This is the problem with giving even reputable agencies and institutions your private data: They will give it to Google in secret: https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/
@ocdtrekkie Implying Google isn't reputable. They're one of the safest vaults to put someone's data in.
@mtomczak Google is one of the most pervasively evil entities on the face of the globe. The biggest threat your privacy could ever face is in charge of that vault.
@ocdtrekkie I was just mentioning to someone earlier today: lost my insurance card. As you know, that can be a pretty significant risk to health in the US.
I'd taken a photo of it, but no idea when.
Google photo searched for "insurance card" and it was right there.
All that creep powers magic that keeps me sane, so I'm gonna be a hard sell on "most evil." I was there for the engineers revolting when management even considered AI for drones. I was there to see the internal fights on figuring out what ethics looks like in a tech space that never existed before. And yeah, I bore witness to a lot of less-than-perfect.
But dude... There are actual defense contractors out there. I have no idea where you put the "evil" bar, but it must encompass a pretty wide swath if Google is over it.
@mtomczak All of the people who protested or stood against Google's actions were fired or pushed out. At least most defense contractors support a cause, Google is just as happy to sell to Russia as the US, and only withdrew because they couldn't transfer the funds out.
@ocdtrekkie I literally know people currently at Google, so your "all of" assertions are falling on deaf ears here.
Google got hit with a fine by Russia for letting prohibited Ukraine news and information discrediting the Russian military on its services, particularly YouTube.
I follow your content and generally like it, but on the Google topic you're far off-base, no offense intended.
@mtomczak No offense intended, but give it a few more years free from the cult tactics they used on employees and see if you still hold the same position. And people working at Google today still are deeply unethical people who have put personal wealth ahead of ethics and human rights.
@ocdtrekkie It's already been years.
I think I'd have to get a better idea of what you define as unethical (besides, broadly, pursuing their mission statement "To organize the world's information and make it university accessible and useful") to have any thoughts on whether they're current staff is unethical. More often than not, ethics at their scale is hard to pin down (especially given how many mutually-exclusive templates there are at global scale).
I mean, if your assertion is simply "no company can be that big and ethical at the same time," agree to disagree.
@mtomczak I mean, it's generally true that for a company to be that profitable, it is almost certainly doing something wrong. But no, Google is still owned and run by it's sexually-harassing founders, a pile of executives who set a new bar for inappropriate workplace conduct, and a it has actually managed to act illegally in nearly every single business vertical in every jurisdiction it operates, and it pays off a wide variety of politicians and media outlets to spin otherwise.
@mtomczak If you work at Google, you have decided to help Sergey "the point of hiring female employees is ****ing them" Brin make more money for his yacht. And everyone who ever worked for him is going to have to square that with their conscience some day.
@ocdtrekkie We will.
Me, I take some solace in the fact that their computer is the only machine my older relatives have ever used that works for them, isn't trying to sell them something, isn't perpetually advertising at them, isn't perpetually broken, and is locked down enough that they can't install anything that breaks it.
There's obviously room for improvement and Brin's behavior (and the behavior of several execs) is indefensible. I'm not sure we're covering a lot of "special evil" ground by calling out American CEOs for being personally trash, but yes, room for improvement.
(Insert Summer Smith's rant about working for the devil here ;) ).
@mtomczak Google's leading ad vertical is scams and malware, and that convenience for *your* older relatives have cost everyone else's relatives hundreds of billions of dollars. Google is complicit and profits from pervasive malicious ads that they deceptively portray as the top search result. (Educating seniors on how to protect themselves from Google Ad scams is a top part of helping seniors recover from scams. I've been working in this area in particular for well over ten years.)
@mtomczak Nearly every scam or malware install I've ever dealt with has been traced back to a search ad. Google has reinstated malicious advertisers I've reported, using the same domain name. And of course, search ads are permitted to lie about the destination URL, leading to countless examples where the "top result" is an ad which says the URL is a reputable domain but goes to a scammer.
@ocdtrekkie (Incidentally, if you catch one of those scam ads, feel free to screenshot and send my way. I'm curious how they're beating the filters)
@ocdtrekkie I'd be interested. If you can pass the keywords my way I'll be happy to do my own research too.
Senior scams are *absolutely* insidious. I field phone calls for a relative, and it's all damn day with those people. Manage to get one cursing me out because he called back-to-back with his colleague in the same call center; that was a fun day. ;)
@mtomczak Here's a great example. If you want to see ads targeted at seniors, look for "mapquest" (nobody else would look for MapQuest on Google... instead of Google Maps).
@mtomczak You'll notice the top three results are all ads, and all malicious. The real MapQuest result is nestled near the bottom of the screen. Searching for MapsTab, MapsAssist, and GetSuperMaps will all reveal they are browser hijacking extensions.
Oh, and here's some Chrome Web Store malware I commonly see advertised, and I've tried having Google take down before:
@mtomczak The same malicious hijackers appear on more generic queries sometimes too, when people might otherwise want to go to Google Maps.
@mtomczak Here's another fun/weird one, for a very common first thing people search. Google outbid it (you can pay yourself infinite money for free, after all), but it's just odd:
@ocdtrekkie Oh, this one's clever. It appears to be grey-walking the policy very carefully. *Technically,* its disclosure and the text on the page says exactly what it's going to do, but you and I both know it doesn't pass the smell test.
But ads policy isn't made of smell tests; it's made of bright-line rules (because Google can be sued for anticompetition if it isn't consistent in enforcing those rules). I've no doubt this one is playing cat-and-mouse with Google ads policy.
@mtomczak I mean, I think you can admit Google could absolutely defend banning this in a court of law. But the primary issue, of course, is that Google is choosing to place a deliberately dishonest and harmful ad, styled to look like a search result in order to encourage people to click on it, above the legitimate result.
Search ads used to be obvious but every A/B test has proven revenue goes up when they look more like search results.
@ocdtrekkie I think at this point, I may start advising my elderly relatives to use Bing for the same reason I advised them to use Apple back when Microsoft didn't have its malware-and-viruses house in order. Ethics / "evil" aside, there's such a thing as being a victim of one's own success, and if Google can't police this crap purely because they're the biggest target, well, strong incentive to use the smaller targets.
Bing is certainly good enough for the 90% search space to act as a substitute, especially for queries like that.
@mtomczak I *will* state/advise Bing is not drastically better in this regard. I just think Google has a lot less of an excuse considering it's their primary competency. I'm using DuckDuckGo or Brave Search usually, but the main thing is I no longer believe seniors should use the Internet without an ad blocker.
Ads are too often misleading to people not tech savvy enough to identify them.
@mtomczak And I say that as someone who used to equate ad blocking to stealing from web content creators.
@ocdtrekkie Oh, it still is (in the sense that if everybody does it, the web ecosystem collapses and it becomes a pay-to-play space completely). But "seniors should use ad blockers" isn't "everybody does it" in the same sense that if everybody had handicap access placards, handicap access spots practically wouldn't exist, but we should still hand those out to people who need them.
@mtomczak I am perhaps just no longer convinced the web platform as we know it collapsing is a bad thing.
@ocdtrekkie A funny thought just occurred to me re: the "mapquest directions" search:
It's ironic how much the search is improved by just removing "mapquest" from the criteria. Like, if people are searching for MapQuest just because it's a name they know, training them to go to maps.google.com or maps.bing.com instead is a strict improvement.
MapQuest pops two banner ads and two block display ads these days. It's kinda crap anymore.
@mtomczak This is how you know these attacks are targeting seniors: Nobody but seniors would search for MapQuest on a search engine with built-in maps abilities. Whether you're on Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo, most people are fine with that given search engine's maps tab.
Searching "mapquest" means you're old. =P
Though FWIW, I've used MapQuest's API for some of my own software dev, and I find it extremely pleasant! They implement OpenStreetMap's standards but also have their proprietary data.
@ocdtrekkie All of that to say: I definitely agree that Google really effed up pushing ads into the main search flow in a way that only the technically-savvy elite can distinguish an ad from an organic result anymore. Bad move.
@mtomczak I will find you some examples when I'm at my desk. They're generally easy to find on any topic aimed at seniors, and I've even had Googlers internally get them blocked only for them to get reinstated, presumably because they're wildly profitable ads to run.