I am not a paranoid person.
Google has access to a bunch of user’s information. They could easily sell this to the highest bidder.
Should we be concerned?
Whatcha mean “if”?
I clear my Google history at the beginning of every month.
The stuff they track is baffling and somewhat disturbing.
Every Android app you use gets tracked.
Right now my History shows I used Clock earlier today. I used the timer while cooking. Why in the hell does Google track that?
Go to myactivity.google.com and you’ll be shocked at what’s recorded there. Every search, every link you clicked, every YouTube vid and all your Android activity. If you opened an App then Google knows.
Click menu, delete activity by, change to All time, press delete
Clearing History regularly is all you can do.
Seconded.
You know that a company that had “Don’t be evil.” as a motto has to be exactly that.
I say “Rabbit, rabbit.”
Well, you can set it not to track that stuff in the first place. All I have in my activity history are Youtube videos and a vague indicator of apps being used on my AndroidTV-equipped television. In those cases, it just says something like “App unknown” (presumably it’s Netflix or Kodi). No tablet/phone app tracking, web tracking, Google Play tracking, etc. For all I know they still track it anyway all secret-like but it’s not listed.
The question I’ve been asking in broader form for several years. The answer is yes.
And anyone who thinks that Google’s tracking and data accumulation is limited to following you around in browser space hasn’t grasped their full role in the… zombie wars.
Privacy is so 1990-ies.
When a man shows you what he really is, believe him.
Your privacy is Google’s enemy.
Google is only one data harvester/accumulator. I suppose it’s the best known in the online world since these days, Gooja *is *the online world. Of course Google is just doing what it does to make Google Tools available to everyone and make sure the search tools and read your mind for a more efficient life, so. But there are others that are about as far from the kindly “Do No Evil” motto as you can get.
Let’s start with the government agencies (CIA, FBI, and the others that are somewhere between deeper in the shadows and completely black). Just taken as an aggregate, do you really think their data holdings are in any way inferior to Google’s? The only feeble thread to cling to there is that they are nominally doing all this for the collective well-being of the country and in theory answer to someone, somewhere for it. (I said “feeble.” At least it’s not just to owners and stockholders among the 0.01%.)
Then there are purely commercial entities such as Acxiom, about which less is known than the inner office map of the Langley complex. They have a bland public face and (after catching a lot of unwanted attention a few years back) even a public portal where you can look up “your record” - by, to start with, giving them more personal information. Even the CIA has a public website where you can look up “their files” on countries around the world. I’m sure every detail is in both.
And Acxiom and its legions of industry competitor/colleagues do their deep data mining, analysis and sale of any data and collated results purely - purely - to enable major industry to control global consumer economics and personal choice on every level. Nothing to fear there. After all, they answer to… their non-public boards and owners.
Did you mean: what if Google ***were ***evil?
So could Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, other social networks, Yahoo, and any number of other companies we choose to give personal information to. Why single out Google?
So as to keep the inquiry from being too terrifying?
I’ve been raising this question and its corollaries, professionally and here (and there) for almost five years. It’s taken the naked (and possibly justified) paranoia of the Trump dynasty for people to start taking the issue(s) seriously.
We have been handing over mountains of the most personal data to these aggregators for a long time, long after it evolved past moldering “marketing surveys” in warehouses that couldn’t be processed efficiently enough to be very meaningful. Go back and read any of the threads, mine or anyone else’s; for every person who got what I was saying, even if they thought I was being over the top, there were a dozen who completely blew it off as a problem for the most fantastically naive reasons and rationalizations.
So, yup, we have a (picks figure from hat) dozen organizations who have a truly massive amount of data about our lives, choices, private acts and even “secrecy” - and as long as mumbling “Do No Evil” made us feel all warm and safe it was okay.
Now a growing number are realizing just how much data has been collected, what vast daily amounts have become routine for continual collection, what analysis using big data tools can see and infer from these massive data sets, and what uses that data is just starting to be put to. And are starting to say things like the OP - “Hey, wait a minute… is this a good thing [any more]?”
Nope. And never was. I predict this decade, more or less, will become seen as a watershed moment in social/economic/political terms, and attached to verities like “They never had a fucking clue until it was too late.”
The CIA WikiLeaks should be a wake up call for many people.
It’s easy to say I have nothing to worry about. “My Google searches are not anything I need to hide”. That may be true. But you have to think of everything that’s being collected and organized into databases. Databases with harmless sounding names like market research.
With Google, you are the product. You give up your information in exchange for “free” services. No if and’s or butt’s about it. You cool wit dat, bro? Don’t believe me, then read the End User License Agreement. Now you can hope they don’t use this for evil, or just to monetize you…
And do you believe that clearing your history will actually remove it from Google’s servers?
Does anyone have any actual concrete examples of evil things Google has done? Yes, they have lots and lots of private information, but merely having that information is not in itself evil.
Yes, I do believe that. Government agencies do have access to some pieces of information that Google doesn’t. But it’s not the individual pieces of information that makes Big Data valuable: It’s the connections between those pieces of information. And Google is very, very good at making those connections: The best in the business. How could anyone else catch up? By hiring Google’s people away from the company? Fat chance of that: Any techie on the planet, given a choice between a job at Google and a job literally anywhere else at all, would choose Google.
The cynical side of me says no.
But what else can we do? The feature to clear Google history is offered and I use it. I also clear my Chrome history. It’s the only option we have.
I use Google Drive storage knowing that those files are vulnerable to inspection.
These are essential services that users need in the modern world. It would require legislation to ensure actual privacy online.
That’s not the question. I think there’s at least tacit acceptance that Google, on the whole, has been a beneficent entity… so far.
The question is “what if Google [became] evil?” - and I’d phrase it as “what happens *when *they become evil?” A year or so ago, in one of these discussions populated by posters rolling around on the virtual floor at how absurd all these ideas were, I asked something like “so what happens when Google is taken over by ‘evil’ owners or board members?” - which provoked more merriment, since (from-memory quote) “Google’s like the biggest company in the world; who in the fuck is going to take them over?”
…which indicates a staggering lack of knowledge of both how the business world works and the history of “the world’s biggest businesses,” all of which are eventually taken over by either other owners or transformed BODs and become something quite different from their original forms.
No one including me said that was the case. It’s a very *dangerous *situation, because that enormous stockpile of information and the tools to make use of it represents global power beyond almost anything conceivable… and it’s effectively “forever” regardless of how the world changes around it. it would be easier to rid the world of functional nuclear weapons and the means of making them than to put the whole… “invasive data” genie back into the bottle.
So, great. Google is *satori *made manifest. And next year, when a combination of world turmoil and authoritarian governments across the West open doors for it to be… acquired or realigned… will all that potential power just drain away because someone took the motto off their street sign? (Nope. But, of course, the motto will remain. See: 1984.)
I’ll give you a mulligan on this once you’ve had more coffee. 
Because what you just wrote makes no aggregate sense. Data is data, and while Google might have the pinnacle capabilities right now, that doesn’t mean players who have been doing this since Page and Brin were undifferentiated amino acids in their fathers’ bloodstream are on a wholly different tier. Google is exploiting a relatively new loophole in data accessibility (and generation); governments have had absolutely unique data collection abilities for centuries. (Note that even Google doesn’t seem to have Trumpy’s tax data. Muse on that a moment.)
And one of the things that I touched on above and this thread is kicking around is the *confluence *betwen Google, Facebook, Twitter, Acxiom and the other mega-data resources and the added sweeping powers of government. Google may not be able to force us to do anything; government sure as hell can. The idea that Google-level tools don’t exist within government (probably wrong, at least in the general sense), or could not be merged or acquired or flat-out nationalized in some form is a feeble argument against the dangers of the material both entities hold.
Which has nothing on earth to do with where the bright young sprogs go to work. Other than for uniformed military service, going to work for the government has always been a second- or lower-tier choice for TBATB. This addendum is pretty close to a non-sequitur. Mulligan?
Right now, this minute, you’re right.
But we’re probably in the last years of being able to change it for the better; it’s already become so entrenched that one or two more college generations indoctrinated to Google’s world will make it all permanent. Because, you know, that’s how it is, and we can’t even do our jobs without all of Big G’s (or Big A’s) free tools and stuff. And they pay great and have free cafeterias and stuff, too!
We might finally be at a point where this discussion can go where it needs to go. I think even some deep-dyed scoffers and skeptics are shaken by the revelations and exposures of the last year or so; that even the most self-satisfied of Googleista are starting to understand that the bill for all this wonderfulness is paid in coin much dearer than gold.
However, it is not that what you put on Google Drive etc. is “vulnerable to inspection.” It’s not about what some hacker in his shitstained whiteys in his Russian or Korean or Kansan basement can get into because it’s “in the cloud.” That’s all secondary to the core problem of privacy. One-on-one privacy, or one-on-few, or even few-on-small.numbers.of.many are not the problem. It’s one.to.many-on-everyone that’s the new and literally terrifying issue.
I have a model of the actual core problem that I’ve kicked around with colleagues for several years. I’ve never brought it up here because every one of these threads has devolved into something between finger-twirling, name-calling and dismissal of the core problems. There’s not much point in trying to take the discussion to a next level when the foundational arguments are dismissed.
But, all snark aside, all traces of told-ya-so aside, this thread is one of the most heartening and exciting ones I’ve seen in years. Maybe it took Trump and the backlash from the rising tide of authoritarianism to shake people out of their Google + Obama + economic stability + progress happy fog, but people I never thought would acknowledge any part of this looming crisis are suddenly realizing that’s one bitter fuckin’ wind blowing in, and it’s blowing in *their *door.
So maybe it’s time to move past what’s NOW so obvious it’s in* USA Today* headlines.
I almost skipped over this because it’s too far down the road, but: You are correct only in that successful legislation is the codification of mass understanding and preference. If no one knows the scope of the problem, if no majority believes it is a problem… you can toss out legislation all day and get nothing more than Prohibition. There has to be awareness of what the legal strictures are opposing and what the benefits of stricturing them are… and we’re not there, yet.
But we’re a step closer. At last.