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As a Google Fi user, who frequently gets relevant ads immediately after talking about a product on the phone (voice call) with my girlfriend - I do fear a world

As a Google Fi user, who frequently gets relevant ads immediately after talking about a product on the phone (voice call) with my girlfriend - I do fear a world where Google controls the OS. Once I also mentioned some tv's I was interested in (not on the phone, but in the same room as the phone) and also got ads right afterwards. I do not know if it was related to an app open or the phone itself, but a scary invasion of privacy nonetheless.

microwavecamera 9y ago
Holy crap that is weird. Well I won't be using Google Fi. I was reading Fi's Terms of Service and came across this gem: We take protecting your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” very seriously. Using CPNI without your additional approval is limited to specific purposes. By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to your CPNI without your additional approval only for the following limited purposes: ... Any other purpose permitted by federal law So they can use your personal data without your approval for anything that's not illegal? Spurious use of the word "limited" there Google.
- infogulch 9y ago
  Wait, if that's a limited list, why is there anything listed before "everything not illegal" at all? Are there other things they do that are illegal? Or is that just designed to confuse and mask the last item?
  - infogulch 9y ago
    It's stupid. The whole section could be rewritten as just: By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” without your additional approval for any purpose permitted by federal law I just read it myself, that's essentially what it says. The whole privacy section is just garbage filler to distract you from that, unless I'm reading it completely wrong.
    - alexanderdmitri 9y ago
      I wonder why it's permitted by Federal law for a corporate entity to write legal notices in such a way that is limited to, in most cases, leading the user to believe something is being asserted via highly contrived prolixity when in fact the assertion is entirely void of any substance outside of the tacit acknowledgement from the entity issuing the notice that there will be no breach of notoriously vague Federal law unless the lawyers working for the entity, who (in so many words) actually authored the notice in the first place, see a loophole through which they believe they can exonerate their client without needlessly causing their client's PR firm to work overtime especially in cases where the aforementioned lack of substance is purposefully placed over the purpose of the notice, which may be defined, but is not definitively limited to meaning, the entity will more or less use the data of the notified person, who may or may not be misled by traditionally sound intuition as well as the insubstantial notice being described to believe that his or her actions upon the entity's platform are private, as currency, thus leveraging the intimate knowledge of the disoriented, albeit notified, person to manipulate thoughts, desires, and actions (not to mention internal and external perception in general) towards any and all ends the entity dictates based on fiduciary goals and its incommensurable and entropic drive to further consolidate control of a market the entity continues to cultivate and grow beyond all reasonable proportion.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    > Or is that just designed to confuse and mask the last item? Bingo. The main reason most ToS's are like ten pages long, really. They're counting on you not reading it.
  - microwavecamera 9y ago
    Plus it's doesn't exactly instill confidence in me that Google has to go out of their way to tell me they're not doing anything illegal. I just would have assumed that, but thanks for letting me know Google.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Google will not be evil ... except where permitted by federal law.
asdffdsa321 9y ago
For me it's the push notification "how was your stay at Starbucks" .. so creepy
- Phrodo_00 9y ago
  I think you can disable location history/reporting. (I don't because I like looking at my location history, but it IS creepy that it's an opt-out)
  - glhaynes 9y ago
    It's also (to many) a creepy usage of the data. It's reminding you that it's watching you — and not (primarily) to help you, but for somebody's profit.
  - mkj 9y ago
    You still get those even with it disabled.
  - kqr 9y ago
    These are two separate things. You can disable location history, but I'm not actually sure what that means in terms of data retention besides "you can no longer access your location history". I do know that it does not disable these sort of "immediate" responses to your current location. You can disable the responses (one by one separately), but it is pretty clear that it disables only that specific response, not the data collection itself.
- rurban 9y ago
  I do like the NSA to know where I was at a certain time in history. So that they cannot come up with a random allegation and I do have some proof that at the least my phone was somewhere else.
jk2323 9y ago
This sounds interesting. While it is definitely possible to enable, I doubt that this would be legal in many countries. 1. Is there any proof that google "mines" your phone conversations on project fi? 2. Have you done testing? Like, get a friend and do several phone calls over a week with trigger words you agreed on and that you will use a couple of times (e.g. herpes, pregnancy, etc.).
jorvi 9y ago
Google owns 60-80% of these markets: smartphone, search, advertising, e-mail, video, browser, mapping. They don't need to own your desktop OS. This is also why I always tell people Apple vs Google is a silly comparison. Apple might have a bigger market cap and make more money (currently), but Google largely owns nearly every important market. They're set up to take the deep learning market as well, and if Waymo pans out they're also the first to level 5 autonomous cars. Hell, during the Obama era, Google had on average 1 White House meeting a week (!). That's influence no market cap can buy. Funny thing is that I'm typing this on my Macbook Pro with my iPhone next to it. Apple is a sublime hardware company that also takes great care in crafting the most human software experience, but we're going to a 'The Expanse' future where every screen is just a dumb pipe to the cloud and the software on that cloud is just a dumb pipe to your personal AI and massive data trove. Apple is ill-suited for such a world, yet Google would thrive in it.
- jk4930 9y ago
  https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
- s3r3nity 9y ago
  > Hell, during the Obama era, Google had on average 1 White House meeting a week (!). I had no idea about this - does anyone have citations on what the meetings were about? Were they just typical lobbying efforts?
victorhooi 9y ago
Are you sure the two are actually related? AFAIK, Google doesn't mine phone calls, and I'm not aware of any companies that do. Even thinking about it from a technical point of view, it seems quite unlikely.

microwavecamera 9y ago

Holy crap that is weird. Well I won't be using Google Fi. I was reading Fi's Terms of Service and came across this gem: We take protecting your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” very seriously. Using CPNI without your additional approval is limited to specific purposes. By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to your CPNI without your additional approval only for the following limited purposes: ... Any other purpose permitted by federal law So they can use your personal data without your approval for anything that's not illegal? Spurious use of the word "limited" there Google.

infogulch 9y ago
Wait, if that's a limited list, why is there anything listed before "everything not illegal" at all? Are there other things they do that are illegal? Or is that just designed to confuse and mask the last item?
- infogulch 9y ago
  It's stupid. The whole section could be rewritten as just: By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” without your additional approval for any purpose permitted by federal law I just read it myself, that's essentially what it says. The whole privacy section is just garbage filler to distract you from that, unless I'm reading it completely wrong.
  - alexanderdmitri 9y ago
    I wonder why it's permitted by Federal law for a corporate entity to write legal notices in such a way that is limited to, in most cases, leading the user to believe something is being asserted via highly contrived prolixity when in fact the assertion is entirely void of any substance outside of the tacit acknowledgement from the entity issuing the notice that there will be no breach of notoriously vague Federal law unless the lawyers working for the entity, who (in so many words) actually authored the notice in the first place, see a loophole through which they believe they can exonerate their client without needlessly causing their client's PR firm to work overtime especially in cases where the aforementioned lack of substance is purposefully placed over the purpose of the notice, which may be defined, but is not definitively limited to meaning, the entity will more or less use the data of the notified person, who may or may not be misled by traditionally sound intuition as well as the insubstantial notice being described to believe that his or her actions upon the entity's platform are private, as currency, thus leveraging the intimate knowledge of the disoriented, albeit notified, person to manipulate thoughts, desires, and actions (not to mention internal and external perception in general) towards any and all ends the entity dictates based on fiduciary goals and its incommensurable and entropic drive to further consolidate control of a market the entity continues to cultivate and grow beyond all reasonable proportion.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  > Or is that just designed to confuse and mask the last item? Bingo. The main reason most ToS's are like ten pages long, really. They're counting on you not reading it.
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  Plus it's doesn't exactly instill confidence in me that Google has to go out of their way to tell me they're not doing anything illegal. I just would have assumed that, but thanks for letting me know Google.
pmoriarty 9y ago
Google will not be evil ... except where permitted by federal law.

asdffdsa321 9y ago

For me it's the push notification "how was your stay at Starbucks" .. so creepy

Phrodo_00 9y ago
I think you can disable location history/reporting. (I don't because I like looking at my location history, but it IS creepy that it's an opt-out)
- glhaynes 9y ago
  It's also (to many) a creepy usage of the data. It's reminding you that it's watching you — and not (primarily) to help you, but for somebody's profit.
- mkj 9y ago
  You still get those even with it disabled.
- kqr 9y ago
  These are two separate things. You can disable location history, but I'm not actually sure what that means in terms of data retention besides "you can no longer access your location history". I do know that it does not disable these sort of "immediate" responses to your current location. You can disable the responses (one by one separately), but it is pretty clear that it disables only that specific response, not the data collection itself.
rurban 9y ago
I do like the NSA to know where I was at a certain time in history. So that they cannot come up with a random allegation and I do have some proof that at the least my phone was somewhere else.

jk2323 9y ago

This sounds interesting. While it is definitely possible to enable, I doubt that this would be legal in many countries. 1. Is there any proof that google "mines" your phone conversations on project fi? 2. Have you done testing? Like, get a friend and do several phone calls over a week with trigger words you agreed on and that you will use a couple of times (e.g. herpes, pregnancy, etc.).

jorvi 9y ago

Google owns 60-80% of these markets: smartphone, search, advertising, e-mail, video, browser, mapping. They don't need to own your desktop OS. This is also why I always tell people Apple vs Google is a silly comparison. Apple might have a bigger market cap and make more money (currently), but Google largely owns nearly every important market. They're set up to take the deep learning market as well, and if Waymo pans out they're also the first to level 5 autonomous cars. Hell, during the Obama era, Google had on average 1 White House meeting a week (!). That's influence no market cap can buy. Funny thing is that I'm typing this on my Macbook Pro with my iPhone next to it. Apple is a sublime hardware company that also takes great care in crafting the most human software experience, but we're going to a 'The Expanse' future where every screen is just a dumb pipe to the cloud and the software on that cloud is just a dumb pipe to your personal AI and massive data trove. Apple is ill-suited for such a world, yet Google would thrive in it.

jk4930 9y ago
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
s3r3nity 9y ago
> Hell, during the Obama era, Google had on average 1 White House meeting a week (!). I had no idea about this - does anyone have citations on what the meetings were about? Were they just typical lobbying efforts?

victorhooi 9y ago

Are you sure the two are actually related? AFAIK, Google doesn't mine phone calls, and I'm not aware of any companies that do. Even thinking about it from a technical point of view, it seems quite unlikely.