My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil
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@luetage said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
I still wonder how the dynamics to fight and lock out competition develop. Because it seems to "happen" to all companies leading in a field.
Because if you follow the capitalistic logic through to its conclusion then that is the end goal. And that's why pure capitalism is definitely not the best way to run society in my opinion.
People who have an idealistic belief that the market can solve everything seem to have no grasp of consequences and the bigger picture.
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Machine translation of google
Tony, the mascot character of vivaldi, established the new Western Roman Republic.
And Tony made a throne to the new emperor of Western Roman.
Let us all bless Tony.
Our vivaldi community is a Roman senator and an Roman integrated forces officer.
Also Tony. It is the 14th emperor counted from Emperor Honorius.
Original text of Japanese
vivaldiのマスコットキャラクターであるTonyは新しい西ローマ共和制国を建国しました。
そしてトニーは新たなる西ローマ皇帝に即位をなされました。
私たち皆さんでトニーを祝福をしてあげましょう。
私たち皆さんのvivaldiコミュニティはローマの元老院議員であり、ローマの統合軍将校でもあります。
またトニーは。ホノリウス帝から数えて14人目の皇帝であります。 -
I've been very suspicious of Google for a very long time. "Don't be evil" sounds wonderful, but often "evil", or at least "bad" depends on where you are standing. What they have always really done is promote themselves as supporting a particular ideology, or perhaps "mentality" is the better word- Progressivism. This is basically the idea that the morals and values of a society should be dictated by a moral elite.
It is naturally censorious, suspicious of/hostile to differing opinions and genuine plurality, and sees democracy (itself a dangerous word) as a system by which these moralist better people manage the population by manipulating that population's values.
Honestly, I much prefer the "evil" of a company that just wants my money. I know what they want and it's straightforward. When a company wades into the domain of morals and values, I fear they want my soul, which is not really worth trading for access to documents stored on somebody else's server, frankly.
It's a terrible pity that the technocrats dictating web standards produced a system (HTML/CSS/Javascript) so huge and unwieldy that only the most massive of coding operations can afford to develop rendering engines. The cynic in me wonders if this is deliberate.
The positive thing is that today's monopoly is tomorrow's horse and buggy. Google will not be in the position they are in forever. When a technology comes along that kills the clumsy "search" paradigm (which requires vast investment in what amounts to brute force cataloguing of information, fine tuned by hand (I dread to think how many people Google have checking that Christy Canyon won't turn up in my search suggestions)), Google are toast.
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@duarte-framos: while worked at google we got email in our inbox cleary stated that google have officially changed their motto from "dont be evil" to "obey the law"
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googles policy is a joke and does not promotes intelligence, creativity and free thinkers. google use their policy to bully around just like Jon Von Tetzchner said.
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There are worse than Google (Facbook?), But there are good alternatives. As a search engine eg ixquik is the best (Startpage), but for other services to the height is already complicated.
Ok, you can use Flickr for photos (1 Tb free) but Yahoo? OneDrive instead of GDrive but Microsoft? Mega, Dropbox do not have the same functionality.
Nor are there alternatives that are really equivalent to YouTube
Good alternatives therefore only exist for the seeker and for the mail.
It is therefore not so easy to get around to Google.
But you also have to know that there is the possibility of accessing all the data that Google collects, with the possibility of modifying and deleting themhttps://myaccount.google.com/dashboard
We can modify or delete the data in Google maps and even disable the tracking in this service.
https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb
We can download our data
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Customize ads (whoever you are interested in)
https://adssettings.google.com/u/0/authenticated
View and delete our history and activity
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
View and delete our searches on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history
View and modify permissions for other programs and services
https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
Google for some months also has an encrypted search engine which web analytics services can no longer access, leaving them in the dark about our searches
The privacy in the network in first line depends on ourselves and there are good methods to safeguard it, independent of the service that we use.
The main reason why I use a search engine like ixquik or DuckDuckGo, is only to avoid that my search results are adjusted according to previous results, which narrows the search results too much -
@catweazle that's a good list there! Maybe I should take a note of those...
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@rigo of course I'm interested. I can do beta testing on my JollaC if you want. I try to avoid installing android apps. They import all the evil from android, namely slowness and crashes
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I have seen this sort of behaviour first-hand as well, and, as you say, Jon, the timing can be very suspicious—so much so that it’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence. I’ve seen Google libel websites through their malware warning system (one was clean for months but still had the black Google warning page), delete blogs, breach their own privacy policies over their Ads Preferences Manager (for years, if you opted out, Google would opt you back in within 24 hours), and possibly bias news results toward big players (and to heck with independents). I have been watching these things since 2009 and calling Google out on them, and the natural solution is to de-Google. Your blog post is actually the reason I switched to Vivaldi properly after being a Firefox user for years: if you’re wary of Google, then that means you’ll do what you can to protect us from its excesses and questionable behaviours.
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@d0j0p interesting. I don't see that, ever, and I use drive, docs, sheets, keep, the rest all the time.
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@aach1 You're pretty lucky, then. I wish I could figure out why it's showing that, and see if I could turn it off. It's not a huge deal, as I can just click x to remove it, but it shows up everytime I go on Drive.
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@networkedbrowsing Closed networks are just as evil in my opinion. Facebook, LinkedIn etc. all do this so you are forced to join if you want to see their content and I consider that to be anti - Internet as well.
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Worse than Google is Windows 10 which by default collects more than 60 private data it sends and it is not so easy to configure all the privacy settings
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@catweazle for Windows 10 privacy issues I always run O&O ShutUp10. Nearly all options on maximum privacy. It seems to work very well but you have to run it regularly since Windows Update often resets things.
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@mossman said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
@catweazle for Windows 10 privacy issues I always run O&O ShutUp10. Nearly all options on maximum privacy. It seems to work very well but you have to run it regularly since Windows Update often resets things.
Yes, there are also other utilities for this purpose, but beware, it is not advisable to deactivate everything because with this also some things stop working.
I know O&O, a good brand, I use them O&O FileDirect -
@mossman Never heard of O&O ShutUp10. How does that hold up against Spybot Anti-beacon?
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@d0j0p Never heard of Spybot Anti-beacon, so I've no idea!
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