What if a country like the UAE or Hungary start asking for location data matching LGBTQ events or locations? How about political/media headquarters location data?
At what point will they realize that surveillance data is radioactive, and manually patching categories will leave people at risk?
They're doing their best to fight off governments from snooping around in their business, but ultimately this will require regulation if we ever want it to stop.
It's just a shame that governments are kind of interested in the same data these companies have, so there's really no incentive for anyone to change things.
We're living in Orwellian times.
lol talk about hyperbole. Please actually read 1984 and get back to me
Then as an American company, Google will generally tell them to pound sand unless the country invokes right to do business, at which point Google gets to do a fun calculus on whether that country's business is worth compliance.
They pulled out of China once over such calculus.
I guess you could close shop and leave that specific market, but that's not feasible everywhere.
But for the specific scenarios you mentioned, I don't see what the Hungarian government for example can do beyond just ban Google's services.
If you look book at the the canonical bad exemplar of nazi Germany, hindsight leads people to conceive of it as a juggernaut-like attack on all jews, communists, homosexuals etc., but in reality it was a scattered and uneven aggression over a 12 year period whose aggregate effect was massively genocidal.
Huge unstoppable genocidal actions that are highly coordinated and happen over a very short timeframe do exist, eg the Turkish genocide of Armenians or the Hutu genocide of Tutsi people in Rwanda. But I believe they're atypical in modern history compared to incremental genocides. The latter can end up being worse because they're easier to deny, dismiss, or ignore as abuses accumulate.
In the specific example, an authoritarian government could not only ban the product but arrest corporate officers/employees; if there are none in that country, it could arrest people attempting to use the prohibited product, or create fake access portals that were actually honey traps.
Thats old school. You don't not need a phone to be tracked.
If you don't want to be tracked don't go out in public.
Please clarify.
The fact that this data COULD be asked for should be enough to stop collecting it.
The amount of good enabled by data collection far often outweighs the bad. Better to collect, use for benefit, and protect than to just say "This area of technology is forbidden to mankind."
Besides, it doesn't solve the problem; countries can do their own data collection without Google.
Especially given that in all likelihood Google is much better at it than them.
Gmail spam filtering, Maps business data, Maps traffic signal, Google voice recognition (basically the entire technology stack, which was piggybacked off of analysis of samples from Google 411 and continues to be refined by analysis of audio snippets from corner cases where the technology fails), search (obviously, it is just a scraper pointed at the web), Google voice spam number identification (crowdsourced signal), Google Translate, Google image search, and of course the ad products that pay for a not-insignificant portion of the sites available on the internet, without which a significant chunk of the internet would go dark unless it was beholden to other monied interests.
Big Data from large user numbers enabled the creation of technologies that had not been possible before at the level of quality that they are now possible. I don't think a lot of people fully wrap their heads around how big data analysis enabled the internet that we know today.
People are making decisions about the products they buy and use based on how they are made and choosing the ethically produced products. If I have a choice in buying something that was produced ethically or not, I almost always buy the one made ethically even if it might cost a little more or be of lower quality.
How many are as good, and how many are boot-strapped or piggybacked off of datasets that started as big data analysis and were eventually published? I'm not personally of the opinion that big data analysis is unethical; I think broadly speaking, it's been win-win. Companies collecting the data obviously benefit, and users also benefit because their data, aggregated with the data of others, enables utility for them that they would not have gotten alone.
Was a time we called collective action where people generally benefited a good thing, and novel analysis of available data to draw new conclusions "research," not "unethical."
I did not say that big data analysis is unethical. It is that which relies on surveilling and manipulating people/cyborgs which is unethical. I work on big data that surveils and manipulates robots, but they are not sentient and have no rights.