I have noticed this as well. Over the past few months I have had a plethora of issues with it as has my place of employment. They switched to chrome and as for me I am debating between a few. I might go with two different browsers. While I like google chrome for many things, the fact google makes it scares me. I also like Opera and Vivaldi and going back and forth between them. I really don't want to use three and two is not ideal, but may be necessary so at the very least, one of them is getting eliminated. Firefox is definitly out as it Edge for the obvious reasons, so it leaves the three I mentioned above to choose.
why does it scare you that Google makes it?
They can easily get access to all your information through it. They've been caught before and with their resources its not a far stretch. It all sounds extreme and like a conspiracy theory until they get caught, which already happened once.
Big data is their business model. There is nothing mysterious or conspiracy about it. It is the new big thing and the reason why for example they invest this much in AI . (Not robot take over the world AI, but just algorithms to search efficiently and automatically through those ridiculous amounts of data.
They use all their sources (search engine, browser, android store/wifi, chrome, gmail, all the google trackers on websites to name a few) to catch information and combine to make profiles. Same as other companies , for example Facebook. Google is just way bigger and has their hands in everything. More activities means more data.
Even if the data of one of such sources is anonymised, it can be used to pinpoint individuals by combining it with the data from their other sources.
Just to be clear: I am not saying they will do something evil with it. Just that you should not underestimate the amount of information they know about you. And know it is you.
So the question for us is, do we want to end up in those databases at that extent? Anyway, many people just shrug it off, but I think it is a good idea to think about what kind of influence these kind of companies can have in the long term. And if you would want that.
"Big data is their business model. There is nothing mysterious or conspiracy about it."
Ah... information is key to most conspiracy theories. Maybe FaceBook might agree with you.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"Big data is their business model. There is nothing mysterious or conspiracy about it."
Ah... information is key to most conspiracy theories. Maybe FaceBook might agree with you.
That is a useless platitude. Big data is big business. All major tech companies invest heavily into it for good reason. What will be done with the vast amounts of personal data in the future can't really be predicted yet. They probably do not know themselves for sure yet.
This also depends on how machine learning and AI will develop and what opportunities these will bring. And whatever the commercial interests of these companies will be in the future. They are still just companies with business interests that have to respect laws. Not some megalomaniac villains with a shark basin in their cave.
This is also nothing new. Companies always wanted to know as much as possible about their potential customers. Information has always been a very powerful commodity in business. The difference now is that they just don't have to ask for it anymore.
The question is just :
Do you want these companies know everything about you? Do you like it that there are companies that earn money by dealing in profiles with information about you that you don't even know that they have (medical history information, mortgage, wage information etc)?
"Big data is their business model. There is nothing mysterious or conspiracy about it."
Ah... information is key to most conspiracy theories. Maybe FaceBook might agree with you.
That is a useless platitude. Big data is big business. All major tech companies invest heavily into it for good reason. What will be done with the vast amounts of personal data in the future can't really be predicted yet. They probably do not know themselves for sure yet.
This also depends on how machine learning and AI will develop and what opportunities these will bring. And whatever the commercial interests of these companies will be in the future. They are still just companies with business interests that have to respect laws. Not some megalomaniac villains with a shark basin in their cave.
This is also nothing new. Companies always wanted to know as much as possible about their potential customers. Information has always been a very powerful commodity in business. The difference now is that they just don't have to ask for it anymore.
The question is just :
Do you want these companies know everything about you? Do you like it that there are companies that earn money by dealing in profiles with information about you that you don't even know that they have (medical history information, mortgage, wage information etc)?
I don't believe that big business is totally separate from conspiracies.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"Big data is their business model. There is nothing mysterious or conspiracy about it."
Ah... information is key to most conspiracy theories. Maybe FaceBook might agree with you.
That is a useless platitude. Big data is big business. All major tech companies invest heavily into it for good reason. What will be done with the vast amounts of personal data in the future can't really be predicted yet. They probably do not know themselves for sure yet.
This also depends on how machine learning and AI will develop and what opportunities these will bring. And whatever the commercial interests of these companies will be in the future. They are still just companies with business interests that have to respect laws. Not some megalomaniac villains with a shark basin in their cave.
This is also nothing new. Companies always wanted to know as much as possible about their potential customers. Information has always been a very powerful commodity in business. The difference now is that they just don't have to ask for it anymore.
The question is just :
Do you want these companies know everything about you? Do you like it that there are companies that earn money by dealing in profiles with information about you that you don't even know that they have (medical history information, mortgage, wage information etc)?
I don't believe that big business is totally separate from conspiracies.
But that is a generalisation that is kind of pointless. Any kind of secret agreement (business cartels for pricing for example) is a conspiracy per definition. And secret agreements can happen in any kind of business. But that doesn't make big data a conspiracy. Big data as business is not a secret.
I also don't like to use the term conspiracy, because it usually gets associated with basement dwellers who wear tinfoil hats and believe in alien lizards replacing their politicians or something.
The first rule of conspiracy theories is that any conspiracy theory that requires one or more participants to be evil for the sake of being evil is false. If the theory goes something like this:
1) Do something evil. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
and you can't fill in any more details in step (2), then the conspiracy theory should be dismissed out of hand as completely implausible. A lot of conspiracy theories that don't fail on these grounds are also false, but if you're going to go around peddling conspiracy theories, at least make it something plausible.
As for Google, you've really got to fill in more details than just "have a lot of data". In the case of Google, the details aren't too hard to find: they want to know enough about you to serve you ads that are more likely to interest you. They can charge more for those ads than for scattershot, untargeted ads, and that's how they hope to profit. Still, there's only so much to be gained from better ad targeting, and whether they'll spend money for the sake of getting information on how better to give you ads that will get you to buy something depends tremendously on how much money it costs them and how useful the information is.
Still not obvious enough, what is "wrong" with Google?
Do you want Google to know everything about your life? A few years ago, I would have assumed that Google at least wouldn't abuse such information to nearly the extent that Facebook would.
The James Damore incident made me question that assumption. He used to work for Google. Due to a political disagreement, some Google employees spread a bunch of slanderous lies about him that culminated in the CEO firing him, basically for heresy. Some of the stuff that has come out in the aftermath of that makes Google look like the very definition of a hostile work environment, at least if you're not far to the left politically. If they'll do that to their own employees with the backing of their CEO, how confident are you that they'll never do the same to any of their customers?
This is what I was looking for. Thank you. While I never heard about Damore Incident, but it sounds really nasty. Tbh, it's doubtful whether they'd do such a thing to their users. Because users are often protected by laws several magnitudes stronger than the employees are. I don't know how it's in the US, but this rule generally applies globally. Sadly.
Suppose that Google had some very embarrassing information on you. Maybe it's contents of e-mails in Gmail, or location tracking information from an Android phone, or unwise posts made on Google+, your search history on their search engine, or whatever. But whatever the embarrassing information is, it's private and not publicly accessible.
Would rogue Google employees go off and leak that information to the media? If you're some random peon whom they've never heard of, then of course not. But if you're prominent, such as a viable candidate or appointee for some high political office, I wouldn't be shocked if some rogue Google employees did sift through your stuff to see if they could find anything to destroy you.
It's not official Google policy to do that, of course. If the pending lawsuits go to trial (and Google has powerful incentives to settle, as discovery is likely to be very embarrassing for the company), they'll surely argue that it's against official policy to do what they did to James Damore, as they could face some hefty punitive damages if they don't. If the harassers had been promptly fired for what they did, it would be one thing. Regardless of the official policy, for the CEO to side with the instigators of the harassment and fire their target instead will only encourage them to try to also professionally destroy the next person with whom they have a disagreement about politics.
If you do want to seriously look into what happened to James Damore, don't just read political commentary about it. Go read his original post that lead to the incident, as that's available, too. Damore's lengthy post was a response to an official (albeit insincere) company request for feedback about some seminar, not an issue that he decided to raise on his own. And if you read it, don't ask whether you agree with his views; it's completely reasonable to disagree with much of what he said, though his scientific claims are generally accurate. Rather, ask whether you could state his opinions (not your opinions!) in a significantly milder, more measured, more cautious way than he did. You can't, which is why the claims that it was some hateful diatribe are slanderous lies.
As someone else said in this thread, I've long given up on internet privacy and wouldn't do anything online that I couldn't do with family looking over my shoulder. That being said, what worries me more than lack of privacy is, what the hell are all these people doing online that they break out in a rash when they think of someone finding out about it. Creeps me out a lot more than someone knowing I like Cheerios and fried pies.
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"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
1) Do something evil.
2) ???
3) Profit!
and you can't fill in any more details in step (2), then the conspiracy theory should be dismissed out of hand as completely implausible. A lot of conspiracy theories that don't fail on these grounds are also false, but if you're going to go around peddling conspiracy theories, at least make it something plausible.
As for Google, you've really got to fill in more details than just "have a lot of data". In the case of Google, the details aren't too hard to find: they want to know enough about you to serve you ads that are more likely to interest you. They can charge more for those ads than for scattershot, untargeted ads, and that's how they hope to profit. Still, there's only so much to be gained from better ad targeting, and whether they'll spend money for the sake of getting information on how better to give you ads that will get you to buy something depends tremendously on how much money it costs them and how useful the information is.