I just decided that whatever advantages that Google services may provide are not that valuable to me, and alternatives exist that will perform the same function for me to my satisfaction but without the creepy data collection.
Whatever Google is doing with it may well be perfectly benign, but I’m just not interested in earning money for Google for free, to whatever extent that is possible on my end. Surely whatever it is they wanted to know about me they’ve got by now. I don’t need to volunteer any more.
You say that as if spending money is a bad thing. I want to spend money. The reason I go to so much effort to earn money is so that I can spend it. It’s just that I want to spend money on things that interest me, and not on things that don’t interest me. Most ads are annoying because they’re trying to get me to spend money on things that don’t interest me. Targeted ads, however, are not only not annoying, but can actually be useful to me.
My district is a “Google District”, which means the Google Office Suite, Google Drive, and the Google Chrome browser among a myriad of other things. We’ve had to include in our registration directions to parents the statement that the process only works with Google Chrome. If you try to use Safari, for example, certain key buttons will simply disappear, thus making the process impossible. It’s just an unfortunate accident, I’m sure. LOL
I think what DPRK is saying is that the SDMB is powered by Discourse software, and that this software is likely, but not necessarily required, to be running on one of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers. Although I’m also not quite sure what he specifically means by blocking Amazon, because usually those sites running on AWS have mapped their IP addresses to a custom domain name with no mention of Amazon inside them - you’d basically have go to the trouble of finding out all IP addresses belonging to the AWS pool of addresses and blacklisting them.
As for the OP, I’m ok with Google harvesting and selling my data, after all, they are providing a suite of free services and need some way to subsidize it. I just use an ad blocker and ignore any targeted ads that make it past the blocker.
If you think your data is just being used to market products to you that might make sense.
But wait until your insurance premiums go up because the insurance company hired ‘insurance analytics inc.’ to do a risk profile on each client, and they rated you down because their AIs decided your social graph, late-night posting habits and food choices makes you a higher risk.
Or you apply for a job, and the company pays another firm to estimate your conscientiousness, work ethic, and ability to get along with others by scraping your social media posts and login histories. They’ll probably also provide scores rating your political positions, how strident you are, whether you have bad-mouthed your employers in public in the past, etc.
Our data is being used in a hell of a lot of ways that have nothing to do with selling us products. Wait until you get rounded ip by the cops because by coincidence your location data shows that you were in the vicinity of three recent crimes, making you a suspect.
Ok, I wasn’t thinking that way when he said blocking Amazon. Can a single person even block a cloud service? Short of Amazon giving you a list, how would you even know who uses them?
People think stuff like this is farfetched, and I don’t think we are at that point now, it will certainly arrive. Everybody, government and business seems to want to have all kinds of data, even stuff they haven’t thought of a use for yet.
In my wife’s hometown there is a big thing going on because the police put license plate readers on all their patrol cars two or three years ago but told nobody outside of the police about them. They also never deleted any of the data in that whole time. That’s a lot of being tracked unknowingly. I think now they are trying to get them to delete after three or six months.
Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in a big shopping mall. Employee parking was always about as far as you could get from the building. One day she wasn’t feeling well but her boss pleaded with her to work because he couldn’t get anyone to cover for her. So she went in, but parked in the customer parking because she didn’t want to do the long walk in the winter weather while she felt like shit. Two hours later, mall security came in and told her she had to move her car. Her boss said nothing he could do, she had to move her car. So she said fine, I’m taking a sick day and left. So, not only does this mall security have plate readers but they have a way to connect plates to customers.
I find “privacy maximalists” to be the digital equivalent of doomsday preppers. Probably too many “mark of the beast” chain emails back in the internet infancy… “We’re all going to be tracked with a microchip in the back of our left hand or our forehead! Mark of the beast! Blearghh!”
I literally don’t give a shit that Google knows where I am. At all times of the day. Heck, I find looking at the Google maps tracker of where I’ve been interesting. The idea that I could be “placed at the scene of a crime!” cuts both ways; if an ex gets randomly murdered, Google will be able to tell somebody that I wasn’t there. And my phone is biometrically locked; I imagine my logins and whatnot are probably tracked too. So the idea that maybe an accomplice was packing my phone around wouldn’t fly either, because I don’t sit still for five minutes without checking my email or the SDMB.
My protection against accusations of being a shitheel are just… not being a shitheel.
The roblem is that ‘being a shithead’ varies over time. There are people today being canceled for things they said years ago when saying them wasn’t particularly egregious, but now is.
Let’s say you fight for social justice, and you are active in the movement onljne, A decade from now the zeigeist changes, and businesses decide that activists in the company are bad for morale. And you suddenly find that you keep applying for jobs, but never get called for an interview.
You may not even realize what it is you do online that has caused you to be blacklisted. Maybe no one knows, because the blacklisting is done by a trained AI which simply correlates behaviours with historical employee outcomes, and you have been filtered out because you were a close match to the online behaviours of the ‘bad’ employees through some combination of variables.
This information asymmetry problem gives corporations more power over you, and in ways you can’t understand or fight against. All you know is you didn’t get a job interview. You don’t know that the company you applied to bought a rating from Google that includes your behaviour in grade school through records stored in Google Scholar, and that time you got into trouble in grade six is now haunting you.
I suppose someone could set up a custom firewall that intercepts all traffic, making DNS lookups to see which hostnames resolve to IP addresses that fall within the range of addresses that AWS reserved, and then specifically blocking traffic from those domains. But then again, is it really worth going to all that trouble, and subsequently having a gimped web browsing experience, just to stick it to the man?
Most providers will have lists of their IP ranges available. You can also get lists for countries, so it is pretty easy to do something like block all traffic coming in from Canada (this doesn’t stop Canadians from using VPNs, etc.)
I’m a bit surprised anyone would make that public unless they had to. Is it voluntary or mandatory? I’ve noticed that while people like to have info they are very reluctant to share it.
I think peak Google was around 2012-13. YouTube was still a better-funded version of its original free and open self, and then there was Drive, which was, and still to this day, mostly is, pretty daggone good.
But Fuck me if Google hasn’t started competing with Facebook and LinkedIn for creepiness in terms of invading privacy.
I agree that there’s still no better search engine out there, but at the same time, most of us remember Google Search in 2008-2012 and it was a friggin great spam-free, ad-free experience. Not so now.
I have tried Brave browser but some websites give me a shit-fit that I am running an unsupported browser. I’d ignore that but some of those sites I need to use for work so I have to use Firefox or Chrome or Edge ().
So I installed Malwarebytes, uBlock Origin and PrivacyBadger.
Ads and popups pretty much never happen now. Occasionally a website will be blank until I turn those off but I never do, I just leave that site.
I flip back and forth between Chrome and Brave; I like FF but it’s just been burned into my memory as the slow browser and habits (avoidant ones) are hard to break
That is so very true - it does hog a shitload of memory. I also know that each new update is not about user experience; it’s about how much memory it can shove up my computer’s ass and how much data it can milk from me.
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