The Geek Forum
Main Forums => Political Opinions => Topic started by: Buster on March 01, 2012, 09:38:10 AM
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So from what I have been reading, under the new Google Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, they will use your search data to "Better market to the consumer."
All search information can now be reported to the United States Government. My burning question is, how does this supposedly help them market better to their users?
To top it all off, if you use a proxy to surf any website "safely" you may now be considered a threat to the United States of America and Google can and will report your use of a proxy service or desktop application.
I personally have used proxies in the past if I was visiting a website that I was unsure of being safe or legitimate. And I know many of you have also. I would like to see what other geeks think about this new Google Privacy law. I personally denounce it and think it's a bunch of crap.
I won't copy and paste the entire Privacy Policy here, but here are the parts that most alarm me.
Information we collect
We collect information to provide better services to all of our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful or the people who matter most to you online.
We collect information in two ways:
Information you give us. For example, many of our services require you to sign up for a Google Account. When you do, we’ll ask for personal information, like your name, email address, telephone number or credit card. If you want to take full advantage of the sharing features we offer, we might also ask you to create a publicly visible Google Profile, which may include your name and photo.
Information we get from your use of our services. We may collect information about the services that you use and how you use them, like when you visit a website that uses our advertising services or you view and interact with our ads and content. This information includes:
Device information
We may collect device-specific information (such as your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number). Google may associate your device identifiers or phone number with your Google Account.
Log information
When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include:
details of how you used our service, such as your search queries.
telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls.
Internet protocol address.
device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL.
cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account.
Location information
When you use a location-enabled Google service, we may collect and process information about your actual location, like GPS signals sent by a mobile device. We may also use various technologies to determine location, such as sensor data from your device that may, for example, provide information on nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.
Unique application numbers
Certain services include a unique application number. This number and information about your installation (for example, the operating system type and application version number) may be sent to Google when you install or uninstall that service or when that service periodically contacts our servers, such as for automatic updates.
Local storage
We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches.
Cookies and anonymous identifiers
We use various technologies to collect and store information when you visit a Google service, and this may include sending one or more cookies or anonymous identifiers to your device. We also use cookies and anonymous identifiers when you interact with services we offer to our partners, such as advertising services or Google features that may appear on other sites.
The most alarming part.
We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users or the public as required or permitted by law.
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A few things you can do which you actually should have done before today:
Pause and remove web history:
https://www.google.com/history/
Pause and remove watch and search history from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/my_history
http://www.youtube.com/my_search_history
Honestly, just take a look around the dashboard and you can find some of these things:
https://www.google.com/dashboard/?hl=en
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A few things you can do which you actually should have done before today:
Pause and remove web history:
https://www.google.com/history/
Pause and remove watch and search history from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/my_history
http://www.youtube.com/my_search_history
Honestly, just take a look around the dashboard and you can find some of these things:
https://www.google.com/dashboard/?hl=en
Did them yesterday.
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And yet people continue to jump ship from Facebook over to G+. This sounds like it's way worse.
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And yet people continue to jump ship from Facebook over to G+. This sounds like it's way worse.
Yes, I tried Google + a while back. When I saw the results of a Google search on myself, showing all of my personal information, family photos, and every other tid bit of information page 1, top of page, I nuked that account real fast. Including deleting all photos and posts.
From what I heard, Google got a lot of heat for that.
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And yet people continue to jump ship from Facebook over to G+. This sounds like it's way worse.
Egads, no. The FB privacy policy is worse by a huge degree. At least on G+ you can actually control what you share pretty easily. In FB pretty much everything is buried, and is a constantly moving target, defaulting on "exposed" whenever they change something or rip some controls away. The biggest example is how any time you comment on something or "Like" something on FB, it shows up to pretty much everybody. With no way to control that.
I finally got fed up with it and bailed to G+ because it's not like that at all there. G+ has its issues, but nothing like that trainwreck that is Facebook. They're not even in the same category of mess.
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defaulting on "exposed" whenever they change something or rip some controls away
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<snip> defaulting on "exposed" whenever they change something or rip some controls away. </snip>
Here's a story for you. One of FB's recent changes did reset the default privacy settings on pictures. My cousin posted a funny and innocent picture of her son, and the story that went with it. The pic is of him sitting naked on the living room floor, reading a book. The story is that his underwear were in the dryer, and he wasn't comfortable going commando, so he decided to stay naked and read while he was waiting. You couldn't see his pieces and parts, but he was clearly naked.
A large number of people who were total strangers to my cousin commented on the photo and tore her a new one for (in their opinion) posting what amounted to child porn on FB. I sent my cousin a private note telling her to check her privacy settings and explaining to her that there was a recent change etc.
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My story involved an old stalker being able to find me because FB reset my location settings to public...
But yeah, that's right up there with that and among the reasons I'm not on FB anymore.
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There's always the option to stop using Google, especially since they're nothing more than a for-profit advertising company.
That being said, I'm kinda boring when it comes to my web searches these days, so I'm not really bothered much...
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Yeah, yeah, it's been past 30 days yadda yadda yadda, Imma bumping dis thread.
So it's been suggested (mandated) that I join Google+ because the higher-ups have a huge hardon for Google and they want me to use that to pass around project info at work.
I don't want to. How terribly at risk am I for doing this? I already refuse to Facebook friends anybody from work because they're a bunch of judgemental (no offense to The Judge wherever His Honor may be these days) assholes, but seriously what am I in for?
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Linkedin for current company. Other social networking past cow-orkers only. Thems da rulez.
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On G+ I created circles to put current coworkers in. I only share things with those circles that I want them to see.
And people you have in your circles can't see what circles they are in. All they can see is that they are circled by you.
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OK, I guess G+ can be added to the safe list. Well for my business G+ account. I'm not so sure that I'd want any cow-orkers googling pbsaurus.