'll play nice on mobile too.
The only real way to do a Libre phone is for me to invest entirely in the Libre ecosystem for mail, chat, VPN, everything.
if you've spent time moving your stuff into more secure and diverse sets of applications and services, and what's more - convincing friends and family to communicate with you over those very things, you'll have to migrate once more in order to use this phone.
I would bet money that Firefox doesn't even work on it in a mobile/phone-mode. You'll have to use their stock browser which will probably be based on Epiphany.
Frankly, a container-based app model sounds kinda nice!
there is https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility for ChromeOS devices but on many phones, it is currently not possible to install a 3rd party OS, unless you figure out how to root them yourself... and even then, some of its hardware will probably not be compatible because they don't release drivers
I wish a Librem 4 was available (a lot cheaper then the Librem 5)
While "deleted" might take a while (eventual consistency FTW), any company with a presence in the EU has a lot to lose if such a scheme (beyond what they declare, eg. "31 days to recover your account") ever sees the light of day.
Even if a company only does the bare minimum required under GDPR, total deletion of data on request is part of that.
IMO the corporate board of directors will coast on the situation for as long as possible and only then will we see some changes, don't you agree?
There are a few cases already with fines around 2.8% of revenue, and those fines don't mean the DPA will go away. The expectation is that these fines are paid _and_ the reason for the fine is resolved.
Turnover in the 2.8% case (Taxa 4x35 in Denmark) was from Fall 2018 (start of investigation) to March 2019 (when the DPA reported the incident to the police and "recommended" that fine). Sadly the only follow-ups on the case that I could find are behind paywalls (so I can't read them), but apparently the DPA isn't done with them yet.
It's all a matter of exercising pressure, and it seems that the authorities are willing to do that.
GDPR covers any interaction of people or organizations in the EU.
So non-EU consumers are covered once they're visiting the EU (citizen of a member state or not), and potentially (untested, not spelled out explicitly) when they use a VPN with an endpoint in the EU (because they're then likely talking to data centers under the control of the European subsidiary).
> they don't have to afford the same protection to non-EU users
Given that "EU user" is murky like that, I'm not sure if any company goes through the trouble of differentiating which action happened from inside or outside the EU beyond raw GDPR blocking that refuse service entirely for accesses from within the EU.
If they only use it for something where other factors affect the outcome (ad targeting, etc) they can still keep your data forever while hiding behind plausible deniability the other factors provide them (from outside, there’s no way to prove that a particular ad was served to you because of your data instead of another factor they use as input for the algorithm).
Create an account, use it to excessively look for tea pots until you predominantly get ads for tea pots. Store the cookie[0] that encodes your user id. Delete the account.
After the advertised account retention period, try the cookie again in an otherwise squeaky clean session that gives random ads without the cookie:
Tea pots? Something survived.
No tea pots? No targetting.
(and yes, the onus to demonstrate your accusation well enough to convince a DPA is on you, IMHO as it should be)
[0] or whatever bits of data are necessary: try to recreate the tea-pot session after a logout without logging in officially to determine what's necessary.
They've improved their model none the less even if you delete your data after the fact.
An anecdote: I stayed with relatives for a few days one time, and my two-year-old niece really liked one particular music video on YouTube, so it got played on their TV box 3-4 times during my visit. Not on my laptop, but I used said laptop on their wifi (not logged into Google products, as I never am). When I got home, YouTube highly recommended that video to me after I watched an unrelated video, when there was no other reason to recommend it (I didn't know the artist, almost never watch music videos, and it wasn't anything all that popular).
My IP seems to be permanently associated with my YouTube habits. They’re even being sneaky about it, as in they’ll give you a default homepage and generic recommendations first, but watching any video similar to the previous viewing habits will bring back not just videos related to that one, but the entire history they’ve collected over the years (some of the topics I watch are completely separate and would never intersect normally, so the only way for them to both come up in suggestions is from previous viewing history).
I didn’t create an account, didn’t agree to any privacy policies, and am blocking any and all cookies just like they advise in their own privacy policy and yet I am still being tracked.
edit: I've been subjected to Google's dark patterns for so many years that I doubt I will ever trust this company to be honest with me.
"The GDPR is open to interpretation, so we asked an EU Member State supervisory authority (CNIL in France) for clarification. CNIL confirmed that you’ll have one month to answer to a removal request, and that you don’t need to delete a backup set in order to remove an individual from it. Organizations will have to clearly explain to the data subject (using clear and plain language) that his or her personal data has been removed from production systems, but a backup copy may remain, but will expire after a certain amount of time (indicate the retention time in your communication with the data subject). Backups should only be used for restoring a technical environment, and data subject personal data should not be processed again after restore (and deleted again). While this adds some complexity, it allows organizations to have some time to re-engineer their data protection processes." https://blog.quantum.com/backup-administrators-the-1-advice-...
You are absolutely correct that following the intent of the GDPR (we don't have access to the user data once they file the request) is of utmost importance. But the prior poster is correct that the data still exists.
Edit: All opinions my own and not that of my employer, etc. etc.
"Personal data which have undergone pseudonymisation, which could be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional information should be considered to be information on an identifiable natural person" (Recital 26).
In which case you need a lawful basis for doing such processing (of which consent is just one possibility). Furthermore, that's considered "profiling" and is subject to extra rules if it can have strong impact on the person's life.
On the other hand, if the data is well mixed with other people's, preventing that recognition, then it has been anonymized, and therefore it's not longer subject to the GDPR (Recital 26). But note that you're still subject to it when you're capturing and using personal data to train that model, even if the model itself is anonymized.
I realised in the next months that the perceived "freedom to tinker" on Android is something hugely overrated. I could achieve almost everything I wanted on my iPhone -- it just took a bit of time to find the proper apps. Later Apple added the Shortcuts which is a very solid automation app.
Many Android users also lament the lack of a visible filesystem but that's a huge plus in my eyes. What are Android apps doing with that? You guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users). iOS' sandboxing is not a bug. It's a feature which I appreciate a lot.
I'll not shy away from the fact: there are areas that I miss from Android. For example, I could have inspected WiFi strength signal with an Android phone and I cannot with a non-jailbroken iPhone.
Again though, as a guy who used Android phones for 4.5 years before switching to an iPhone, I found that the uncomfortable feeling of switching to an entirely new (and supposedly more "locked down") ecosystem is mostly an illusion created by our brain's unwillingness to endure big changes. You get over it very quickly. Don't trust your brain on these matters, it floods you with non-truisms to avoid cognitive shock.
P.S. I too loathe the notch. So after 15 months with the iPhone X I switched to iPhone 8 Plus. Easily the best phone on the planet to this day (plus a bigger screen and a slightly bigger battery). Now I dread the day the device will no longer be sold.
The best part is the equivalent Android APIs have terrible performance and stability.
Android has been steadily moving away from both being open and supporting power users, with stuff like Doze relying on GCM, nerfing WiFi control, disabling getting BT mac addresses (and not even letting apps ask for permission)
It turns out being able to replace a users lock screen with a full page ad is not a good thing.
That's awful in my eyes. What's more is my inability to browse that file system without a third party application when i want to simply move files to my computer.
The only reason I'm even contemplating the move to iOS, is b/c I have a android based, digital audio player that has 2 SDcard slots that I keep disconnected from Wifi (and it does n't have a 4G connection at all).
If my music was still on my phone, I simply would not move to iOS over this singular issue. You're talking 250-400GB of files, not including my downloads, my pictures, my Keepass databases, my SSH keys, my certs file for my VPN, and files that I don't want the OS to index and put in some general library.
It stills seem ridiculously daunting to let go of. Because I use it extensively. Daily - even without my music on there.
>ou guessed it, scan your internal storage and SD card and upload them feck knows where (and this has been proven by many advanced Android users)
Except only the apps I trust are allowed storage access.
As mentioned in a sibling comment, Apple's proposition has cracks and that's unequivocally true. Your usage sounds like an outlier case.
In my case, I have tons and TONS of videos (800GB at this point) so I am pondering the home NAS + 10Gbps router + 10Gbps switch setup. And yeah, I can't use Apple's iCloud for my videos.
That's not the case almost anywhere though. And you won't be able to access your own stuff without internet either. That's would be very annoying for music, imo.
In my case I am on 1Gbps ingress/egress for ~43 EUR a month and could negotiate a deal for a datacenter level of a link (10Gbps) but I don't want to.
The reason I'll go for 10Gbps router and a 10Gbps switch is because if you put a NAS in your home network then the gigabit speeds will never be achieved again (various reasons, including LAN chatter). And also because I'll buy a 10Gbps-enabled machine and would like to be able to work with the data on my NAS with 1.25GB/s.
Quite an investment I admit. But it's long-term. I don't anticipate changing that setup for like 10 years.
I agree that my planned setup is an overkill but I am setting myself up for such a tech overkill setup in all my work endeavours because I want to have a peace of mind for about 10 years -- if at all possible.
I don't think any of us will soon need more than 1.25GB/s ingress/egress anytime soon (unless of course our games are rendered on the cloud and streamed directly to our PCs). And since I am sick and tired of eternal tinkering, I want to go for an ultimate endgame, or at least one that can last me some years in the future.
I went iPhone -> Android -> Windows -> Android. I'd really like to get back to an iPhone for privacy reasons, but the storage situation really doesn't work for my family. Traditionally, it's been a low capacity entry model and then ~$100 to upgrade to each new tier, paying Apple's wildly inflated markup. The pricing is also way out of line with our budget. I was really hoping for a new SE model for my wife.
I'm fairly happy with my Galaxy S9+ now, but I really miss a lot about Windows 10 Mobile. I'll never forgive Google for doing everything in its power to make sure another mobile platform didn't become viable.
This is why I bought the 256GB versions (although your photo archives might be even bigger).
Not sure what I can recommend but in any case I'd probably get a professional camera with 400GB SD card. :D I mean, if you guys like to make long videos during a time outside, why not?
I agree Apple's proposition has cracks by the way. Not arguing that.
As for W10 Mobile, yep -- I sold my Lumia 1520 the summer of 2017 and my heart is still broken. :( This system had so much potential! And I have never found a phone whose form factor and feel to the touch that I like so much as the Lumia 1520 and the Lumia 950 XL.
As for photos, I wouldn't say I take hundreds of gigabytes. The point is I don't want to have an anxiety attack over running out of space where I have low coverage. I can get a 512 GB microSD card for $100 and smaller capacities for much less. That let's me have my apps, offline music, offline maps, photos, 1080p videos, and so on. But, thanks for the suggestions nonetheless.
Use what serves you best. I recognise that your scenario isn't well-served by Apple. Of course you'll switch.
I'm preaching to the choir, but it sucks that the only two viable options these days require such huge trade-offs. And that the premium for privacy is so much greater than what typical Android hardware costs.
I'm glad you've been able to find a trade-off that works for you. I'm hoping something changes in this duopoly system we have.
I completely agree we shouldn't have to make the big trade-offs between the duopoly. But truth be told, if Microsoft failed to gain ground as a third smartphone vendor, what hope does anybody else have? They were sabotaged by Google at every turn and let's face it, if your mobile OS cannot have YouTube that means at least 80% of the smartphone populace will write you off as useless. If not 95% even.
I also haven't found the perfect setup yet. Pondering investing heavily in a 10Gbps router + 10Gbps switch + NAS with 25TB as a start. I have loads of videos and can't pay iCloud for them. So things are still shaping up.
Overall though, I am really happy with my choice. Serves me well in 98% of the time.
Thank you for the kind words. Right back at you. :)
I'll grant you that Apple providing better software support for their phones was a huge advantage. And their stance on privacy is leagues apart from Google's. So, I could work out the math on that iPhone 8+ and call it roughly breakeven. I typically keep a phone for 3 years, so the per annum cost was roughly the same. But, for that money I likely wasn't going to be happy and that factors in. I just wasn't going to have what I want out of a phone and I'd have to console myself with having an intangible benefit of better privacy. I care about privacy, but trying to be honest with myself, that likely wasn't going to make me feel better about paying $200 extra because Apple doesn't think I need a microSD slot.
My wife has a completely different hang-up. She gets very nervous about carrying around a fragile $800+ device. And she'd lose her mind if she misplaced such an expensive device. Prior to inheriting my Lumia 950 XL, she had a Lumia 640 she loved and only paid $30 for. So, she was never going to be happy with an iPhone 8 either. If Apple had refreshed the SE device, we may very well have made the switch to iOS. But, they want to sit at the high-end of the market -- as is their right -- and so we decided to self-select out.
All of this is a really long-winded way of saying that affordability isn't the only concern when it comes to making a purchase. For all its other faults, the Android ecosystem provides many options to suit people's budgets and comfort zones. And yet again, I have to lament the demise of Windows 10 Mobile because it really offered the best of both worlds there.
I most certainly do, but as mentioned in a sibling comment, don't most US households use carrier-financed phones? That's like, $20 - $50 extra a month?
The 3 years usage period is kind of surprising to me because it clashes with my anecdotal evidence somewhat -- I've known 20+ people holding on to iPhones for 5-6 years. But I am pretty sure the median you gave is more accurate so in that case the cost per annum might indeed be equal to Android flagships (or larger).
> paying $200 extra because Apple doesn't think I need a microSD slot.
I now dearly regret not keeping the link but there was a research showing that the SD controller introduces lag in the entire system (in the case of SoCs anyway). However, nowadays that probably can be solved. Likely nobody in Apple tried though. So there's not only Apple not thinking you might need a microSD. There seem to be other factors in the equation. iPhones are known to be fast and Apple doesn't want to risk losing that no matter what -- would be my guess.
> She gets very nervous about carrying around a fragile $800+ device.
As I mentioned in the other sibling comment here, I really miss the days I didn't have to care if I dropped my phone. Sadly I don't think these days are ever coming back. :(
I personally am unwilling to sacrifice privacy and smooth operation (most budget Androids lag like hell) -- because I consume a lot of reading and video and audio material on my phone and replacing light amounts of anxiety (that most of the time I can put under control) with severe annoyances on a daily basis is a bad trade for me.
Of course, we aren't trying to convince each other, I am aware. We're sharing use cases and I am grateful that you oblige.
Well then 40% of American households are concerned: https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-house...
I'm a former ios user (9 years, from my 3GS in 2009 to my 6S which I used until 2018) that switched to Android last year mostly out of cost. Apple crossed a threshold I'm unwilling to follow.
Now I have a moto x4 that was just $300 so I'm not terrified to take it running/hiking with me in case I trip or fall or otherwise break/drop/lose the phone. It takes an SD card so I don't have to pay inflated rates for memory during purchase, the one chance you get. And on top of it I'm on a cheaper carrier (not strictly Apple's fault).
That being said, don't most US households get carrier-financed phones?
The problem isn't that I'm using the device wrong. The problem is the device isn't fit for purpose.
especially in the case of a phone failure to boot.
So consider that this niche feature you find useful is of almost no consequence to anybody.
Additionally, iPhones and Samsung devices have really durable internal storage. Almost always the battery craps out first.
The ability to do offline salvaging does not seem like such a big selling point to me.
As for offline salvaging, do you realize how many phones have had bugs that resulted in boot problems in the last 10 years?
As for privacy, I would disable cloud sync and backups as well. But eventually came to the sad conclusion that I have a lot more going on in my life and I cannot sacrifice even more of my preciously little free time to self-manage all my data -- not to mention this would require a moderate investment in my own NAS / 10Gbps switch / 10Gbps router and end-to-end encrypted backups to 1-2 VPS-es.
I get where you are coming from, I do. But I had to make a choice between an actual life and paranoia. I settled for a "mostly ok" solution and a bit more of a personal life and free time.
If privacy and offline-first own personal data get commoditised, I'll be the first to switch away from cloud (and thus Apple).
Now my phone has 64 GB based storage and I'm still in the same situation because everything has bloated to fill the available space. microSD is a really cheap and incredibly effective solution to the problem. Certainly much cheaper than buying a new phone so you can get more storage.
My main complaint about iOS is text entry. Both the keyboard and voice input are incredibly bad compared to Android, even compared to Android of 3 years ago. I still struggle to type accurately or voicetype without having to make a ton of corrections. And there are better 3rd party keyboards (including GBoard) but they tend to be slow and awkward due to iOS limitations, plus then you lose voice typing completely which is not acceptable to me. If I could have an iPhone with the native Android keyboard and voice typing I'd be super happy.
Doesn't stop Google's keyboard to periodically pester you to give it full access "to get the full experience" (or something along the lines) but if you don't, it will never get or send a single byte to Google's servers.
Trust me, I researched. I too didn't want the huge irony you mentioned to hit me. And it doesn't.
I use GBoard on iOS, and on the iPhone XS with iOS12, you can still use the native voice typing while using GBoard
I've never really wanted to tinker much with my smartphone. I want it to do a handful of simple tasks (calls, texts, maps, music, light web browsing), and otherwise get out of the way.
Similarly, I switched to Mac OS X awhile back after years on Linux and BSD, because I realized that I would never want to tinker with (the source code of) my web browser or word processor, and there was a whole tinker-friendly Unix system sitting right next door. Pace, Stallman, but I don't need the freedom to tinker everywhere.
I used Debian as a main driver for several years and lost patience around 2010. Using a MacBook Pro with an external monitor and working to get an iMac Pro with maxed out settings (~14_000 EUR) to have as a main driver for the next 9-10 years.
Customisation and freedom to tinker with the details is great but only when you need it. Not all the time.
I ask you what can we realistically do though?
It's very apparent that budget Androids that lag like hell and break down often aren't to the general populace's taste if they have a choice -- in my "poor" country (Bulgaria) people get loans so they can buy the Galaxy S10 or Huawei P30, en masse. Most people I've known in my life buying budget Androids only did so because of money constraints. I only knew 2 people who bought cheap Androids to tinker -- and it was because they loved tinkering with tech more than having sex with their wives, or spending time with their kids, or go jogging.
I already said I am not OK with Apple lobbying against the right to repair.
But I have no recourse as a customer. My iPhone is legitimately saving me time and frustration for a no small amount of leisure and work activities. If it didn't, I'd be using a budget Xiaomi for life. But here we are.
What would you do? Would you sacrifice your free time so you can punish the big evil corporations? And how?
If the only Android phones where the cheap, shitty ones, I'd probably be on an iPhone now.
I loved Samsung while I was using Androids but they were starting to lag at the 6-9 months mark, without an exception (I owned 5 of their devices over a course of 4 years). Eventually it pissed me off.
Only Android device I legitimately loved was the Xiaomi Mi 6 (the high-end version with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage). Truthfully a masterpiece!
In the end though, my need for full and easy integration between my mobile devices and laptop (soon a desktop as well) prevailed. I arrived at the conclusion that "tinker at all costs" is not for me. There are plenty of people who do only that, I am passing the torch to them.
The current toss-it-over-the-wall-ware model is good enough. Android and Chromium technically "work" without Google, and their code is online. There are multiple Firefox forks. I don't know about OSS programs for Excel spreadsheets and Word docs, but I'm happy to sacrifice some freedom in order to never have to go down that rabbit-hole.
Instead of being hung up "but if the people just do this...", how about we formulate a new strategy based on the facts observed so far?
Trust me, I'd like some of my ideas to be funded as well. But it doesn't seem to be the world we are living in. :(
iCloud is accessible as a "filesystem" on iOS. It's a decent compromise that doubles as a dropbox replacement
Is it not? Your entire post only argues "It is, but here's why it works for me...". Removing the "freedom to tinker" is taking two steps back from what a computer should be. And smartphones are growing to be the primary computing device for many, so in my mind it's ridiculous to argue them being locked-down a merit. Relying on apps from a walled-garden app store is not a solution even if it works for you or others. Many legitimate apps are banned from the Apple app store entirely, and users cannot install them even if they choose to because iOS prevents installs outside of the app store (unlike Android). I want to run my own code on my own device, freedom to do so is not "hugely overrated".
And as for privacy: what is privacy if its decided for the user and not the other way round? You cannot have true privacy without freedom, you only have Apple's definition of it. Tell Chinese Apple users about privacy, why Apple stores data in China.
And freedom extends to hardware, too. You purchase an iPhone and Apple tells you it's too dangerous for users to fix it themselves, and lobbies against right-to-repair [1]. Do you also consider freedom to repair your own devices overrated?
Of course we should have the right to repair. And of course many Apple users aren't okay with everything Apple does -- or you thought we were all mindless worshipping drones? No. We buy Apple because it makes the most sense for our needs. That's all there is to it.
But tell me, what choice is there out there if we want alternatives? No, really. Don't give me theoreticals and "if we could only do X...". We have Android and iOS. Nothing else. Sailfish OS is very niche and not everybody likes Sony's 2-3 devices that the OS supports. W10 Mobile is dead. Google and all Android OEMS actively sabotaged any and all open-source efforts -- mostly the ROM community -- mainly by voiding warranties if you touch a single byte in the bootloader. Even the rootless unlocking techniques are attacked on a regular basis. It's a furious battle and the OEMs won.
So don't tell me Android is much better than iOS because it's very obviously not. Historical factual records show that Google is very keen on the walled garden idea as well -- and I hope you are aware of the Google Play Services situation and that "the vanilla Android" (AOSP) gets less and less useful with each release and that more and more functionality is sucked into the proprietary, closed-source, binary blob that's Google Play Services.
---
Again, what other choice of mobile ecosystems do we have?
Android's supposed increased freedom is periodically strangled away (normal file system is soon going to be a thing of the past, for example). Looks like a pretty classical bait and switch, don't you think?
Oh, and the ability to side-load apps is only useful for the 0.2% of the populace that are tech-savvy users. For everybody else it's a huge security risk.
I understand you're not OK with what Apple does -- trust me, I hate their guts for some of their policies as well. We really don't have a choice nowadays though. Apple just seems like the lesser evil compared to Google.
Now if you aimed your comment to be narrow then why broadly disregard the fact of Apple's ecosystem and related concerns as simply "supposedly" and freedom as "overrated"? There is nothing "supposed" about iOS being locked down, and "just find it on the App store" isn't viable alternative to the freedom Android offers. Neither is the contrast in the two platforms an "illusion" to merely adapt to.
> what choice is there out there if we want alternatives?
What Google does with Android remains a worry for the future, but the current-day choice simply from a matter of freedom and privacy is a LineageOS-supported device, preferably one requiring the least amount of blobs, alongside F-Droid. No Playstore and related frameworks installed. No accounts, no perpetual sign in and tracking, unlike Apple requiring you to be signed in with Apple ID even if you don't use their cloud services or just to install an app. If you must use apps that depend on Play Services, install MicroG and use Yalp. You have near full control of your device, which extends privacy since you can root, install low-level firewalls, and edit system-level files like hosts. Notice that this ecosystem is more Unix-like as opposed to just one big Apple ecosystem. You can decide yourself instead of Apple making choices for you.
With Apple, you only have one vendor, but with Android you have many choices you can make. Headphone jack? Too bad. Since iOS comes with Apple hardware, you have to discuss the two alongside each other. And for me, even ignoring the lock-down of iOS, I refuse to support Apple and vendor lock-in.
> For everybody else it's a huge security risk
Think-of-the-children fallacy. This always ignores the fact you can have the best of both - those none-the-wiser can continue using official means of installation. It also ignores the other side of the coin, developers wishing to offer programs but not interested in dealing with the Apple ecosystem - both them and users are out of luck in that case, and this can happen even if you're already on the app store if Apple decides to take down your app or developer account for whatever reason.
A free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space apps and libraries.
It's cool if you have a weekend's worth of time to burn on such a project and fine-tune everything to your liking. But I don't.
There is a counter argument which says that the only reason you can do those things is because the existence of open source Android forced Apple to do it or be uncompetitive with Android's features.
My primary objection to Apple is one of principle: giving up your right to code software that is hostile to the interests of a platform owner is massive loss of freedom. As Stallman put it, "Apple made it cool to go to jail".
> I loathe the notch.
To be fair, each of these either already is or is becoming the norm on Android phones as well (at least, ones at a similar price point iPhones). Several of the top end phones have notches and no headphone jack, and I haven't had an Android phone with an SD card slot for about five years now.
[edits: formatting/typos]
My DAP has 2 slots. (android based)
And it's a god send when your phone decides to boot loop and you can no longer actually get into your phone.
Oh they say - use their cloud services for the low low price of whatever. F- that.
Loathe is a strong word. And I loathe everything about Apple and the iPhone.
But I think I'll get an iPhone next. And it's not even because I hate Google or because I don't like Android. I just believe in voting with my dollars. And Apple at least is masquerading as a company that makes a product and wants to sell that. I like the idea of the transaction. I buy my phone and then I own it; I'm done.
With Google, I buy the phone, and the phone owns me.
This is the key point. Google came of age during the GWB administration, when the folly of trusting government was more clear than it had been for decades, and under Schmidt's leadership Google became a major defense contractor.
It's impossible to know how much unlawful surveillance has already been done thanks to Google's collaboration/complicity.
How can Google earn back some trust? Implement warrant canaries at the google account level, decline to do business with the Pentagon, and come forward and reveal all of the shady and unethical things the firm has done, and simply ask the public for forgiveness.
I ordered a new old-stock Nexus 5X to run KDE Plasma on. Fuck both Google and Apple. I hope the Purism and Pinephone actually get released as well so we have more real Linux options.
I hate we live in a world with totally non-standard mobile hardware. Back in the day you could wipe Windows and run Linux on nearly anything. Maybe you would only get VESA graphics or text, but it would at least boot.
PostmarketOS is trying to make a dent in it, but we still have huge gaps in hardware support.
Sure, it's not up to the level of Android and iOS in most respects, but it takes effort to get something like this going. Also from the users. Like Linux 20 years ago.
Developing for it is not a nightmare either.
And it's running Linux so there's advantages as well.
I used it as my daily driver years ago and I've been using it as my daily driver again since six months or so.
What I meant to indicate is that it is a viable alternative to iOS and Android, available right now. (Except it's hard to get outside Europe, China, Russia and India apparently. I missed that.)
If it pans out, you may want to wait for the Librem 5[1], that's definitely my next phone.
There must be some kind of way outta here.
How about carving out a Google-free chunk of the web, and then only visiting sites for which you're somehow certain there's zero Google in them (no Google Analytics, no DoubleClick, no fonts, none of the other junk they use to track you). Otherwise you'd be slapped in the face by a dire warning akin to those for the expired SSL certificates.
Would that be crazy?
> I'd rather just try to block the Google domains themselves.
This works to some extent but falls short of really penalizing the site owner for installing the trackers (of course, they probably lose some revenue but that's not enough).
If sites had a rating reflecting how "tracky" they are, then, given a choice, people who care would tend to pick the less tracky one. Benevolent browsers, search engines, and other tools can enable them to make this choice.
Do you really intend this statement in regards to pure AOSP/LineageOS (ie microg)?
Yes Android will always be a product of a surveillance company, rather than being focused on user-centric security. But I would think that microg should be enough to deprivilege Google's backdoors, and generally avoiding stuff from the Play (Yalp) store should shield you from the bulk of OS-facilitated commercial surveillance. If you have information to the contrary, please share!
Obviously given the choice I'd rather run an OS not designed by a surveillance company, but it's awfully hard to find a pocket-sized computer that can. I look forward to PostmarketOS, but I don't think we're anywhere close there.
This came many times before and it is incorrect. If you delete your data from google, it is deleted permanently. Deletion of multiple backups takes longer, but eventually it is gone, forever.
Disclaimer: Googler.
I'm seriously considering my next phone to be one I build.
The hardware is available - cheap 4G LTE modules that plug right into a Raspberry Pi Zero exist; that and a cheap touchscreen will get you around 90% of the functionality most of us need, hardware-wise. You won't have a camera, or motion sensors. You will have GPS, voice, data, a screen, storage...
Basically everything you need for most purposes. And adding a camera and an IMU isn't that difficult, either.
The difficult part is - as always - the software. But people out there are building those pieces. Quite a bit can be done using plain-old Raspbian and Python on top, because the cellular module is essentially a virtual serial port device, and everything else has simple drivers or is otherwise easy to interface to.
Where I'll probably start, though, is with the idea of a custom "cyberdeck"; I already have most if not all of the parts, I just need to find the time to do it. It's form factor will be close to what the TRS-80 Model 100 was, though the screen will be...well, different. I'm considering a few options; probably a standard 800x600 HDMI screen along with a secondary 128x64 monochrome serial GLCD.
The ultimate thing about the whole project is independence (well, as independent as I can get - still have to pay some piper - aka T-Mobile - but maybe voip over wifi could be done in the future?) - and customization.
I may not have everything I want in the beginning, but what I want may only be a bit of extra coding, a tad bit of soldering, or likely a bit (or a bunch!) of both. I'm honestly tired of the games Google and pals are playing; kicking them to the curb may be the best thing to do.
It's made by people who care about software freedom. It doesn't use the common ARM-based SoCs which require proprietary drivers and will be unusable with modern software in a few years. Everything except the cell modem (on a replaceable M.2 card connected over USB) runs 100% free software. The device as a whole runs Linux with Gnome, and Plasma Mobile + others also developing for it. The company contributes back to the OSS software they use/improve.
It doesn't have the form factor of the TRS-80 Model 100, but basically the deal you get with it is that you pay the price of a decently high end smartphone in exchange for a midrange smartphone which is completely controllable by you, as much as a normal Linux desktop, but still offers a 'pretty good' UI out of the box for normal phone usage.
How do I know that?
The first I saw about Librem was their original laptop that made clearly overstated claims about its openness. (e.g. claiming a device that used intel CPUs would have completely open firmware). After that I paid no further attention to them.
https://puri.sm/learn/freedom-roadmap/
For instance, all the firmware is completely open. The BIOS can be flashed by the user. What openness do you feel is lacking?
instead: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ (i know it's not ready, but it's coming) or https://lineageos.org/
you give them all that valuable personal and private data and then also pay them? why are you so resigned to this? the tradeoff for knowing everything about you gives you what, a few less taps on your phone?
people ignored or minimized it then, but their direction was abundantly clear by 2004 or so: search -> adwords -> adsense -> gmail ---> all-your-data-everywhere (gmail seemed cool at the time until the realization of where all this was going). how is it that so many people are just now waking up to the dangers of google (and facebook, incidentally)?
It's just how we tick. And a lot of marketing strategies are based on those specifics.
I've been using Google for a couple decades, and I can't really articulate a specific way that I've been harmed. Yes, I realize that there's the potential for harm from a leak or something like that, but it's hardly surprising that the abstract notion of possible harm isn't super compelling to the average user when they're currently getting useful services for "free".
it's important to expose this kind of mis-rationalization, especially when tiny individual harms accumulate otherwise silently to become population-level dangers (e.g., measles).
> should we ignore that gas leak in the kitchen because it hasn't killed anyone yet?
No, but it's hard to see how using personal data to sell ads is going to cause a harm anywhere near as bad as a person dying.
again with the misdirection. look the other way if you like, but you're letting google choose the information you access and believe (even with ads). if you don't understand the power therein, maybe you should study more of your namesake.
There's no current concrete harm, and the potential for serious harm just looks unlikely to occur.
No need for imagination, simply read history:
Like, the US once rounded up Japanese people and put them in camps. Using your same reasoning, one could argue that the government collecting any data on race/ethnicity anywhere -- like, say, on the census -- is a slippery slope to interning racial minorities again. And yet, almost nobody really cares in practice, because almost nobody thinks there's a realistic chance of that happening again.
Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
This opinion wouldn't be quite as naive if there was some magical boundary that keeps digital information solely in the hands of benevolent rulers in developed countries, but there's not.
>Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
That's somewhat like how some gun rights advocates say it's futile to ban guns because you can just kill people with knives, so why don't we ban knives too?
We're talking about virtually total information awareness which is far more powerful, problematic, and discriminate than knowledge of superficial attributes such as race and gender.
If you're of the opinion that this is not problematic on a fabric-of-society level, could you please explain why?
I can think of many, many outcomes wherein Google’s collected data is more valuable for uses other than “helpful”.
Of course, absent something like GDPR, it's possible in the future Google could change their minds about that.
From Wikipedia:
2013–present: Time Inc. and Meredith Corporation ownership
On February 11, 2016, it was announced that MySpace and its parent company had been bought by Time Inc.[18] Time Inc. was in turn purchased by the Meredith Corporation on January 31, 2018.[20]
In May 2016, the data for almost 360 million MySpace accounts was offered on the "Real Deal" dark market website. The leaked data included email addresses, usernames and weakly encrypted passwords (SHA1 hashes of the first 10 characters of the password converted to lowercase and stored without a cryptographic salt[68]).[69] The exact data breach date is unknown, but analysis of the data suggests it was exposed around eight years before being made public, around mid-2008 to early-2009.[70]
On March 18, 2019, it was revealed that MySpace lost all of their user content from 2016 and earlier in "a server migration gone wrong". It was widely reported that over 50 million songs and 12 years worth of content was permanently lost, and there was no backup.[71]
and there was no backup
and there was no backup
and there was no backup
Wow.
Remember that Apple has been cracked by the FBI, has proprietary connectors, and charges more than anyone.
I couldn't disagree more. Apple is horrible to customers and developers.
I also don't see how "being cracked by the FBI" makes one evil, in fact I think resisting the FBI in the first place makes them good.
Yes, the iPhone still ships with Lightning connectors. But Lightning was revolutionary in a world full of phenomenally shitty Micro-USB connectors. It's really not a big deal, and Apple will move to USB-C for sure eventually.
So what's with the defensiveness?
You mean the Apple that takes IoT security seriously that involves a certification process versus Google who just killed off their Nest ecosystem?
You mean the Apple that stood up to the FBI?
Sure proprietary connectors are on some of their products, but it sounds like you consider USB-C proprietary now? Apple has moved a number of their devices to USB-C and that will probably only go up overtime.
Apple has physical retail presence, which makes purchases, repairs, and other interactions easy for customers.
Apple isn't perfect, but I don't think you're looking at the same Apple everyone else is.
The value proposition to Developers was not very clear, but I imagine a few bad 3rd party apps could severely harm the E2E Google experience.
The minute their CEO went all-in on a US Presidential election well, that ol' Rubicon got crossed.
The data site had tools to remove your data, but before I knew my data was even there, Google bought the site sometime around 2011 and shut it down, and added the data to their own system.
Today, if you search my full name on Google, it shows an infobox on the side with my real birthday. Google considers birthdays non-private enough that they won't let me remove it. I'm no celebrity but I get that info box because I had a MySpace musician page once over a decade ago.
My birthday now appears nowhere on the internet except that Google search infobox. MySpace, the original aggregator, all gone - but the data lives on.
We don't have a Right To Be Forgotten law where I live but if we ever get one, I know where I'll be going first.
I like the Google products and services that I use. There are some that I miss (Reader) and some that just confuse me (Bookmarks), but the core works for me.
Based on commentary I've seen, I may be the only person on Hacker News to think so. Regardless, I'm hopeful for the future.
Still a company that collects and sells consumer data and ads right?
"We just have your data, and sell promises to show you exquisitely targeted ads based on our exhaustive data about you."
I would definitely stop using Google if they actually sold my data. I don’t mind them using it for ad targeting.
>Fast forward to today: China Telecom, a government owned telco, is taking over the iCloud data from Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. This essentially means that a state-owned firm now has access to all the iCloud data China-based users store, such as photos, notes, emails, and text messages.
https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
My point was that iMessage is an easy way to have your default mode of messaging be E2E encrypted
I haven't had the time to wade through the barrage of information Google has put out in the last few days (ironically)...did they explicitly say that?
Can you provide some more information about this pivot? I haven't noticed it, and I thought I was paying attention.
Google did not need to give this stance at I/O. It appears that they're being as transparent as they can about the fact that our data is their business model.
I get it: our online privacy is important. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to remain truly anonymous on the Internet, and this is mostly thanks to Google. However, the converse could be Google using our data for malicious purposes. Has there been any evidence of that? I have not seen any.
I believe we live in an age of online convenience, and not just for the average user. Google generally makes security-conscious products, especially with Chrome. Heuristics has proven to become very effective in combating online malicious behavior. By establishing our identities with Google, Google can generally say "we are who we say we are" with a degree of confidence, without us having to do much of anything. This is generally bad from a privacy stand-point, but can be good from a security stand-point.
Overall, I think Google has done good things for the Internet. But good things sometimes come at a cost, and sometimes third party companies want that cost paid in a way we do not agree with. I think Google is doing all they can to make that point clear.
You are right. I have not seen any evidence of this yet either. What frightens me is that IF something happens and Google is compelled or chooses to give that data to an entity to use maliciously there will be nothing we can do.
As I look at it: It is dangerous for that much data about that many people to exist in one place period.
What do you stand to lose if:
* Google shuts down tomorrow?
* Google turns into a malicious conspirator tomorrow?
* Google's databases are compromised by a separate malicious party tomorrow?
Each of these can have different outcomes for your data. Do you wish to mitigate, avoid, or accept that risk?
Likewise, what do you stand to gain from using Google services? AKA, do you get substance out of their services in exchange for the information you're giving them?
Everyone can have different answers to these questions. If you choose not to use Google services, more power to you. I simply encourage everyone to think about their threat model critically, and make an educated decision - rather than hopping on a bandwagon.
Over the next 20-30 years personal freedoms and economic opportunities in the United States gradually erode, and large corporations seeking to continue/increase profit are entirely complicit in legally feeding their data into a surveillance state.
The goal of the model would be to decrease how fucked I am from this eventuality.
You make it sound like a clear and simple transaction: I give Google my location, they give me relevant information based on that information. They add that location data to their model.
In my experience it is not presented as a transaction. I have no idea what information Google is taking/inferring about me.
Are they using my phone microphone to listen in on me? I don't think so. As far as I know there's nothing stopping them from doing that tomorrow without telling me. How would they use that data? How much are they keeping on file? There's no way for me to know and they don't have to tell me.
I found out a year ago that Google maps was tracking my every movement. I would not have consented to that, but it was grouped in with a bunch of other "app history" permissions that I agreed to a decade ago.
So it's true. I do stand to gain from using Google's services. What's hard to judge is the costs. I can't make an educated decision without knowing the costs.
Then again, since Google controls so much of what you see, would you ever be exposed to this evidence?
* Google are brave for admitting they have your data!
* Sure it's bad they have so much data, but they can be so much more helpful.
Your reply's funny in a way, because if you jump from the beginning to the end it reads like "I get it: our online privacy is important" and then you give N reasons why it's not. And why Google's awesome for the internet (with capital I).
Google at the end of the day is gobbling up information on billions of people from mobile phones, browsers, e-mail, ads, their search engine, their web analytics, their smart home devices and classroom laptops, Google voice service, captchas and almost anything one can think of. The fact that so much information exists in one place is dangerous in itself, they don't have to actually do anything evil.
But they do anyway: they lock people out of their online lives, out victims to their stalkers, manipulate people into handing over their data with dark patterns, subvert or take over web standards, conspire to keep employee salaries low, sometimes serve malware through their ads, crush competition by illegally promoting their properties on search, illegally prevent Android suppliers to use Android as they wish and so on and so forth.
They've been found guilty in a court of law multiple times on both sides of the ocean.
The only good things they might have accidentally done for the internet were done to cement their power.
I don't believe I was listing reasons why privacy is not important. I was simply noting a benefit that has come from Google's data collection: increased heuristics to combat malicious online activity. I believe this is a valid thing to consider.
Regarding your list of evil deeds Google has done, lets refer to the definition of 'evil'. According to Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil), I believe we're focusing on the 'morally reprehensible' aspect of Google's actions.
> they lock people out of their online lives
I have seen reports of folks being locked out of their Google accounts because Google marked them as 'suspicious', which ultimately locks them out of logging into many other sites that they choose to link their Google account with. I agree that this is a valid concern. If this is an intentional act by Google, I would say this is morally reprehensible. Is it intentional though? And how quickly does Google typically fix these lock-outs? (I genuinely don't know).
> out victims to their stalkers
> manipulate people into handing over their data with dark patterns
I'm not sure what context you're referring to with these two.
> subvert or take over web standards
Google has contributed to many web standards. However I have not seen them 'subvert' or 'take over' any existing standard. Is there an example of this?
> conspire to keep employee salaries low
I don't have salary reports for Google employees in front of me. I will not pretend to know the business logic for their payroll dept. I think the only folks who can accurately answer this are actual Google employees.
> sometimes serve malware through their ads
Through Google-owned ad companies? I have not seen an example of this. Malvertising is a real concern, but I have not seen this in the wild on a Google/Alphabet-owned website or on a site that serves ads directly from AdSense.
> crush competition by illegally promoting their properties on search
Yes, I have seen what you are talking about here. Is this illegal though? And is it crushing competition? If I search for 'duckduckgo' or 'bing' on Google.com, I get results for those websites.
> illegally prevent Android suppliers to use Android as they wish
Again, would love examples. AFAIK, phone manufacturers are free to alter AOSP however they wish. Again, what is the illegal part?
> They've been found guilty in a court of law multiple times on both sides of the ocean.
Guilty of what, and are those things morally reprehensible?
--
To make my point clear, I completely agree that Google has a lot of power in their data collection, and it is something we should be concerned about. The reason why I'm replying is because I am genuinely curious about a lot of these points. Lets not romanticize the problem. Provide hard facts. That is the only way things change.
They offer a lot of customization for tracking and the ability to turn it off. They don't do anything hyper anti-consumer(IMO) and provide me very good products at either a low price or at the cost of my data(which I'm willing to pay with).
I don't see all the reason for the hate, but it is there, and I'm glad they are taking steps to be more privacy aware.
I said this 15 years ago and I will repeat it again. Google is like a man selling boats after a dam brake. They are profiting by managing the problem, not by fixing it. It is to their benefit if the problem actually gets worse. In other words, looking at their long-running effects and initiatives, I see that they aim to change the Internet so that it's completely unusable without their services. (The recent stunts with AMP and Gmail are great, obvious examples, but it didn't start there. It was going on for a very long while.)
This not the kind of thing that I want to spread to my offline life.
EDIT: For those who want to downvote, consider that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads, and that most of the advances in ad targeting using personal data have been made by Google.
If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) information about jackets and make my own decision.
Some of that might be in the form of advertising, but I will have made the decision to seek it out, rather than my plane ticket purchase being mined and then targeted with a clothing company ad.
I consider it to be equivalent to someone unexpectedly spooning food into my mouth, then arguing "Well, you have to eat anyway, why are you complaining?" It violates my sense of agency.
Perhaps I have a higher desire for agency than most?
I personally have a pretty strong desire for agency. I’m also conscious that my understanding of the world is entirely constructed by the sum of my interactions with said world, and advertising is only a tiny part of it. I’m thankful for the sensory input this world provides me - without them my brain would have nothing to do and my agency wouldn’t be very useful.
It sounds like you are suffering a lot because your experience of advertising in the world is incompatible with your opinions about advertising. I can see two ways to solve this problem:
1) Adjust your opinions about advertising, so that you think of them as part of your voluntary engagement with the world around you, not something that is being forced on you.
2) Remove advertising from your life.
I’m all in for the former, but the latter should be made illegal.
You've been trained to buy things and don't even realise it. What would happen if you didn't see that ad for the jacket, would you go without clothes? Heck, maybe you'd go visit a store and meet new people. Or you'd save more money.
The whole premise that we need advertising to make us happy is ridiculous.
/rant
That said, given that ads are a psychological trick to get you to purchase something (often something that you don't need in the first place), you're right: I do consider ads to be inherently bad.
"But mah blog isn't sustainable without ads" - If your blog depends on collecting a heap of pennies generated by psychological manipulation of your viewer base, your blog provides a net negative value to your viewers.
/end rant
As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).
Claims that they are equivalent feel like an attempt to normalize such invasive ad targeting.
I spent over a decade in adtech. I have several patents from > 8 years ago for metadata-based ad targeting.
While I agree with you that it is better to see relevant ads over irrelevant ads, the datastores that enable fine-grained behavioral targeting is, simply put, just too much power for any corporation (or government) to wield.
Corporations directly profit from larger data stores. The more invasive the data extraction, and the more available it is to their true customers, which are advertisers, the more they profit. The advertiser dashboards and ability to explore potential audiences based on targeting, both on G and FB, are astoundingly detailed.
I try to convince everyone in my life to run an adblocker and stay off FB.
One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work.
This sounds interesting. Do you have any links you can share?
Yeah, me too. The difference is that nowadays all the platforms, services, devices, and tracking are being used intrude into every single corner of life. They are constantly tracking you, analyzing you, studying your every move. And they are trying to interpose into every waking moment of your life.
The day that my guitar tuner app for Android showed me an ad in the middle of tuning my guitar (which usually takes 20 seconds), intruding to the very thing that I need most to unplug from this shit show, I just about lost my mind.
Fuck advertisers. I hope that whole ecosystem implodes.
The vast majority of the revenue comes from search ads, which are intent-based on the keywords in the query.
What you're talking about are display ads / adsense, which is not even close to the majority of their revenue.
> our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible
to Google
Yes, because then I could apply my own ranking. More realistically, it would be useful as various web services could select from among various forms of ranking as desired by their users. Right now, the internet as a collective is at the whim of the particular ranking Google elects to use. If they don't like you, too bad, you lose.
What's more, I would even settle for a sorted list of all websites that contain my keywords, but Google provides no such thing. Google's algorithm has changed significantly in just the past few years, making it very difficult to do research of unusual topics, no matter how broad or specific you make your search. For instance, just today I was looking up information related to an event in the life of Andre Gide. After you get through a few pages (maybe 150 or so useful links from the grab bag of what appears), Google makes it such that you can explore no further. Entering a new term with a slight variation can yield a set of another ~150 results with no overlap with the previous search's results, making any kind of exhaustive research quite frustrating.
Not without more compute than you could afford.
Besides, if the results were sorted only by rankings (not that the rank was a particularly great thing) it woiuld've been OK, but theyu are personalized which is a Bad Idea(tm).
I don't see how decentralization would permanently solve discovery. I can see how it could be useful in other ways, but you'd still be managing an ongoing problem.
While there are alternatives for search, it's only search. Everything else is scattered. Google lives and breathes through the mesh of services they offer. Search is at the core, but everything attached to it is what makes Google so different.
It is a scary prospect IMO. We already sold our souls to it whether we like it or not. We live on our tech bubble and perhaps try to make better choices but it will never happen to the majority.
Most of what I said can also be said about Facebook, with the social network at the centre instead.
Before you say, "Bitcoin did it!", just look at the block size debacle or the fact that it's mostly controlled by a handful of Chinese miners.
It's quite interesting the way people are more willing to trust Google than Facebook with their data though. I think this might come from Google actually offering more "useful/needed/can't live without" offerings vs facebook's more vanity based services.
For example, Google takes your very privacy sensitive location data but also returns you amazing mapping capabilities (google maps), transit information, nearby points of interests etc.
They might have access to all your text messages, emails, contacts etc but returns you useful features like the last year's Duplex feature or auto reply suggestions in emails etc.
Facebook's vanity based offerings are quite shallow imo - Instagram is just hyper edited pictures to scroll through, messenger/whatsapp might be useful but it has quite good competition from iMessage or simple text messaging. So for people who actually care about privacy, they are still okay with Google having their data but are not okay with Facebook having their data because FB doesn't really offer much of real value. This could be because Google being a much older company than FB. FB has also had quite major privacy issues (Cambridge Analytica being one of the major ones) and they have shown that they really don't care at all about privacy.
One thing to note though, I still don't think Google should operate the way they do and I am not willing to compromise so much of my privacy. That's why I stick with iOS even though I know Android offers more power (especially since I am an iOS and Android Developer). iOS's AI might be inferior but it gets the job done for me and I appreciate the privacy stance of Apple over Google.
It is not possible for most people to live their lives without some form of Google, whether it's search, email, drive, maps, docs, or calendar. It's almost impossible to function today without using Google or interfacing with someone who is using Google.
People are more OK with Google because there is no alternative.
0. YouTube 1. Maps 2. Search 3. Email 4. Docs 5. Drive 6. Calendar
I put YouTube as 0 as it is at the very top of the list. There's virtually no comparable competition for YouTube and that's why Google is also getting away with abusing their power with YouTube trending feed, censorship, demonetization, clickbait etc. YouTube really needs some proper competition but I really doubt any company will want to take over this massive infrastructure. I don't consider Twitch to be a competition for YouTube for non-gaming content.
Maps is the only one which I cannot live without. Apple Maps has improved drastically in the last couple years though but in Canada, they are still not as good as Google. But they seem to be on the right track.
DuckDuckGo is pretty good actually and I think most people can get the job done pretty well with it. For email, there are okay competitions and I still have an alternate yahoo email but they have been going downhill in last few years.
Docs is one place where Microsoft Office is good but Docs is superior if online collaboration is needed.
Dropbox is superior to google drive imo, especially since I am on iOS and Mac.
I have never used Google Calendar as I use iOS offerings and it does pretty well.
I think if Apple can improve their Maps and if Siri stops being so useless, it would be for the better and will help take away some power from Google. And somebody really needs to compete heavily against YouTube.
There is no good alternative to Google maps on Android IMO. I've tried
- HERE: the app is not great and I'm not sure it's any more private than Google.
- OsmAndroid: as a map it is fine. It doesn't do address searches very well which makes it useless when you need to get somewhere you haven't been before.
If anyone has a suggestion I'd greatly appreciate it.
I think it's more that it returns you what will keep you using the product, so they can sell more ads. Every time I open Google maps on mobile (to see how busy the traffic is, for example), I get a big useless "Explore nearby" window taking up 40% of the screen, which I have to close to be able to actually use the map. I will never want to explore ads for businesses near my house or workplace, and the fact that the app doesn't remember that suggests the true intention.
When I let Google track my location, I get useful hyper relevant results for searches. When I let it track my emails, I get useful flight reminders and package delivery notifications.
But Facebook doesn't really need to track my location to offer the service I want from it, the extra privacy invasion very specifically only helps advertisers. By giving it access to my contact list I can add friends more easily which is nice, but it also does so much more analysis of my extended offline friend network than I want it to, which feels like it hurts me more than it helps me.
Both companies are monetizing my private data, but with Google it feels like I get enough out of the deal that I'll (sometimes grudgingly) allow it. With Facebook I feel like it's an adversarial relationship where I have to constantly defend myself from FB. Obviously each person's valuation of the deal will be different; for some people there's no amount of usefulness Google could offer to justify the data they collect. But I suspect for many people Google is on the right side of the usefulness to creepiness ratio.
This is what we let Google ruin the internet for?
For all the things people have mentioned here: maps, e-mail, search, docs, etc. there are alternatives. Sure, they're not (yet) as good or convenient but put some effort into this guys.
> This is what we let Google ruin the internet for?
If you use any other searchable email service, you have exactly the same loss in privacy. The only difference is they don't give you these value adds from the data they already have about you.
The noises Google makes about being "useful" are just cover for the fact that being useful is the only way they can entice everyone to give them that personal information for free. If Google could get a law passed that required everyone to have a grain-of-rice sized Android tracker implanted in their body, Google would do it in a heartbeat. And then the need for all that expensive "usefulness" would be over.
I don't even think they need that with everyone having a smartphone.
Google themselves explain it clearly and openly.
> "make shitloads of money selling everyone's personal information to advertisers."
It's a very important difference between trusting Google with the data, and trusting a random advertiser.
In particular it doesn't mention the critical problem that Google makes its money from advertising, not from people who pay for premium phones or premium services. That is, you are still the product.
I recognize social positives from advertising, but there is a fundamental conflict when you are dependent on "free" services paid for by a third party.
I don't see tracking as the problem with Google.
The problem with Google is that it crowds out competition, also that it contributes to a "data smog" environment. The way we would get better services is to pay for them ourselves so we establish a feedback loop such that encourages better services from our point of view (not that of advertisers)
Given that google’s income is mostly from advertising, it feels like the mission is about making my information available to someone else, and useful for them to make money.
It would be one thing if they were very straightforward the 'with whom' and the 'for what' of the data they harvest. Users could weigh the pros and cons, make an informed decision, and move on.
But instead they choose to masquerade as a forward-thinking philanthropic organization, burying their ulterior motives behind pages of fine print and intentionally vague 'disclosures' about what they do with your data.
Wearing a disguise makes one appear guilty. I would be wary of any individual or group intentionally presenting a false image in order to mask their true intentions.
search: duckduckgo
android: copperheados (dead ended, waiting for puri.sm librem 5 on order)
chrome: firefox, containers, uMatrix. Isolated usages of chrome w/o logging in.
gmail: fastmail
youtube: peertube
docs/sheets: local software (libreoffice)
reCaptcha: isolated chrome usage w/o logging in, or I avoid the website and email the webmaster.
fonts: uMatrix block them, I live with the fallback fonts. On my sites I host the fonts locally.
analytics: uMatrix blocks it. I don't need it myself.
maps: OSM or other mapping websites
earth: [never needed it]
sky?: [never needed it], stellarium
Google is doing everything in its power to buy/take/borrow that commodity from people (just like FB. Amazon, MS, etc...) They can say things like "We are moving from a company that helps you find answers to a company that helps you get things done…We want our products to work harder for you in the context of your job, your home, and your life, and they all share a single goal: to be helpful, so we can be there for you in moments big and small over the course of your day. "
But I don't buy it.
Actually, I do buy it!
What that actually means is: injecting Google into every aspect of your life.
Would that bring a usability improvement for users? Maybe. But it also gives Google what it craves - all the data they can possibly have about you.
Pretty bold statement. Can you expand on that?
It is right now in the US (outside of health data). It isn't in the EU because of GDPR.
Clearly an opinion piece.
What if the majority of people would block all ads? Wouldnt data collection become meaningless?
Data is used for more than advertising.
These data silos are enormous blackmail machines waiting to be activated. There is tons of evidence of crime, adultery, extortion, and all the other fun things humans get up to in there.
Google, FB, and the other big surveillance outfits protect this data now. Who knows what happens tomorrow, or if that protection is "enough", or if $nation_state will grab what's stored in their borders, or...
Building these blackmail machines is incredibly dangerous, _even if you completely ignore_ the garden-variety privacy problems they cause for "little people".
But I am not sure it's ever going to come. Many smaller devs and studios publish free apps which they monetise only with ads. Not sure Apple wants to scare off millions of developers by officially streamlining app ad-blocking.
On iOS, VPN remains the only good choice so far, sadly.
That seems pretty magical. Perhaps it is all server-side?
Probably.
> translate, vision and speech
To me, these types of technology are both wonderful, and particularly dangerous.
With Google Translate, I was able to read technical posts on a Russian forum, which contained a piece of critical information to the problem I was trying to solve. And with Google's speech recognition on YouTube, highly accuracy text transcripts are now generated at an industrial scale, and even in real-time, that enabled me to see parts of unintelligible speech in some videos which are otherwise impossible to understand. In the future, it's expected that these types of technologies would see greater applications, for example, using automatic translation in international conferences or private conversations is not a "far future" Sci-Fi idea anymore, and may eventually be crucial tools for a specific propose, or even play a central role in the human society.
> The implicit message was clear: “Yes, we have all of your data, but the fact we have all of your data is a good thing, because it allows us to make your life easier.”
On the other hand, due to the very nature of these types of technology, it's mostly impractical to deploy them locally, the only natural way to implement these is running them on Google's computers. It means soon enough, Google, would have access to massive volumes of information, not only personal, but human information, such as private conversations and communications. And unlike those cheap IoT devices you could refuse to purchase, using these services may be essential (e.g. being able to understand the conversations) to live in a digital society. And even if it's not Google, the information collected would be vulnerable from another service provider as well, in addition to a government subpoena.
To some extents, the search engine already showed the existence of these problems - it's not possible to run a search engine on your computer (I know there are some FOSS Proof-of-Concept projects, but they are what they are...), the search engine has to be operated by a large centralized provider which would be able to see and track everything you've searched. Meanwhile, you must use an search engine to find information produced by the human civilization.
In the future, it's certain that Homomorphic Encryption and Differential Privacy may be important and must-have solutions, but only for some very specific applications, they allow some computations and queries to be performed by a 3rd-party without revealing their contents or nature. Theoretically, if there's a future breakthrough in applied cryptography, you would be able to execute an entire blackbox program on someone else's computer without revealing anything.
But I doubt if there's a solution in general.
The author's simple-minded reasoning is why Microsoft was late to the Internet search engine game.
So while I often hate that DuckDuckGo’s results are sometimes wildly laughable compared to Google’s I’ll continue supporting privacy first companies and pay a premium to do so before I let my phone be a Google phone.
RIP WP8
Not sure if I'm the only one but I don't see a perfect solution on the smartphone part: - iOS is privacy focussed but walled garden and overpriced and impossible to repair. - Android is affordable and hackable but Google powered. - Cyanogen alternative: not easy to access and remain dependant to the Play Store to get apps (so back to Google power)
If they now play the "privacy" card it will stifle competition even more, as there will forever be a compromise on either the amount of data they are able to gather, or the public perception due to being less "privacy" focused than big G.
> To put it more succinctly: “Yes, we collect a lot of data. But that data makes amazing things possible.”
I don't like Google, but stating that collecting data is bad just because, doesn't sell it for me. Oh, and this refers to data already available to the general public.
It makes me wonder if there is something behind. What's the agenda behind all these hit pieces? I really don't know.
Can you elaborate on that, please?
It's definitely better than nothing.
The proprietary thing does not look good I admit. But maybe they think the open stack is easy to pwn?
As Morphius said, "Now do you believe?"
My Android phone decided what I really meant was "As Amorphous said..." So maybe before they decide they want to control everything in my life with all the data they are collecting, they should figure out spell correction first. I got the spelling wrong, but their correction was completely stupid.
i don't have anything against google. I just think, having only 1 search engine is too much power for any 1 company, no matter how benevolent.
Well, I got fed up this week because release of new GSuite services lags the free offerings, and sometimes just aren't released. I lived with switching between free and paid accounts depending on what I was doing (made OK by using Firefox containers).
So, I switched my ProtonMail account to a paid for account, applied my custom domain, and flipped back to using Apple's Calendar, Siri, Maps, etc.
Literally Google lost a tiny bit of my business because their paid for product in some ways was worse than the free offerings.
I can see myself going back to Google paid services in the future but they have to up their game.
When companies start peddling poor people in need from some desperate place to pull on our heartstrings ... it's a problem.
If this were something related to their core product - maybe.
But this is virtue signalling at it's ugly finest.
Surely, they mean well. Kudos for that - it's good they're spending a tiny portion of their trillion dollars doing that.
What I object to - strongly - is the attempt to brand themselves by this act, to imbue themselves with some kind of moral fervour, especially in such an emotional way.
"Look at these puppies, they were starving, and then we saved them! Everyone likes puppies, right?" Ok, so they actually saved puppies.
---> Now please fix our privacy problems, which is actually the core of what you're supposed to do.
This is why a) free/libre software and b) Moore's law are important. Trading privacy for convenience is a real trade you can make right now, and nobody benefits from pretending it isn't--the first step to fixing that problem is to admit it exists. But there's no inherent reason this has to be done "on the cloud" (which is just a marketing phrase for "on other people's computers"). As an industry, I would like to see us putting more computing power into end users' hardware and more intelligence into freely available software so that more of this work can be done on people's personal computers without giving their data to amoral corporations.
The way out of this situation is to develop competitive solutions which are less private data dependent.
I think most free software folks would agree that the training data doesn't have to be public.
I do agree that there's some problem to be solve here, though. Part of the point of free software is to be able to trust that the code you are running is serving your interests. Right now I don't know of any proofs of concept of manipulating what an AI does by manipulating the training data, but it's a very plausible attack vector.
That seems antithetical to me. The trained model is the program, and the training data is in-essence the source code.
> manipulating what an AI does by manipulating the training data
You don't even have to do this. You can manipulate the model directly. Writing neural networks manually isn't difficult. You can't do more with that than conventional programming, but its sufficient to add malicious behaviour.
No, I think that trained models and training data are entirely new concepts. I can see the similarities between trained models/programs a and training data/source code, but there are obvious privacy concerns with training data that don't apply to source code. Calling the training data the source code is a leaky abstraction.
You could, for example, equally argue that the trained model is the source code, and the program which operates on the trained model is an interpreter which runs that source code.
Even if you refuse to concede that there are differences between training data and source code, you'll note that I am talking about free (libre) software, not open source. There are lots of cases where free software doesn't mean opening all the source up. Free software is about freedom, not about open source. For example, while there's plenty of source code in settings files, I don't think there's anyone arguing that we need to check in our settings files on open source projects. The point is to put the power in the hands of users. Putting users' data out of their control is the antithesis of that.
> You don't even have to do this. You can manipulate the model directly. Writing neural networks manually isn't difficult. You can't do more with that than conventional programming, but its sufficient to add malicious behaviour.
That's an interesting point, and may provide a workaround making training data public, i.e. you can generate the model and then make a representation of the model public, rather than the training data. However, there's an assumption here that the training data can't be reconstructed from the trained model--if a study of this exists, I'm not aware of it.
Trained models carry all the hazards of binary blobs, and so can't just be trusted. Training data is no true analogue to source code, but the concept of reproducibility is still relevant. At the very least, the production of blobs should be auditable.
Yeah, I agree that's a valid analogy, but again I'll say it's just an analogy. The training data still differs from source code in its privacy attributes, so I don't think it should be treated the same way as source code in a free (libre) software context.
> Trained models carry all the hazards of binary blobs, and so can't just be trusted. Training data is no true analogue to source code, but the concept of reproducibility is still relevant. At the very least, the production of blobs should be auditable.
This is true, and it's a big problem, not just because of free software concerns. One of the deeply problematic effects of this is that we can't always explain why an AI does what it does, leading to horrifying possibilities[1].
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/frogger-ai-explains-its-dec... (WARNING: I recommend copy/pasting this link to a separate tab rather than clicking it. JWZ has a rather negative opinion of HN and a while back his server started serving up rather unsavory images in response to requests with an HN referrer. I'm not sure if that is still happening, but I know that if you copy/paste the link there's nothing offensive on the page.)
Unfortunately, even with (a), (b), and (c). I doubt if a general solution exists, as I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19861630.
In addition, sure, people could absolutely create local, non-cloud ways to accomplishing a lot of this. But who is footing that bill? Where's the value proposition to anyone who has the manpower
"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
They want to make Laplace's Demon real in the form of their publicly traded company. That's a breathtaking vision statement.
They explicitly want to collect every piece of information on everything that happens worldwide, and then influence how that information is used. "Useful" is in the eye of the beholder and is the wonderful escape command that lets them do anything they want.
If that doesn't inspire/terrify you then it should.
If it means that an literate mother of 3 from India can become literate when it counts then Google execs can take naked pictures of me and publish them in the New York times for all I care.
That said, there's also much value in allowing this data to be free. Google are open about their business model (and they always have been), and provide services that make use of it.
I do think it's funny when people accuse them of "harvesting data" or "surveilling" people. That's just using emotional language to paint a more sinister picture than is warranted, and it's rampant on HN unfortunately.
Try to watch out for extremist positions on both sides of the debate. Reality is more nuanced.
I mean, if I buy into the notion of Google's benevolence, I should buy into that notion for other corporations, shouldn't I?
No. You should decide whether to give your personal data to organizations on a case by case basis, depending on whether you trust the organization in question, and the value proposition they offer in exchange for your data.
If a company is able to share your data with whomever they want, you don't have that choice anymore. Which is why something like GDPR would be good to have in the US.
That's how I use Internet services. If they don't do anything useful with my data, I don't use them. If they do something useful with my data, I use the one that does the most useful thing with my data. Thus, Gmail over other email services and Slack over whatever nonsense Google's messaging product managers are pushing today. And Apple services for nothing — collecting data and not being helpful with it is stupidity, not "privacy."
Where is the feature of calling people automatically on google assistant?
Last year they promised they would call my hair saloon for me, and it's all BS.
Like everything they say every year, it never works in real life.
But I see lots of "journalists" praising it, while criticizing Siri as useless.
Where is their self driving car too? Never complete, they always promise "it's the next year".
https://www.androidauthority.com/what-is-google-duplex-86947...
Prove that it does work. Because it just doesn't exist at all.
You pointed to an Android fanboy's site.
It's not the reality:
https://mashable.com/article/google-io-2018-report-card-dupl...
This is to put it lightly....
Edit: A quick browse through OP's comment history suggests that s/he might not be US-based. Should that be the case, then it's not that Duplex is flawed, it's that it's simply not available where they live.
already available in 44 states, they’re bringing it to the web.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/goo...
> Where is their self driving car too? Never complete, they always promise "it's the next year".
there’s zero rush when there’s a chance of killing people.
also this: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp...
Yes, the problem of self driving cars is they can kill people, that's the whole problem, thing is that google is always promising that "they are here for all", "it's the next year", etc. it's all BS.
You don't have a google self driving car, and you didn't book your hairdresser via duplex, and you won't be booking your car or anything through any of this.
Those are the facts.
can you provide any basis for your "facts"
Siri being subpar when compared to Google Assistant is well established.
Is this about Siri?
I'm a bit disappointed by all big companies focusing on the states. Fact is, over 95% of people don't live in the US. Every time I see some fancy new technology, chances are I'll never get to use it in my country.
Waymo is not a car company. They don't have the capability to make an actual car even if the autonomy stuff worked well enough to be used nationwide. Which it does not and will not in the foreseeable future.
Google simply doesn't have it.
Google sells this BS to journalists, and they sell it to Wall Street. That's only why Google is worth $817B.
Assistant calling and Duplex appointment booking were both available within the year, across most of the United States, but you claim neither work.
"Company is wrong about release date of cutting edge technology" isn't exactly a new story.
Vision is imprecise.
Google Duplex has been launched and you can use it today to book appointments in restaurants that are not on any table booking platform. Have you tried it?
If you haven't, please do.
If you have, and you still insist on saying it doesn't exist, please explain what it will take to convince you.
(Edit: I went through your comment history and your comments pattern match to either a troll or an Apple shill, neither of which are welcome here. Please take this to reddit)
Also, please do not accuse people of being trolls. It is against the site guidelines and is not constructive discourse.
They didn't say "it isn't available to me". They said it was "BS" - that is, that it was a lie and isn't a real service. They could have easily verified for themselves this isn't true. They could have even read the linked article which specifically mentions that Duplex did in fact come out.
https://www.businessinsider.com/siri-google-assistant-voice-...
This is in the US, where Apple only manages a 36% smartphone market share, and google assistant is available on the iPhone, but Siri isn't on non-Apple devices
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-had-the-most-smartphone-...