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by cl289
3174 days ago
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It's not appropriate to say that "Google never intended for it to happen" without proof that that is the case, something which is almost impossible from outside Google. Yahoo and Equifax didn't intend for their breaches to happen either, but at least they do not benefit from them. Companies like Google and Facebook, which are in the advertising/datamining business, have an incentive for "accidental" slippages like road-mapping cars collecting wifi data, "we didn't know" sharing of virtually all user data sent over the internet without encryption with the NSA, over-complicated "privacy" settings, services for which user data "will be kept separate" morphing into "we now share user data across services...," and on and on. These are the most powerful non-governmental agencies in the world (and more powerful than almost all governments). Developers have to stop giving in particular Google a free pass on virtually everything. We need to stop setting Google DNS servers to be the default in software or in example code. We need to stop pretending that turning separate URL and search boxes into a single omnibox is a great convenience or efficiency of space and recognize that it's just more comprehensive collection of user data. We need to stop turning that ever-smaller remaining free space on the internet, the Web, into another massive spiderweb of signals sent to Google and Facebook, with as many as ten or twenty requests sent to Google from a typical webpage, many of which no longer function when these requests are blocked, because the functionality of the site, and not just the advertising, now comes from Google servers. Acquiescence to this status quo is easy and probably good for one's career, but it's also dangerous for democracy, dangerous for innovation, dangerous for independence of thought... |
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