Google IS evil

[Hawtbawx]

Google Tracks Your Movements, Like It Or Not

by Ryan Nakashima

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.

An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used privacy settings that say they will prevent it from doing so.

Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request...


...Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search...
​

more...



​

​

[/QUOTE

Completely agree with you. Evil as fuck.

 

[trysail]

A Test Of The Tropical 200-300 mb Warming Rate In Climate Models
by Ross McKitrick

I sat down to write a description of my new paper with John Christy, but when I looked up a reference via Google Scholar something odd cropped up that requires a brief digression.

Google Scholar insists on providing a list of “recommended” articles whenever I sign on to it. Most turn out to be unpublished or non-peer reviewed discussion papers. But at least they are typically current, so I was surprised to see the top rank given to “Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere,” a decade-old paper by Santer et al. Google was, however, referring to its reappearance as a chapter in a 2018 book called Climate Modelling: Philosophical and Conceptual Issuesedited by Elizabeth Lloyd and Eric Winsberg, two US-based philosophers. Lloyd specifically describes herself as “a philosopher of climate science and evolutionary biology, as well as a scientist studying women’s sexuality” so readers should not expect specialized expertise in climate model evaluation, nor does the book’s editors exhibit any. Yet Google’s algorithm flagged it for me as the best thing out there and positioned two of its chapters as top leads in its “recommended” list.

Much of the first part of the book is an extended attack on a 2007 paper by David Douglass, John Christy, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer on the model/observational mismatch in the tropical troposphere. The editors add a diatribe against John Christy in particular for supposedly being impervious to empirical evidence, using flawed statistical methods and refusing to accept the validity of climate model representations of the warming of the tropical troposphere.

By way of contrast, and as an exemplar of research probity, they reproduce the decade-old Santer et al. paper and rely entirely on it for their case. If they are aware of any subsequent literature (which I doubt) they don’t mention it. They fail to mention:

-Santer bitterly fought releasing his data
-Despite having data up to 2007 he truncated his sample at 1999
-If he had used the same methodology on the full data set he’d have reached the opposite conclusion, supporting Douglass et al. rather than supposedly refuting them
-Steve McIntyre and I submitted a comment to the journal showing this. It was rejected, in part because the referee considered Santer’s statistical method invalid and didn’t want it perpetuated through further discussion
-We re-cast the article as a more detailed discussion of trend comparison methodology and published it in 2010 in Atmospheric Science Letters. We confirmed, among other things, that based on modern econometric testing methods the gap between models and observations in the tropical troposphere is statistically significant.​

​

more...
​

What's in your algorithm?


​

 

[phrodeau]

They can only track your locations if you carry their devices with you. They can only track your search history if you use a single device to search, or sign in with them when you use a different device.

 

[trysail]

CALLER: Is this Gordon's Pizza?


GOOGLE: No sir, it's Google Pizza.


CALLER: I must have dialed a wrong number. Sorry.


GOOGLE: No sir, Google bought Gordon’s Pizza last month.


CALLER: OK. I would like to order a pizza.


GOOGLE: Do you want your usual, sir?


CALLER: My usual? You know me?


GOOGLE: According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.


CALLER: OK! That’s what I want …


GOOGLE: May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?


CALLER: What? I detest vegetables..


GOOGLE: Your cholesterol is not good, sir.


CALLER: How the hell do you know?


GOOGLE: Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.


CALLER: Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza! I already take medication for my cholesterol.


GOOGLE: Excuse me sir, but you have not taken your medication regularly. According to our database, you only purchased a box of 30 cholesterol tablets once, at Drug RX Network, 4 months ago.


CALLER: I bought more from another drugstore.


GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your credit card statement.


CALLER: I paid in cash.


GOOGLE: But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.


CALLER: I have other sources of cash.


GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your last tax return unless you bought them using an undeclared income source, which is against the law.


CALLER: WHAT THE HELL?


GOOGLE: I'm sorry, sir, we use such information only with the sole intention of helping you.


CALLER: Enough already! I'm sick to death of Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and all the others. I'm going to an island without internet, cable TV, where there is no cell phone service and no one to watch me or spy on me.


GOOGLE: I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport first. It expired 6 weeks ago…



​

 

[SpeareChucker]

Okay, that's funny, but too close to the truth.

 

[LupusDei]

Turn the GPS services off. Saves battery too. It's a bit annoying to dismiss pop up begging for the location data every time I open maps, but most of the time I do know where I am myself, and that's fully enough.

 

[trysail]

Google

IS

evil.

​

 

[von_Bismarck]

Science

IS

evil.

​

Fyp; yw.

 

[Dribble]

Here is a novel idea tryfuck. Let me use what I want...you use what you want. An idea like that....is....American...dont you think?

 

[trysail]

Google

IS

evil.




_____________________________
(not least for its multiple classes of stock including one class with super-voting rights— that, of course, is a major, serious and flagrant violation of good corporate governance)





​

 

[bellisarius]

I switched to DuckDuckGo some time ago.

 

[ryan8558]

Then don't fucking use it!

 

[jaF0]

While to company is, at least some of the employees may not be. They're trying to stop the company from bidding on one of Donny's ICE cloud schemes.

 

[ryan8558]

https://gizmodo.com/list-of-former-googlers-claiming-google-hates-conservat-1837261837

 

[Rightguide]

I switched to DuckDuckGo some time ago.

So did I. Google represents a clear threat to the free exchange of information and speech in the United States, and the world. George Orwell would be astonished.

 

[trysail]

Gaggle Doesn't Want Employees Debating Politics At Work Anymore


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ebating-politics-at-work-anymore?srnd=premium



​

 

[jaF0]

That's OK. Employees shouldn't be doing that. They should be working.

Outside of work, on their own time, they should be free to lobby against the company's policies.

 

[beezzz]

I now use BING

 

[suurfer]

[/COLOR][/SIZE][/B]
A very long but eye-opening article:
The Case Against Google


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
by Charles Duhigg

...Google has succeeded where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide. It processes trillions of queries each year, which works out to at least 5.5 billion a day, 63,000 a second. So odds are good that sometime in the last week, or last hour, or last 10 minutes, you’ve used Google to answer a nagging question or to look up a minor fact, and barely paused to consider how near-magical it is that almost any bit of knowledge can be delivered to you faster than you can type the request. If you’re old enough to remember the internet before 1998, when Google was founded, you’ll recall what it was like when searching online involved AltaVista or Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or porn. (Pity the early web enthusiasts who innocently asked Jeeves about “amateurs” or “steel.”)...

In other words, it’s very likely you love Google, or are at least fond of Google, or hardly think about Google, the same way you hardly think about water systems or traffic lights or any of the other things you rely on every day. Therefore you might have been surprised when headlines began appearing last year suggesting that Google and its fellow tech giants were threatening everything
from our economy to democracy itself.


(much) more...


​

[/INDENT]

Interesting.
I was just google-ing a topic of discussion, and this article reminded me of this thread and bellisarius's:
Further evidence to support the above point:



July 23, 2019
"New York became the first state in the nation to empower revenge-porn victims to get their intimate images yanked off the Internet, thanks to a bill championed for nearly two years by The Post that was signed into law Tuesday.
While 45 other states have anti-revenge porn laws, New York’s is the first to give victims a way to fight back.

“The fight for revenge porn laws has proven to be a six-year gladiator match."
We outmatched not just the pervs, predators and jerks, who distribute revenge porn, we also won against all the forces that interfered with the passage of this law: civil-liberty groups, big-tech lobbyists and Internet companies like Google.”
Legislators were close to adopting the measure last year, but they backed off amid mounting pressure from tech giants including Google."

https://nypost.com/2019/07/23/new-york-state-enacts-historic-bill-to-crack-down-on-revenge-porn/

https://nypost.com/2018/06/21/new-yorks-revenge-porn-bill-dies-after-11th-hour-campaign-by-google/

 

[suurfer]

Just wow:

https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/how-google-has-destroyed-the-lives-of-revenge-porn-victims/

 

[Ziggins]

Many features of many sites don't work until I trust the Google scripts in NoScript. Seeing it on the script list of nearly all sites I visit is a visual reminder of how much of the internet that Google controls or owns.

 

[phrodeau]

Every cellphone tracks your movements, and every GPS can tell if you're speeding.

 

[Hal9000_]

I googled the google news aggregator about this.

On my Microsoft based PC.

EVIL!

I'm switching to OS1.

 

[oddity83]

Not evil so much as they have the ability to be if they choose. In time when a new generation takes over then I expect them to go full Dr. Evil but not until all the current folks are gone.
That being said, DuckDuckGo is a good alternative no matter what some asshat thinks. It's not about databases for searches, it's about privacy and they provide that. Mostly.
Plus with the Deep Web being used more and more Google becomes less useful.

You want real evil keep an eye on Amazon. Before long they'll have an underground lab beneath Raccoon City.

What do mean before long? I would be more surprised if they didn't.

 

[seeshelly]

The Google God

I definitely agree there's room for concern, and a particular worry about home assistants. I don't think it's a paranoid fantasy to believe listening devices have become too intrusive. But, evil? trysail is putting this out because he's championing global warming denialism, and his preferred brand of anti-science propaganda isn't getting the ranking from Google that he wants.

Global warming is very real. If not for the sun the Earths surface temperature would be minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. Solar radiation has been warming the Earth for billions of years. If you don't believe me just check with the Google God and find the truth. Stop "global warming denialism" by using Google.