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They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. You cannot triv

They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. You cannot trivially opt out of Google tracking you or your environment. To give some examples: - Google reads all my e-mail sent to a Google Mail user to build advertising profiles. - Google Analytics is used by many websites and can be used by Google to track users' movements around the web. Obviously, ads can be used for the same purposes. - Google snoops access points and maps them to GPS positions. It's not opt-in, but you have to opt-out by adding _nomap to your SSID. To make this even more annoying, Microsoft has different requirements to opt out of their tracking. - Google snaps photos of my house, street, car without ever asking permission and puts them online. Applies machine learning to extract data. Unfortunately, we cannot know what data. A lot of things that Google does are incredibly offensive privacy violations (even if not by law), but it is hard or impossible to opt out of them. Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company? There are also communication companies with moral values and that try to avoid collecting and retaining as much possible data and metadata. (Fastmail, Protonmail, Signal, XS4All, to just name a few). I would also like to point out that there is a huge difference between (1) a dictator can monitor all your traffic from this point in time (ISP with short log retention) and (2) a dictator can scan virtually behaviour data of the last decade to see whether someone was gay, communicated with a leftist group, or whatever 'crime' one can commit. At any rate, 'others do it too' is a terrible argument. A lot of humans do a lot of terrible things. That does not mean that we do not have to strive for a more reasonable world.

Freak_NL 10y ago
> Applies machine learning to extract data. Not only machines are let loose on that data. Ever try to open some websites through a VPN or Tor? Often you'll be presented with Google's Recaptcha tool to verify that you are not a robot but a genuine human visitor (to prevent spam and DDOS attacks). To gain access to the website itself you are enlisted to train Google's algorithms to properly recognize objects on outdoor photographs — including but not limited to mountains, store fronts, house numbers, and cars. A recent 'innovation' has you freehand draw the outline of traffic signs. All unpaid labour, all for a huge proprietary dataset. The old Recaptcha system of proofreading OCR scanned words from books at least had some public merit.

Freak_NL 10y ago

> Applies machine learning to extract data. Not only machines are let loose on that data. Ever try to open some websites through a VPN or Tor? Often you'll be presented with Google's Recaptcha tool to verify that you are not a robot but a genuine human visitor (to prevent spam and DDOS attacks). To gain access to the website itself you are enlisted to train Google's algorithms to properly recognize objects on outdoor photographs — including but not limited to mountains, store fronts, house numbers, and cars. A recent 'innovation' has you freehand draw the outline of traffic signs. All unpaid labour, all for a huge proprietary dataset. The old Recaptcha system of proofreading OCR scanned words from books at least had some public merit.