How much do they not care about privacy that a chief exec with an army of lawyers and advisors "haven't thought about this before"?
They said that by consenting I was asserting I had the consent of anyone who appeared in any of my photos or might appear in future which is insane to ask of anyone, no-one can really give that third party consent.
Then when I refused they showed me a nag screen which didn't have that warning.
Then just yesterday I opened google camera and it really wanted to run face recognition on my photos. I refused.
I wanted to try the google podcasts but it was a brick because I had disabled "youtube & web activity" in google account settings. There was no way to subscribe to podcasts without web activity, the application said. And without subscribing there was nothing the app could do.
We have a company claiming that because I don't consent to have my web and youtube activity tracked that there's no way I could subscribe to a podcast that I explicitly choose to subscribe to in an application designed for subscribing to podcasts.
They don't stop trying, everyone is trying to hoover up all data, all the time.
For example, their maps app on iOS won’t save locations for me unless I sign in an enable web history tracking. I get prompted every time I try to save a pin as well as every once in a while I’m case I change my mind.
It’s a free app and it’s Google’s prerogative to try to get value out of it. But it’s annoying to me that they purposely don’t implement client tech (eg, save to app cache, device cookie not tied to individual) that would make their app better for me. And that they nag with no way to turn off forever. Their app already shows ads and makes money for them, they just want more money from the data stream.
I also worry about less savvy customers who don’t understand the prompt and unwittingly opt in to data collection that exists forever. The Facebook privacy explosion of last year is an example of users who accepted terms, but didn’t understand them, and got upset when data was used in ways that upset them.
FFS, my phone has gigs of RAM, why can’t Google Maps remember the address I searched for ten minutes ago? One minute ago? This is 2019. It has been this bad for a decade plus. Embarrassing IMO and demonstrates true UX myopia and true UX incompetence.
The only thing I miss is google's "offline" mode. I live in Michigan, and I frequently go on trips up north into heavily wooded areas. I don't always get cell service, so being able to save map data locally is a huge benefit. I can still search for nearby gas stations or stores even if I do not have cell service.
From what I tried, there's no way to save data in Apple Maps - it assumes the device is always connected to the internet.
I share your frustration.
It still sucks because they don't want to fix it. Google makes their money off of people giving up info for ad targeting, and a user who only contributes one or two manually saved locations probably costs them more than they stand to gain.
To me, this is a simpler explanation than malice.
only way to know would be to download osmAnd and find out. it's a good all rounder app. for navigation i tend to use maps.me
DDG is at least a reasonable way to ween yourself off Google search rather than needing to go full cold turkey.
Similar to DDG, Startpage provides results in a privacy respecting way, but it uses Google instead of Bing (and Oath), which DDG uses. There’s a common misconception amongst some that using !g on DDG is private, but it’s just a redirect, so Google can gather information from that search. Using !s as the fallback instead will keep your searches private.
So that means either Startpage has higher ad margins than Google or Google is selling services to Startpage below their own search margins or Startpage has some other source of funds to subsidise the search engine.
I have no idea how much revenue this may bring in but it can't be much since I don't think I've ever seen it recommended in an Ask HN thread.
I expect this is the case - it's still better for Google to capture a user at lower margins via Startpage than to lose them to Bing.
I do find the mention of DDG using Oath rather alarming, though, since Oath seems particularly obnoxious, at least with their GDPR pop-up on Tumblr. What does DDG do with Oath?
DDG was originally using Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo was thrown under the Oath umbrella along with AOL, Tumblr, Engadget, etc. when they were acquired by Verizon. I assume for transparency, DDG stated they use "Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing" on their Sources help page to indicate who they're actually making the deal with.[0] However, I guess Verizon has changed the Oath name to Verizon Media, so now it's "Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing".
But, to answer your question. It's just a long winded way of saying Yahoo.
[0]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
Seriously, I already said no 100s of times, why keep asking?
I can't speak for their privacy practices, but it has the bifg advantage of letting you download maps to use them off-line.
This is the worst. I have all the privacy settings turned up. In Google Maps on my phone, when I try to set my "Home" location, it tells me I need to turn on "Web and App Activity". What? Why? How are these two things related? Why do you have to track what apps I use and upload this info to Google in order to remember where my house is?
It's a bit like a psycho ex; "You want to have my phone number in your phone even though we broke up? Ok, but that means I get to install this camera in your bedroom."
The worst part is, it's all lies. If I open up Android Auto it says "12 mins to Home", so maps in Android Auto still knows where "Home" is, even though the Google Maps app claims it can't set home anymore.
It's not a real requirement at all. I have "Home" and "Work" remembered from before it was a "requirement". They pop up as quick nav actions when holding the Google Maps homescreen icon on my phone, or when opening a GMaps Driving icon.
But I'm not allowed to set the "Home" and "Work" locations in the actual app, so they don't work via text or voice search.
The reason you hear a global sigh that “my battery life is terrible!” at every major iOS release, is the photo face to people clustering is done entirely on-device, and which photos are in the cluster is not shared across devices through iCloud.
There are several such features where Apple has made life difficult for themselves and the UX a little less seamless for users, in service of not giving themselves all the data.
Depending how the politics of privacy go, we could find an aggregation of personal data is not an asset, but a liability.
In such an environment, avoiding “hoovering up all data” is both a marketing point, and a reduction of risk exposure.
I appreciate their approach to user functionality that doesn’t dump all my data into a near infinite number of collectors.
I also think it’s a neat way of distributed computing to use the cpus of all these phones sleeping at night to crunch stuff is actually cheaper than cloud. I think because the phones are sunk cost that is idle a few hours a day.
I miss the BOINC/Folding/SETI at Home clients that used to run as my screensaver and try to do good.
I don’t think the photo app or assistant app allows this functionality although they likely could.
Disc: Googler.
Does it let you specifically choose which photos to analyze, or does it scan your whole library?
If it's the former, facial recognition doesn't sound very useful if I have to go through each of my photos and figure out who's in them beforehand.
And if it's the latter, tracking down the strangers in the background of my 2006 vacation photos sounds time-consuming.
GDPR enforcement for this stuff will hopefully happen soon. As far as I can tell this stuff is illegal in the EU.
[1] https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/, https://gdpr.eu/Recital-42-Burden-of-proof-and-requirements-...
Also, having an army of lawyers is exactly what allows for this -- you need to know which areas are gray in order to exploit them without risk of retribution/regulation. A basic minutes-long conversation would have likely arrived at the point of how recording of the owner themselves/third parties would affect the product.
That assumes the governments aren't in on it. They probably want the data more than the corporations.
I mean, you know, "security" and all.
On the other hand some companies have been shown to be very willing to sell data to any buyer, not just the government. Phone carriers come to mind.
The government would spie on potentielly everybody (and they do btw.)
FB for instance stores tagged image data of non-FB-users.
My theory is the opposite.
Career politicians have a lot to lose from universal data collection. They are already running into issues caused by 5-year-old tweets; imagine if their whole digital history was leaked? This is the one silver lining regarding legislation prospects.
I didn't realise visiting a friends house made me a stakeholder in all of their technology choices.
It's just that traditionally my opinion didn't matter much and my stake was tiny.
Edited.intentiin > narrative
This will never happen.
Can they be reprogrammed is the question.
They are informing you of what their products do, and what the products should likely do in the future.
Debate, or argument, implies, at minimum, a two way discussion. That's not what's been going on. And I'm not sure that a debate ever will happen? The only politically palatable people even concerned about their loss of privacy are a few activists and people in the tech industry. (Can't really count on the pedophiles and the terrorists to be of any help in gaining the support of the larger populace.)
Even worse, it's not even like the moms, grandmoms, grandpas, teenage girls, hell raising ex convict uncles, etc don't know that they lose their privacy to google, facebook, and youtube. They do know that they lose their privacy, and they just don't care anymore.
Actually, maybe they never did care? I don't even know?
It's sad.
Google, Amazon, etc. have a pretty good track record of not using private data against users. Which makes sense, because it is generally more profitable to act as the user's agent. This is exactly how most people think of private data in the hands of these big tech companies.
There's still some data they'd rather these companies not have. Even if I trust my lawyer to act as my agent, I'd prefer they not have a video of me having sex with my wife. On the other hand, if they had access to an occasional snippet of conversation from an incorrect hotword activation, I wouldn't really care. I know, and my lawyer knows, that their economic interest is in maintaining my privacy. There's almost no value for them in disclosing my conversations, and they would lose my future business.
Slightly related, but the only protest marches held in my European country when biometric personal identification documents were announced were held by overtly religious people, the type of people that believe staff like the 666 number and the end of times being near. Even though I'm not religious at all I joined them in one of their protests, and by looking around me there weren't that many lookalike programmers/tech people attending. Quite the contrary, most of the tech people I personally know are all in when it comes to stuff like this, they look at me as a retrograde when I mention privacy-related issues.
Why sign up for that kind of pain?
To me- its more interesting that this exec is so clueless as to utter something so damning in such a cliched way. Gosh- was he really this earnestly naive? Or is it possible that this is sarcasm? How can you be a vp exposed to press and say something this unguarded or sarcastic IN FRONT OF PRESS?!? What is going on at Google that people like this are promoted/hired?
“Our customers should consider warning guests and family that they use our products” -a google exec
In the same interview, in the very next sentence of the article:
> Osterloh then acceded that warning houseguests about Nest devices' recording capabilities is proper etiquette, stating that he already does so.
Given that he already warns his guests, he absolutely 100% certainly has thought about "all stakeholders", in quite that way.
You found that they have no tracking data that they're willing to disclose to you. We don't know if that translates into actually having no tracking data.
The other alternative is that he is utterly incompetent at his role, which I don't believe for a second. He is probably be incompetent in speaking with media though