New privacy tools and policies to help you stay safe and in control online
blog.google
blog.google
Why would you be indexing this information in the first place?
I don't think it's unreasonable, Google knows and we all know that private information ends up online without our permission, but Google is the only one in the conversation hoovering that data up and showing it to anyone who asks nicely.
I don't get to do that, laws apply to me that say I can't even collect that information without consent let alone display it.
Traditionally, in most small towns, privacy has meant something entirely different, because all the residents of a town knew everybody else's business, whether it was from open sharing, gossip, or low-tech spying. People in a small town do not have freedom of movement or freedom of anonymity. There is no crowd to blend into.
Name and phone numbers are Personally Identifying Information in most countries with strong privacy laws, for me I cannot store that info privately without consent let alone make it public.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
That does put Google in a position of power though. Make that kind of site not allowed to participate in adsense and watch them vanish overnight.
Is it? There is a solution: bad actors get kicked off the Internet. Russia doesn't do shit about cybercriminals? Block their networks until they comply. China gets caught again and again and again hacking into governments or companies? Just the same. India doesn't rein in their scam callcenters (just watch one of the recent Jim Browning videos)? Kick them off the net, and the same punishment for their VoIP providers that act as accomplices. Domestic providers ignoring countless abuse reports against people who had their routers compromised? Disconnect them until they've cleaned up their act and don't pose a threat any more.
The official blathering why this isn't done against other nations is "their population depends on access to the free flow of information" or "it would cost our companies too much money", and that's bullshit. Our enemies don't even need Trojan horses, we directly invite them into our homes. And domestic bad actors hide behind laws limiting their liability. Enough with that. Time to hold malicious, incompetent or greedy actors accountable instead of forcing people to drop unknown calls due to an onslaught of spam or companies to hide behind the protection rackets commonly known as "CDNs" and "botnet protection services".
I am just thinking out loud, I don't have the answer and you raise a valid train of thought.
Exactly! Same principle as why we should mandate burqas.
Just make it illegal to be identifiable in public, instead of illegal for surveillance industry to collect and track identities.
Are you saying that being a free search engine for webpages makes you part of the surveillance industry, but People Finder et. al., that charge money for the express purpose of letting you snoop on other people aren't?
My point isn't that we should make it illegal for people to be identifiable in public. My point is that instead of making it illegal for Google to index People Finder, it would be more logical to make People Finder illegal.
Might be because I'm not in the US but I'm getting a 404 there.
Have to wait again
A while back there used to be advice from security folks to use a consistent set of domains for all communication from your company, so that when attackers/scammers/spammers try to impersonate your domains, users are more suspicious. A partial list of Google's gTLDs from https://ntldstats.com/registry/Charleston-Road-Registry-Inc :
.goog .google .gle .youtube .gmail .android .chrome .gbiz
I don't know how many of these are being used to host user-facing sites like [0], but they also have used at least g.co as a URL shortening service.
When you scatter-shot official communication like this, it trains users to believe that your comms can and will come from just about anywhere.
If companies consolidated at that level, you'd get notified by pepsi for a recall of tostitos... Or Aquafina bottled water.
I think if the general public can identify it as a specific product line, it's fine to have that as a communication domain (and that domain should be the source of news for that product)
> blog.google
LOL
Google blogs how they try to make it easier for people remove revenge porn (and other bad stuff like doxxing) about themselves from search and help kids not randomly see porn online
Yet here we have techbros complain about omg those bad trackers
I hate google's evil tech stance, especially after they gave themselves permission to scrape the entire web to train their AI (and btw HN is totally silent about it) but revenge porn and doxxing are serious life-altering traumatizing things and happen to people who often have no recourse to deal with it
The nice explanation is zero people bothered to click and read, the less nice explanation is that techbro crowd probably has not as many victims of it than perpetrators, statistically
GrapheneOS is modified Google software. Almost everything in it is original software written by Google and distributed in hundreds if millions of Android systems.
I don't think it's accurate to treat Google as an indelible taint.
Google's intentions are the problem, but they're fairly transparent so easy to bypass.
>Much of that was somebody else's code before Google ingested and linked to it.
Not really. True for certain parts, e.g. the kernel, but Android is absolutely Google made.
>I don't think it's accurate to treat Google as an indelible taint.
You didn't want to use Google software.
Stripping AOSP back, replacing external Google services, etc does that.
The point is to abandon Google in every way that is reasonably possible. I obviously don't see much of a difference with Apple, nor Microsoft. What options remain that are reasonable in the effort applied and remain plausible in a competitive world? My answer was GrapheneOS. Yours is?
Depends on what is reasonable for you. My answer would be GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. Their development direction is not dictated by Google.
"I will no longer be using anything from Google by choice. "
I am using quad9 DNS
A very large portion of the population willingly and happily uses Google products. These new tools make it easier to remove unwanted data about yourself from search. That's a good thing.
Please stop it with the "Google bad" circle jerk and realize that the majority of non-nerds has a very different perspective on this.
Google is the perpetrator of serious privacy abuses, and we should rightly be skeptical any time they write about improving people's privacy online.
You're not wrong about the non-nerds, but that's the same about anyone who doesn't possess the knowledge to know better.
If we didn't call it out, it would become normalised even faster. I can't live with that.
Dunning and Kruger have some notes on the matter.