Google poised to become your phone company

Originally posted by krystalice
reply to post by Copernicus

 

Yes privacy will come at a price of sacrifice, but what is there to hide, unless you are doing something unlawful.

Thats the argument being used constantly. I can think of a number of things I could do with access to your information. We all have things to hide.

1) Blackmail. Your information from Google making it into my hands. I know what sites you visit and what you have chatted about with your friends for years back. I know if you have visited porn sites, I know if you spend a lot of time on conspiracy sites etc. Unless you want your employer to know every secret you have, hand over cash. Or make that decision I want you to make to give me more power. People in positions of power everywhere being blackmailed to do what I want them to do.

2) Destroy your marriage. Same thing here. Dirty secrets coming out to wife and children.

3) Government pressure / blackmail. Get too inconvenient and suddenly some private information about you becomes public.

Im sure you see the power of information. We all have secrets we dont want everybody to know, and some people will do what they can to keep these things a secret. The more powerful you are, the more you usually have to hide. Having access to this information allows you to control the individuals behavior.

Politicians will easily do the bidding of corporations using this, if they are not already doing it for the money being offered. Key personnel can be blackmailed inside organizations. And so on.

Nothing to hide? No such thing exists.


[edit on 15-11-2009 by Copernicus]

reply to post by Copernicus


Sure of course, personal information has a potential for abuse and blackmail outside the scope of what is considered a legal boundary.

Internet social websites are developed in two ways, first; what the consumer needs, and second; and what the company receives for statistical purposes or advertising profits or services offered to the customers.

Before signing up for a service the service, ethically the service will provide the user a lengthy boring fine print known as terms & conditions that clearly states the rights in regards to the consumer anonymous and confidential matters of privacy and what the company intends to do with the consumer data.

Normally some social websites if stated in the T&C will benefit from data mining the information for statistical purposes. One typical example is a Facebook and YouTube,we might notice how YouTube services tend to recommend the footage relevant to your history of searched data. A lot could be said about an individuals account by accessing his or her YouTube account history.

Thus ethically speaking, the consumer is given a formal consent and the ability to modify the privacy account settings, and should the company step outside the boundaries of the legal boundaries by blackmailing the information to some one else by breaching the confidentially of the user than the victim has the right to sue the company.

Nothing is for free now day's, that is why I said privacy will come at an acceptable sacrifice, we all have families to feed and priorities to support from what we earn, even the developers of the enterprise social websites likes of Google and Microsoft.

If we are really going to become totally paranoid about the dilemma of privacy, we have two options; not to sign up for the service or disconnect from the internet if we may suspect that some one is filtering and logging our data as we browse the internet, which is very possible.


[edit on 11/15/2009 by krystalice]

Yeah but what can you do? It's a free market capitalism system. As long as google doesn't break the law, google may expand to other services, within the confine of US antitrust law that is.

Originally posted by Jazzyguy
Yeah but what can you do? It's a free market capitalism system. As long as google doesn't break the law, google may expand to other services, within the confine of US antitrust law that is.

Correct, as long as the antitrust policy is not abused, the Goggles reputation will not be at stake.

It is excellent that Microsoft has not managed to buy off Google in a bid for internet dominance, without Google's stake in today's internet many of us would have never be able to enjoy the confining moment of collecting and analyzing the spatial data with Google Earth/Sky/Moon/Mars.

Originally posted by Now_Then
reply to post by pavil

 

How would that work? - so your like in the middle of a call and there is an advert played into the call?? I suppose it would be easy enough to deliver text messages, or even more visual messages to a smarter phone - hell I'd probably put up with that for a free phone service...

To be honest I know I should be concerned about the omnipresence of Google - especially cos of the incredible spped they have come from nowhere... But I'm not, they are very clever at what they deliver and they really do seem to like the end user getting everything at little or no cost - which I like...

Don't quite remember....I think it would be images that would show up on your phone, kinda replacing your default wallpaper/Greet screen with a changeable "billboard". Of course they stream you other ad content based on who/what you are calling/searching. Sorta like this, you call a pet store and all of sudden you get shown an ad for the local PET MART.

I could see this, along with a Twitter-like service just doing some phenomenal things. It would quite literally change advertising.

Our founding fathers fought and died for a set of ideals and rights. One of those ideals was that a man in his home should have privacy. Between your four walls you had the right to defy the government, read what you will, and pray as you wish without anyone knowing.

Now people are willing to throw every vestige of privacy out the window for convenient computing and free phone service.

Where do we as a society draw the line? When do we say instant gratification isn't worth the sacrifice?

I'm sorry guys, Google doesn't worry me. They're taking on businesses that are already big and corrupt, they need the competition that Google will bring. They haven't done any harm, not yet anyways.

Originally posted by pavil
Sorta like this, you call a pet store and all of sudden you get shown an ad for the local PET MART.

Yes I could see that as being a little disconcerting - no doubt they have already indexed every phone book in existence already and can do reverse directory lookups as easy as breathing...

Which means not only do they know what types of businesses you are calling - they know WHO you will be calling... Every phone is registered to a person or address - cross referencing databases for Google is literally nothing so long as they already have the data archived...

And if a court orders so that data can be turned over just like your standard phone companies do now (back when I worked for a mobile company every so often I had to redirect Police enquiries to specific teams who delt with them)....

Yes privacy will come at a price of sacrifice, but what is there to hide, unless you are doing something unlawful.

Your private life, your private things that are only for you.
Sometimes people just like to spend time alone with their thoughts and things and not be invaded, it's called privacy.

Companies have secrets to market strategies, people have secrets for succsess, things that you do not share with others because those things are yours alone, but people would hunt for them, strip you naked and take that away from you.

Also confort is always private, I don;'t want everybody for example seeing pictures of my family.

I have a better idea, why don't you ask the goverment to install a camera in your home, a live camera and see how confortable you are, so they can look at you when you eat, when you change, when you sit.
Guess what it will make you unconfortable, and it will make you act like you are not your self and that is what happens when people are left without privacy.

Privacy is esential to our lives, to our character development.

Originally posted by reasonable
They have yet to give me a reason not to trust them. Until that time comes good service and smart products are king and I'll use the best (google).

I guess you don't do the type of searches that I usually do.

One of the reasons for Google's popularity is a false sense of effectiveness. Sure, their searches are faster, but they give fake results.

When Google appeared with its innovative search engine it killed the best search engine that I have ever seen, Altavista, the only search engine that gave proximity results, allowing for us to search two words with less than four (or some other number) of words in between.

Google gave more results, so people thought it was better, but if we click on the "Cached" link below the search result we see many times the following text:

"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page"

That means that they include pages without the text we are searching for but with links with that text, making those results useless.

And I have seen many times (and I am sure many people did too) Google saying that it found a large number of results, but when we move from the first pages the results disappear and sometimes are reduced to less than 10% of what was originally presented as the results found.

I don't know about you, but I don't trust someone that presents false information to make their services look better.

As an example, here is a Google search for December 1, 1640 a Portuguese holiday.

It's presented as having "about" 8,620 results, but if we move to page 12 we see that those 8,620 results were changed into 112.

OK, it says that it has omitted some results, let's see those too.

They are more results, that's true, but they are only 225.

Why was the search presented as having 8,620 results?

I hate liars.

Originally posted by krystalice
It is excellent that Microsoft has not managed to buy off Google in a bid for internet dominance, without Google's stake in today's internet many of us would have never be able to enjoy the confining moment of collecting and analyzing the spatial data with Google Earth/Sky/Moon/Mars.

I suppose you never heard about Keyhole (a private company with some financial support from the CIA's venture capital version, In-Q-Tel. That company has some interesting investments).

That's the name of the company Google bought to have what they then called Google Earth, and that's why the forum for Google Earth is still called Keyhole and the files used by Google Earth are KML (Keyhole Markup Language).

But if you want an open source version then there is one, NASA World Wind (the best source for information about it is in this site).

I think Google is just doing what it does best, buying some company and present it some time later as something new.

Capitalism at its best.

About privacy, when I asked for a Microsoft "Passport" to have access to some Microsoft sites, they had a check-box for people from the EU, and when I marked it (being from a EU member country), the new page did not asked for any private information.