UNLIMITED SHITTING ON GOOGLE THREAD :-D

[Captain Utopia]

If you're salaried and you're expected to work more than 5 days a week, then it's less of a perk, especially if you don't have the rights to the projects you code on your weekends.

[Requia ☣]

'Salary'='We don't want to pay you for overtime'

[Captain Utopia]

I think this bastard is trying to troll Trip:

"Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident. The technology for Wi-Fi scanning means it's easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it. ... It's really easy to protect your data: simply turn on WPA. This completely stops Google (or anybody else) from spying on your private data. ... Laws against this won't stop the bad guys (hackers). They will only unfairly punish good guys (like Google) whenever they make a mistake. ... [A]nybody who has experience in Wi-Fi mapping would believe Google. Data packets help Google find more access-points and triangulate them, yet the payload of the packets do nothing useful for Google because they are only fragments."

Not that I actually buy the core of his argument, and he seems to be a bit of a Google apologist.

[Triple Zero]

If I thought it was intentional rather than a fuck-up, or if Google had used the data for profit (or even accessed it in storage), or if they had tried to cover it up instead of voluntarily disclosing their error... then I'd have a completely different stance on this issue.  But I can't agree with persecuting anything just because it makes a convenient poster boy for a cause.

I see what you mean.

On the one hand, it is the corp's responsibility to ensure privacy (as defined by the law) is not breached. Even if it can be argued that the breach of privacy was not of any use to the corporation.

It's like when some guy is caught peeping through a hole in the girl's showerroom. But then he argues, "but I only saw a single nipple, and besides, I'm gay anyway!" ...

Ok I guess that analogy doesn't quite hold, but it's a funny one, don't you think?


And on the other hand, you say, if it was unintentional and they gained no benefit, they can be excused. I can understand that reasoning, especially from a pragmatic view, and if I had any reason to defend Google I'd definitely use the argument.

But I don't. So what remains for me is that they started a huge project (the magnitude definitely determines the severity for me), they made a mistake which caused breach of privacy, and they got lucky in the sense that no "really sensitive" data was captured. But it still means to me that they were careless with ensuring the privacy of the territories they scanned. And while the mistake might have been accidental, the carelessness definitely was not. Add to that Google's track record when it comes to privacy (pretty bad--not as bad as Facebook but still pretty bad) and I still think they should face consequences.

So it's not only that we caught them recording open wifi data, which may have been an accident, it's also that we caught them being utterly careless and irresponsible when it comes to public privacy. And I think that is their real crime. They should not have let this happen and been more responsible, given the power they wield.

[Captain Utopia]

I think that's entirely reasonable.

[Triple Zero]

Maybe, but reading it back it also sounds a lot like bullshit reasoning.

Thanks for making me realize that, I guess it's better to shit on Google for things they actually really fucked up over (like the $126k Google Checkout deal).

However, there's still a personal reason. And that's that I never liked the whole StreetView project. Even though it has been personally useful to me already several times, as well as fun to play with. I just think the privacy breach of having a megacorporation like Google* sending out a small army of cars with high resolution panoramic cameras to photograph every single street in America, Europe, Australia and more, is pretty severe.

It's something that really makes me uncomfortable. Big, faceless corp, sending out an army of semi-inconspicuous spying cars (everybody's seen one at some time or another, right?). I remember people joking about exact scenarios like this, a mere few years ago ("Bleep. Hello I am GoogleBot. I will not kill you. Please let me index your house").

Then you add to that Google's cars going onto private roads a few years ago. Another mistake. Then their lawyer saying "you should not expect privacy in this day and age", which they promptly retracted. Another mistake.

But add everything together and I get an image that either they do not care enough, or otherwise Google is not able to keep its privacy breaching behaviour in check. I.e. they're out of control.




* there are different versions of this infographic floating around, the original one was not at all to scale. This one is. But it's not all the servers in the world, Google would own about 2% of them. Additionally the numbers themselves are pretty handwavey or dated, as well as Microsoft and Amazon missing from the chart. Plus I would have expected Akamai to be a LOT bigger.

[Jenne]

I've always thought it was creepy and voyeuristic for Google to put a picture of where I live on the internet without my say-so.  I own that fucking house, I own that car--if I want pix of them up on the interbutts, I should have a fucking say-so.  But no, because it's "free to those who use it," it's sanctioned.  Granted, you need my address in order to find it, but it's just fucking creepy and voyeuristic to be.  ITA, Trip, that sending folks out with cars everywhere on the damned Earf to put images of where people live in real time up seems a fucked up thing to do for a faceless, hugeass corporation that already controls a lot of information to begin with.

I know they started out as Ivory Tower eggheads, but they have so much info at their fingertips and have the capacity to get even more still, ad infinititum, that to believe there's never going to be any corruption with that amount of power is just well a little disingenuous.

[Captain Utopia]

I know they started out as Ivory Tower eggheads, but they have so much info at their fingertips and have the capacity to get even more still, ad infinititum, that to believe there's never going to be any corruption with that amount of power is just well a little disingenuous.

Perhaps this question is a bit too broad for the topic, but it is apt -- do you think it is possible to create any institution which can hold power without serious corruption?

I've always thought it was creepy and voyeuristic for Google to put a picture of where I live on the internet without my say-so.  I own that fucking house, I own that car--if I want pix of them up on the interbutts, I should have a fucking say-so.  But no, because it's "free to those who use it," it's sanctioned.  Granted, you need my address in order to find it, but it's just fucking creepy and voyeuristic to be.  ITA, Trip, that sending folks out with cars everywhere on the damned Earf to put images of where people live in real time up seems a fucked up thing to do for a faceless, hugeass corporation that already controls a lot of information to begin with.

The Microsoft/photosynth approach is to scour sources like flickr and automatically generate a 3d model of the environment based upon overlapping photos taken by the public.  So, assuming an open-source version of that technology could be created, would it be less creepy if it were an Open Community project where anyone can contribute data, no one owned it or had exclusive control over it - but we all still ended up with the really useful functionality which streetview provides?

The only problem with that though, is that bandwidth/cpu/storage costs are still not cheap enough for it to be feasible for an ad-hoc community to absorb.  Within the next 5-10 years that equation will probably change, but then -- it would no longer be creepy for Google to have streetview data which everyone else has too!

[Triple Zero]

ONE MORE FOR THE if you have nothing to hide AND THE
what could possibly go wrong AND THE no really it's not like
they could do anything bad with all that info CROWDS




Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats

We entrust Google with our most private communications
because we assume the company takes every precaution to
safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on
four underage teens for months before the company was
notified of the abuses. READ MORE

[Triple Zero]

It seems part of the reason Barksdale snooped through the teens' Gmail and Gtalk accounts was to show off the power he had as a member of a group with broad access to company data. A self-described "hacker," Barksdale seemed to get a kick out of flaunting his position at Google, which was the case when, with a friend's consent, he pulled up the person's email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account—within seconds.

Highlighted to point out that, indeed, as I suspected, having multiple Google accounts helps shit fuck all to keep them separate, as it takes mere seconds to get the other accounts (I suppose by filtering on IP).

Please note that this is mentioned nowhere in their Privacy Policy. They claim they don't do it, they don't correlate data in this manner, not between separate accounts. Could be. Could be that this guy made his own specialized query, in which case the "within seconds" in the article must be hyperbole, cause you don't write such a query within seconds, custom queries on this forum also take me minutes. Or he could have scripted it. I mean, could be. Or Google does have this feature built in some easy-access interface for people with the proper permissions, in violation of their privacy policy.


BTW three more articles (that I haven't read yet):

Google confirms - http://gawker.com/5638199/google-confirms-firing-engineer-for-privacy-violations
This guy wasn't the first - http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-first-spying-engineer
Blahblahblah questions - http://gawker.com/5639266/four-questions-google-still-needs-to-answer-about-their-creepy-engineer

[Triple Zero]

Dunno about you guys but Google has recently been extremely worthless to me for most things except the most "superficial" topics.

That is, stuff that you find with your first-guess/two-keywords query is okay, but if the target's not in there, refining or trying a different query doesn't seem to help very much, anymore. Or at least it'll be annoying as fuck. Because Google will "auto-correct" your query terms (which you can circumvent by putting a + in front of them) (maybe they're trying to raise Google+ awareness) which is a hassle, often the results just aren't there, the cache links are missing (or actually hidden somewhere in a menu, I'm told)

Oh and Google keeps auto-focusing the search input field, so I can't use the 1 2 and 4 keys to navigate tabs in Opera, cause I'll be typing these numbers in the search field, and worse, because of "Google Instant Search" (which nobody ever asked for) it'll auto-update the results with those numbers or whatever you typed, which messes everything up,

and on top of that, the thing you're looking for often just doesn't seem to be there, at all. Or perhaps it's buried beneath all those pages that actually don't even contain your keywords.

It's like using the fucking PD search sometimes, may Goddess have mercy on its soul.

So yeah, it's great because for the first time in many many years I actually find myself trying a lot of different search engines.

So far, DuckDuckGo and Yandex (the Russian Google, sort of) are my favourites.

I already keyed many search engines to search shortcuts and bookmarks, but I found myself nearly always using Google anyway, because it's quick and often yielded what I wanted immediately (not that the others wouldn't have btw), but now Google is becoming unusable, I'm glad to be able to give the others a chance.

Another advantage is that I'll discover more of the non-Google-indexed web, which is actually quite a lot (or so I'm told).

[Elder Iptuous]

I can't recall the last time i used a non-google search engine.
i guess i'll start again. 

[LMNO]

Dunno about you guys but Google has recently been extremely worthless to me for most things except the most "superficial" topics.

That is, stuff that you find with your first-guess/two-keywords query is okay, but if the target's not in there, refining or trying a different query doesn't seem to help very much, anymore. Or at least it'll be annoying as fuck. Because Google will "auto-correct" your query terms (which you can circumvent by putting a + in front of them) (maybe they're trying to raise Google+ awareness) which is a hassle, often the results just aren't there, the cache links are missing (or actually hidden somewhere in a menu, I'm told)

Oh and Google keeps auto-focusing the search input field, so I can't use the 1 2 and 4 keys to navigate tabs in Opera, cause I'll be typing these numbers in the search field, and worse, because of "Google Instant Search" (which nobody ever asked for) it'll auto-update the results with those numbers or whatever you typed, which messes everything up,

and on top of that, the thing you're looking for often just doesn't seem to be there, at all. Or perhaps it's buried beneath all those pages that actually don't even contain your keywords.

It's like using the fucking PD search sometimes, may Goddess have mercy on its soul.

So yeah, it's great because for the first time in many many years I actually find myself trying a lot of different search engines.

So far, DuckDuckGo and Yandex (the Russian Google, sort of) are my favourites.

I already keyed many search engines to search shortcuts and bookmarks, but I found myself nearly always using Google anyway, because it's quick and often yielded what I wanted immediately (not that the others wouldn't have btw), but now Google is becoming unusable, I'm glad to be able to give the others a chance.

Another advantage is that I'll discover more of the non-Google-indexed web, which is actually quite a lot (or so I'm told).

And here I was, thinking that my Google-Fu was full of FAIL.


Guess I'll have to bookmark DuckDuckGo.

[Triple Zero]

Other ones on my to-try list are: Yahoo and Blekko.

And here I was, thinking that my Google-Fu was full of FAIL.


Guess I'll have to bookmark DuckDuckGo.

Yeah I'm pretty sure everybody's Google-Fu has been full of FAIL recently.

[Elder Iptuous]

what do you think is causing googles results to be slipping?
is it the cat-and-mouse they have with SEOs that are screwing it up?