Escaping from google
category: offtopic [glöplog]
psonice, you are right, that's why I said that "such levels" of privacy are overrated (privacy is not, but I don't really mind that).
The way most people -say- it (and I understand you know how it is, but the majority of people involving privacy debates outside the "computer literate" people don't) sounds like there's people at google spending their days reading your logs and e-mail and manually selecting which ads you see.
Of course, they use algorithms with as much data as possible to make their products (and let's not forget: the main google product is advertisement)... that's what any sane company should do: use the mined data to make their products better.
They give some of the tools for "free" (as in money) with the purpose of data-mining: i.e., they exchange the datamining for good tools... I find that obvious, and anyone thinking any money-making company would make and maintain such products without asking for anything in exchange, is a bit naive.
Of course you are free to block it (and don't even really need it: if you can trust it, Google has tools and preferences to manage what they collect from you, and let you delete it). Thing is (and I'm back to what I was answering before): should webmasters stop using Google Analytics (and maybe pay for a -probably inferior- self-hosted stats product) just because some users might be afraid of what Google collects from them?
Back to the comparisons, that'd be like having all your customers run their own SMTPs, having all your friends run their own phone carrier, and have your local water company print their own invoices. It just doesn't cut it.
Some might argue with the typical "it's not what I have to hide, it's what you collect without my permission", but again, that's the cost of making services or products either better, or cheaper.
Plus, blocking it if you are afraid of it is not rocket-science either.
The way most people -say- it (and I understand you know how it is, but the majority of people involving privacy debates outside the "computer literate" people don't) sounds like there's people at google spending their days reading your logs and e-mail and manually selecting which ads you see.
Of course, they use algorithms with as much data as possible to make their products (and let's not forget: the main google product is advertisement)... that's what any sane company should do: use the mined data to make their products better.
They give some of the tools for "free" (as in money) with the purpose of data-mining: i.e., they exchange the datamining for good tools... I find that obvious, and anyone thinking any money-making company would make and maintain such products without asking for anything in exchange, is a bit naive.
Of course you are free to block it (and don't even really need it: if you can trust it, Google has tools and preferences to manage what they collect from you, and let you delete it). Thing is (and I'm back to what I was answering before): should webmasters stop using Google Analytics (and maybe pay for a -probably inferior- self-hosted stats product) just because some users might be afraid of what Google collects from them?
Back to the comparisons, that'd be like having all your customers run their own SMTPs, having all your friends run their own phone carrier, and have your local water company print their own invoices. It just doesn't cut it.
Some might argue with the typical "it's not what I have to hide, it's what you collect without my permission", but again, that's the cost of making services or products either better, or cheaper.
Plus, blocking it if you are afraid of it is not rocket-science either.
Btw: https://history.google.com/ and https://maps.google.com/locationhistory. If you trust Google is actually doing what they say are doing (and taking the law regulations they suffer from all the world, and not just the NSA in the US, I don't think they are lying that openly), you can delete and disable basically everything that might be personal on your profile.
Jcl, thats right, I'm not that naive. Your argument is that in a society you have to interact with services (and generally others) and that services rely on other services. Otherwise you would be isolated. Quite true, when it's usually still up to me who I'm interacting with.
My whole point is that i find it wrong when websites push access data to organizations or companies whose whole business model is to collect and aggregate these bits of data to build integrated full-fledged profiles not on the website but on the sites' visitors (= others). All of which the visitors are not aware of - unless they look at the source or use special plugins.
Still a plausible approach if you have to to pay for your service via advertising. But what does pouet.net get in return? A convenient nice webcounter just because it would be too hard to install piwik.
And how the business goal of having an integrated diary of the electronic life of every online person on the planet is critical for the positive development of society is beyond my understanding.
My whole point is that i find it wrong when websites push access data to organizations or companies whose whole business model is to collect and aggregate these bits of data to build integrated full-fledged profiles not on the website but on the sites' visitors (= others). All of which the visitors are not aware of - unless they look at the source or use special plugins.
Still a plausible approach if you have to to pay for your service via advertising. But what does pouet.net get in return? A convenient nice webcounter just because it would be too hard to install piwik.
And how the business goal of having an integrated diary of the electronic life of every online person on the planet is critical for the positive development of society is beyond my understanding.
Quote:
And how the business goal of having an integrated diary of the electronic life of every online person on the planet is critical for the positive development of society is beyond my understanding.
Thanks to that integrated diary (or, to the targeted ads they sell with that data), you have a developed, competitive, modern and cheap phone operating system (which makes others make better products)... you have an excellent mapping service for free (which makes other mapping services be free too)... you have massive amount of space on your e-mail on the cloud, for free (remember how was e-mail before gmail? remember trying to add attachments?)... you have an extremely vast library of videos at your disposal (and mostly for free)... and that's just a direct benefit to the society. Indirectly, with their tools, they help webmasters build better sites aimed at the reality of their visitors (and don't let me started on how good Analytics is with eCommerce -where I work at-).
They also, with their "free" products, feed the competency and make others build even better products, to compete with them. Isn't that enough?
Maybe pouet.net doesn't get anything -directly- on return due to the very special case that pouet.net is... however, if theoretically pouet was to be developed (hi pouet 2!), wouldn't you think having deep analytics wouldn't help to sacrifice and modernize features on the website according to their visitor profiles? (and I'm not just talking about user agents, I'm talking about the way users see the data, the bouncings, the visiting patterns, the mouse click heat maps, the devices, screen sizes, etc.). Analytics give you that kind of information (and much more).
PS: take my "free" as "as in money".
"remember trying to add attachments?" was meant to be "remember trying to add big attachments?"
Jcl, already got your "give and take" point a page ago - like I said, I'm using lots of google services myself. They f.e. show me ads based on my mail contents. I know it. If I don't want it, I don't use it.
For a visitor to pouet.net there is no hint to that deal (ironically especially as there are no ads that could make that deal visible). A classic hidden agreement at the expense of a third party.
For a visitor to pouet.net there is no hint to that deal (ironically especially as there are no ads that could make that deal visible). A classic hidden agreement at the expense of a third party.
Spin: calling Google Analytics "a webcounter" is pretty stupid though. Then again: don't like it? Block it. Or? Don't use Pouet - your choice really.
gloom, skipping your disappointing insult: yes, my whole point was being aware and able to make this decision.
Jcl:
Yes, and when put like that, I have no issue with it. However, algorithms or not, the profile is built and exists. Perhaps it's used only to generate automated advertising. Fine. More recently, perhaps the NSA has access to it, and perhaps they only use it to track known terrorists. Probably fine. Hopefully. Maybe in a few years some right wing crazy from the tea party is in government in the US, and has access to it. Maybe not so fine. Or maybe the government here in the UK is very right wing in a few years, and forces google to accept a prism-like system (or the same one) if they want to keep doing business.
In other words, we might not have 1984's government, but we're building the tools for it. If the government changes we're in a very bad place. This is what I'm fundamentally against.
And yes, I know I can block it - but the vast majority don't know how to do it, and frankly don't know that it's happening.
There's a huge flaw in this idea: it's great in the short term only. Short term, yes, we get good products and we get them for free. Which is great, definitely.
But then what happens, do we get lots of competitors also making even better products and for free? Well, have a look at some google products, see what happened:
- Search. Google made a better product, completely free (as in *free*, not even ad-supported) for quite a long time. They wiped out most of the competition, then added adverts (and in a better way than the others back then :) Since then, we've basically got yahoo struggling to be relevant and make any money, and only MS really competing with bing (which they lose a ton of money on every year).
How can you start up a new search engine now? It'll have to be free unless you can come up with some new business model to fund it. It has to be better than google (not so hard nowadays I'd say, although building it from scratch is definitely hard!). You really *need* to be a large, global ad agency to even have a chance. MS is trying to become one, and spending billions in the process.
Not really open to competition is it?
- Reader. There were tons of different apps and websites for RSS back in the day. Then reader came out, was pretty good, and was free. Most of them disappeared, and development dried up on a lot of the rest because it suddenly got a lot harder to make any money (remember, competing with an ad-funded competitor gets very hard when the competitor is the ad agency supplying your ads and taking a decent cut ;)
Then reader stagnated for ages, since there wasn't much in the way of competition. Now it's been killed, and there's suddenly a ton of new RSS apps and services, new business models (I'm using newsblur, which has a paid premium option), plenty of innovation.
I'd say in both cases, it's pretty clear there was a short-term gain in that we got good, free products. Long term I'm pretty certain both stifled competition. And when reader was killed the market came back to life.
Quote:
The way most people -say- it (and I understand you know how it is, but the majority of people involving privacy debates outside the "computer literate" people don't) sounds like there's people at google spending their days reading your logs and e-mail and manually selecting which ads you see.
Of course, they use algorithms with as much data as possible to make their products (and let's not forget: the main google product is advertisement)... that's what any sane company should do: use the mined data to make their products better.
Yes, and when put like that, I have no issue with it. However, algorithms or not, the profile is built and exists. Perhaps it's used only to generate automated advertising. Fine. More recently, perhaps the NSA has access to it, and perhaps they only use it to track known terrorists. Probably fine. Hopefully. Maybe in a few years some right wing crazy from the tea party is in government in the US, and has access to it. Maybe not so fine. Or maybe the government here in the UK is very right wing in a few years, and forces google to accept a prism-like system (or the same one) if they want to keep doing business.
In other words, we might not have 1984's government, but we're building the tools for it. If the government changes we're in a very bad place. This is what I'm fundamentally against.
And yes, I know I can block it - but the vast majority don't know how to do it, and frankly don't know that it's happening.
Quote:
They also, with their "free" products, feed the competency and make others build even better products, to compete with them. Isn't that enough?
There's a huge flaw in this idea: it's great in the short term only. Short term, yes, we get good products and we get them for free. Which is great, definitely.
But then what happens, do we get lots of competitors also making even better products and for free? Well, have a look at some google products, see what happened:
- Search. Google made a better product, completely free (as in *free*, not even ad-supported) for quite a long time. They wiped out most of the competition, then added adverts (and in a better way than the others back then :) Since then, we've basically got yahoo struggling to be relevant and make any money, and only MS really competing with bing (which they lose a ton of money on every year).
How can you start up a new search engine now? It'll have to be free unless you can come up with some new business model to fund it. It has to be better than google (not so hard nowadays I'd say, although building it from scratch is definitely hard!). You really *need* to be a large, global ad agency to even have a chance. MS is trying to become one, and spending billions in the process.
Not really open to competition is it?
- Reader. There were tons of different apps and websites for RSS back in the day. Then reader came out, was pretty good, and was free. Most of them disappeared, and development dried up on a lot of the rest because it suddenly got a lot harder to make any money (remember, competing with an ad-funded competitor gets very hard when the competitor is the ad agency supplying your ads and taking a decent cut ;)
Then reader stagnated for ages, since there wasn't much in the way of competition. Now it's been killed, and there's suddenly a ton of new RSS apps and services, new business models (I'm using newsblur, which has a paid premium option), plenty of innovation.
I'd say in both cases, it's pretty clear there was a short-term gain in that we got good, free products. Long term I'm pretty certain both stifled competition. And when reader was killed the market came back to life.
Spin: I'm sorry if you were insulted - you're right: catering to your own argument by degrading the value of a service to it's absolute simplest form isn't stupid, it's arrogant.
:(
Seems they changed their slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Fuck you!" somewhere along the line :|
"Don't act like you're evil"
pssst..
google...
german...
evil axis of...
the Evilness!
[/Dr.Acula]
google...
german...
evil axis of...
the Evilness!
[/Dr.Acula]
I switched recently (at home) from Chrome/Google to Firefox/Duckduckgo, and it seems neat so far.
It will be harder to quit gmail, facebook, google+, and gtalk though...
It will be harder to quit gmail, facebook, google+, and gtalk though...
quitting facebook is like
(same goes for pouet of course)
No Facebook, No Google+, No Google Talk.
Not missing anything...
Not missing anything...
How would you know?
i have a better tactic: act like a fucking lunatic on the intarwebs so however they try to profile me, it aint worth shit. bro. yah.
and here's a picture of a swan:
and here's a picture of a swan:
i have an android phone and my co-worker insists i have to save his contact details on my phone memory and not sync them with my google account.
i dunno how i should feel about it, is that ridiculous or smart?
i dunno how i should feel about it, is that ridiculous or smart?
wysiwtf: I feel it's inevitable that sooner or later some idiot will send his details through uploading their contactlist to Facebook (for instance) anyways. However, I think it's smart.
To (maybe) repeat a point already made, you can guard your information how much you want it - if you got dumb friends they're gone anyways. Conclusion, don't have dumb friends O_o
To (maybe) repeat a point already made, you can guard your information how much you want it - if you got dumb friends they're gone anyways. Conclusion, don't have dumb friends O_o
