Don't Trust Google (2002)

http://idlewords.com/2002/12/don_t_trust_google.htm

by kryptiskt • 12 years ago

152 83 12 years ago

TeMPOraL6• 12 years ago

And 14 years later there still "is no evidence or even reason to suspect that Google is not being an honest broker. The searches give good results, the rankings seem fair, the service remains free, and we haven’t heard of anyone being arrested for running a dodgy query."

So while the author is right about potential dangers mentioned in the penultimate paragraph, it's been more than a decade and those fears haven't really materialized. The article sounds exactly like things that are being said in anti-Google threads in 2014.

comrade1• 12 years ago

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there's been more than a few people arrested in-part based on their google queries, some of them wrongly and some of them rightly so.

e12e2• 12 years ago

I believe at least that "internet history" has been featured in legal proceedings (arrests/trials) -- I'm not sure if there have been warrants issued based on getting search history from google. I'd love to hear more, if anyone has a reference either way.

renlo• 12 years ago

Uhmmm, nearly everything he described became a reality. Personalized search results, mass data gathering, filtering / censorship of results, the growth of Google to megalithic proportions ('next Microsoft'), etc.

pooper2• 12 years ago

filtering / censorship of results

Could you please elaborate on this one?

nick_riviera4• 12 years ago

Perhaps not yet but they have amassed all the data the author describes and much more.

For example, I just drove half way across the UK. Google knows that because I was using Google maps.

I stopped at Pizza Hut. Google knows that.

I stopped at a BP garage. Google knows that.

I searched for houses in an area in the UK via right move. Google knows that because the embedded map knows my Google cookie...

And so forth...

Now I'm not saying they have done any evil but perhaps it's fair to consider that the past doesn't always hold true in the future and by then you've already hung yourself.

Edit: why down vote facts? Someone work at Google?

mynameisvlad6• 12 years ago

Google doesn't specifically know you stopped at Pizza Hut or the BP garage. It uses coarse location (GPS being too taxing on battery to get constant location updates) which has an accuracy of 100+ meters. So it would know you stopped somewhere around the Pizza Hut, but not specifically that you went inside. Could have just as easily gone to the Tesco next door.

antocv2• 12 years ago

The evilness has been materialized, you just dont want to acknowledge it - Occupy Wallstreet was effectively dismantled, one of the biggest protest movements in modern time as well as Tea Party. The biggest thefts in history went by, quite efficiently put down - and you think that the NSA, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple were not complecent in those events? That the big data aboundant about the people was not used against them?

Who knows whom, where they go, what they read, what theyre interested in, what they search for, what they say to each other. A good college CompSci student with that data could pick out the troublemakers/leaders.

AnthonyMouse• 12 years ago

A good college CompSci student with that data could pick out the troublemakers/leaders.

Occupy fell apart because it didn't have leaders. Or any coherent agenda. It was a bunch of people dissatisfied with the status quo without any realistic prescription for improving it.

The Tea Party at least knew what they wanted. Their problem was taking money from and thereby becoming owned by the entrenched Republican power brokers.

Neither of their failings had anything to do with Google.

angularfan• 12 years ago

Here's a few ways the post became true:

Tracking Google Apps for Education students and even paid Google Apps for Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Conspiring to kill SkyHook just with its outsized influence like Microsoft used to. http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking. http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

Google employee access personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email? http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

Paid inclusion for shopping search results http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-...

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...

ukimoo• 12 years ago

I'm sure you're aware that this collection of yours pertains to complaints of interested parties, and that if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture.

But seeing as you had a cherry picked list of the harshest (and incomplete) reportings at the ready, augmented with you're own slanted commentary my guess is that a "full picture" isn't what you're aiming for here.

ericflo• 12 years ago

lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth

This seems like a really strange argument to me.

zmmmmm2• 12 years ago

Google itself might have remained relatively benign, but the fears have absolutely materialised on the government side. Google is now clearly being used as a point of central control over the internet with the "right to be forgotten", the NSA interceptions, etc. The fact the internet made this far has been largely due to its decentralised nature. The point of the article was that centralisation of any of its functions undoes that robustness.

x0x0• 12 years ago

and weirdly enough google services that compete with eg yelp are almost always at the top! sure couldn't be them using their near-monopoly in search to juice their other businesses, could it?

notfoss• 12 years ago

Antitrust lawsuits are a powerful deterrent, otherwise they surely would have gone ahead.

tillywilly• 12 years ago

Seems like recently these anti-Google posts are being dredged up at a noticeable rate. Is there a reason behind it or is all just ad hoc?

For instance I wonder how OP stumbled about the link.

antocv2• 12 years ago

Thanks to Google these links and many others are kept down under the rug.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Are they? On what do you base that claim?

mynameisvlad6• 12 years ago

This HN page is currently #3 for the search query "Don't Trust Google". So I'm going to call BS right there.

nick_riviera4• 12 years ago

It's at the forefront of people's minds at the moment so it is written and posted about frequently and people are interesed in historical articles as a baseline.

It's good that we're thinking like this. It's simply critical thinking.

kryptiskt2• 12 years ago

That's an easy question to answer, I was trawling through the dusty attics of idlewords.com (feel free to go read A Morning in Iceland http://idlewords.com/2003/11/a_morning_in_iceland.htm), I found it amusingly prescient.

oska• 12 years ago

Seems a little suspicious that this is the very first comment from a new account.

threeseed4• 12 years ago

For instance I wonder how OP stumbled about the link.

The same way I stumble across other pro-Google or anti-Google links.

Regardless it is completely irrelevant.

twsted• 12 years ago

"[...] what would you do if Google required you to set up a user account, or enroll in a service [...] so that you could have more ‘personalized’ search results, and the occasional special offer?"

Um...

TeMPOraL6• 12 years ago

Key word: required.

stock_toaster2• 12 years ago

Something like 5 out of the first 16 comments on this post were all from accounts (1 each) created under 1 hour ago. Weird.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

It isn't surprising. There are lots of reasons why people are unwilling to put their "primary" HN account at risk when they want to say something which can be used against them (or simply down voted into oblivion). When I worked at Google I was very careful about what I said outside of Google, there is very little the company doesn't know about its employees. Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.

So when folks want to contribute to the conversation in some way (either to support, attack, or deflect it seems) but don't want to do so openly, the new accounts come out. One motivation for having a 24 hr waiting period on posting is to mitigate that, but sometimes folks do bring good data under an extra layer of anonymity.

pmiller2• 12 years ago

Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.

Wow. Did you actually see first hand anyone who was punished by Google for things said outside the workplace? And did this extend to topics other than Google?

jmillikin• 12 years ago

  > Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your
  > calibration scores and that translates into real money.

Based on the successful career progressions of several well-known troublemakers at Google, I believe this statement is not currently accurate (if it ever was).

stock_toaster2• 12 years ago

Ah. That makes quite a bit of sense given what you said. Thanks for sharing that.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that google keeps tabs that thoroughly on employees -- but it still feels disappointing to hear it.

mythz• 12 years ago

and they're all anti-Google, something smells.

onokyomo• 12 years ago

They're not anti-Google for crying out loud. It's the same thing as saying you're afraid of heights. No they're not. They're afraid of falling.

Not anti-Google/Heights

They're anti-Exploitation/Falling

yuhong4• 12 years ago

Personally I do think Google is not perfect but I never liked things such as Scroogled.

Istof• 12 years ago

using a service like scroogle might help to avoid local/targeted search results (which I don't like most of the time)

yuhong4• 12 years ago

I am talking about the campaign.

aman_abhishk• 12 years ago

I wrote about this last year. Somewhat similar. http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind-faith-i...

kephra• 12 years ago

I have one idea for how to do that, through a network of peer-to-peer search engines, and I hope to post it soon.

This was 2002 ... Is there any follow up posting on it?

I'm actively developing a censor free distributed search engine, with the abilities to parse the layout of a page into fields like author, title, date, abstract, article, pictures. The system is able to login into sites, hide itself as a normal browser to scrap the dark side of the web. Nodes and leafs of the network will communicate with tor (nyi), and act like a torrent of search engines.

Use the /chat/ or contact from my homepage, if you want to discuss my vision of a Google killer.

kryptiskt2• 12 years ago

There were some blog posts in 2003, referring to a paper. Hmmm... the link is broken, but this should be it: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.58.4...

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

Well, I wanna hear about it, but I don't know if I can contribute with something right now (maybe I can, after I hear about it, but I don't think so), so I'm not going to ask, I don't wanna bother you, I just look forward for reading more about it someday somewhere.

(In fact, I really miss a place where we can post drafts of ideas we're working on, or just thinking about, to get others' feedback on them.)

dublinben2• 12 years ago

Have you seen YaCy? It's a distributed search engine project that's been running for several years. You can start using it to search and crawl right now.

http://yacy.net/en/

dkarapetyan• 12 years ago

This is incredibly prescient but then again Harry S. Truman said a long time ago "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know". It seems that all corporations travel the same historically beaten path.

throwawayads• 12 years ago

Once a company has too much power, the physics of corporations states that it will be abused: https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly-trick...

itistoday2• 12 years ago

um, so what happened to the p2p search engine?

richardw2• 12 years ago

Got an android tablet for 94 year-old grandma a week ago. To simplify her experience I turned off most services she doesn't need. Every time I visit, Google has hoodwinked her into switching something on. Location services, Google+, Google now. She only wants mail and pics. Yesterday I got her an iPad because Apple just makes money on the devices and doesn't spin their BS web of ad-based services at grandma.

From an ex Google absolute fanboy writing this on a Nexus. They used to be an example of open trustworthy behaviour. Now they're just another company to me. The ultimate 'you're the product' company at that, and I dislike that phrase.

scrollaway• 12 years ago

I'm not going to comment on the horrifying way you seem to throw money around...

I am however going to comment on the absurdity of how you seem to protest this whole situation. If she only wants mail and pics, why not get rid of all the other junk that comes pre-installed and put in a generic mail and a generic pics app?

Do you think the situation will be any better on ipad, which is running on a platform that is twenty times as closed as android?

richardw2• 12 years ago

Luckily I had backup plans for the Android, in case she didn't want to use it :) It was a test machine to see if she could even begin to find it useful, and I assumed it'd probably be good enough because hey, they're all the same these days.

That's the reason why I chose Android in the first place, assuming I could set the launcher and just make it dead-simple. I did a week or two of research looking into apps that might suit an old-timer. Big Launcher is great, but doesn't fix Skype because Skype's UI is a nightmare (contacts + favorites + recent? really? she has about four people she'd Skype. Why are the video/etc buttons so tiny? Yes obviously that issue will be on iPad as well.) Tried a couple photos apps to see which was best. Tried a couple mail apps. Get PPS from daughter, have to find tiny buttons to move to next slide of cat, rather than just swiping, so app closes and she misses half the pics. I've found websites dedicated to the elderly but none that seem to clear the whole mess up. While trying to do this, I'm listening to her talking to Google because she clicking something and Google says "Talk now", so she's telling it she can't find her email. They put in a quad-core processor so battery dies in no time. The Google tells me the mini has better battery life.

Home button disappears sometimes (e.g. camera, or Solitaire game) and replaced by tiny dot (so you want to go home but can't, or at least can't find it). iPad, it's always there - the physical round thing. Sometimes she touches the home/back buttons when typing (closes game or mail, very surprised - so now you don't want to go home but do), and iPad doesn't have soft buttons below the space bar. Send button is very close to the menu on Android. On iPad there are only two buttons and they're far from each other. Just above the home button Google has the "all apps" button, which she just doesn't need front-and-center. Back button sometimes does X, sometimes does Y, depending on context. Small USB cable works one-way only, iPad's can be inserted both ways. On this device can't remove the Google search bar near the top (I think?) and she's not quite ready for the web yet. Or Google's voice thing that didn't help her. At some point I need to take her off Google+ because she doesn't need any alerts that some random person is now following her. That shit is not in the user's best interests, it's in Google's. Then she's building up a great set of drafts because she'll edit and hit the wrong thing and it'll be gone, whereas the iPad app asks "Delete Draft? Save Draft?" when you click cancel. AFAIKT you can only hit "Send", "Cancel" or the hardware home button while writing a mail. Nothing else goes wrong.

Please don't assume your ten seconds on the problem has shown me to be an idiot. If you find a perfect setup, please tell me.

Btw her daughter and granddaughter both have iPads which helps the support situation greatly because they know what the button does. And shops currently have specials on the older non-retina, which is fine for her. We'll try it out and if she finds the Android better given her extra week of usage, that's a useful experiment. The money is very secondary compared to finding an experience that makes an old lady happy that she can "write letters to her friends". It's a game changer and she's enjoying it despite frustrations.

Current annoyance is that the toolbar icons on iPad can't grow with the fonts. Yes can use the Zoom but that's a bit crap. Will test it with her.

twobits• 12 years ago

I don't think there is one instance in the history of mankind, that great power hasn't been misused. ..I believe in unicorns too. ..But not that much.

Don't Trust Google (2002)

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