HN user
So when Google said their policy was 'Dont be evil.', they meant they would do their utmost to refrain from blowing up elementary schools?
According to Brin and Page: "Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."
Perhaps you should make a quick mockup to show how your redesign would look.
I guess it's a way to make corruption more transparent. Contributions are public.
I don't think that should be the case, but the solution should be more awareness rather than regulation. People should realize that they're giving up something to get a free service or subsidized products like Chromebooks rather than government interfering. Restricting people from searching their own servers will solve nothing.
Many people, especially older ones and people with bad or old monitors don't even realize they are ads. There's purposefully no border and a light background is used to confuse people into clicking ads.
http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...
If a malicious incident like the below happened then Google wouldn't even be liable, unlike data that is kept under UK control.
From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...
In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.
In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.
The goal is to attract female participation, not to deter male participation.
The problem is that corporations are not just satisfied with making a profit but tend to progress towards squeezing the last penny out of users at all costs. For example, Google is rolling out tracking which stores Android phones visit, and if you turn location services off, a lot of things including Google Now stop working[1]. Why would I want to work for free on improving maps so they can track where people go for advertising purposes? It is the difference between contributing to Wikipedia versus Encyclopaedia Brittanica.Not to mention doing user hostile things like making ads look like search results[3]
That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
So is OpenStreetMap, Navteq(commercial again) [2] and other mapping companies. Atleast Navteq/Nokia allows you to download complete offlline maps for their Here maps on supported devices unlike Google which wants to force people to be online for tracking/advertising purposes.
[1] http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/
[2] https://mapreporter.navteq.com/#dashboard
[3] http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...