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Anti-Google Video Runs In Times Square
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Consumer Watchdog is running a 540-square-foot video billboard advertisement in Times Square, New York that shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an ingratiating ice cream truck driver who knows everything about everyone and happily offers free ice cream in exchange for full body scans. The group says its goal is to push Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to create a Do Not Track Me list, similar to the Do Not Call list developed to prevent telemarketers from aggressively calling consumers. 'Do you want Google or any other online company looking over your shoulder and tracking your every move online just so it can increase its profits?' writes the group's president, Jamie Curtis, at the group's web site. 'Consumers have a right to privacy. They should control how their information is gathered and what it is used for.' The FTC's consumer affairs group had no comment on whether the agency is considering creating a Do Not Track Me list."
They'll have to be sure to remember who I am wherever I go, right? That way they can be sure they aren't, for example, mistaking me for J. Random Trackable guy?
Why don't we have this option with credit companies? I don't care for them to make money off of my personal information either. I'm certainly not getting any dividend from it.
If "consumers have a right to privacy", this same Do Not Track Me list would have to apply to credit card transactions and every retail website on the internet. They have been collecting and using similar information longer than Google. Right now, the only way to guarantee privacy is to always use cash and never give any identifying information on the internet. I'm all for privacy, but it is meaningless if the rules don't apply to everyone who currently collects individual consumer behavior data.
"Does Google 'track you' any more than a telco does?"
Last I heard your telco wasn't using the _content_ of your communications to choose which ads to serve you. I'm a total privacy zealot, and despite following all the news, was really rather surprised just this past week to see a news article say that gmail actually scrapes the content of your mail for targetted advertising. I myself find that beyond creepy in and of itself, let alone the more disturbing (though fundamentally no different) situation of a telco selling the words of a private conversation to advertisers in order for them to better psychologically profile you and thus serve you a more persuasive advertisement.
Of course, we all know that becoming a telco is every companies wet dream, especially Google's.
I have to ask, why do you care? Ok, great, they have all sorts of data that will give them insight on what products you might be interested in and who you associate with. You get to see small ads on the side with relevant products as a result. Why do you care if they have this info?
I disagree on the creepy part, but that's a matter of opinion and we're all entitled to feel about Google as we do.
You bring up a key thing about privacy that bothered me in this anti-Google propaganda: when the Schmidt caricature started revealing personal information about people to others in a way that was obviously harmful. Google has never proven to do serious harm even in an unintentional way, let alone as maliciously as portrayed.
It's one thing to use collected information from you to display things on your own email screen. It's another to sell information about your interests to a third party and that's hardly a new practice, even if Google participates in this (which I've never heard of as far as Gmail is concerned). It's an altogether together a different thing to datamine embarrassing information about you and offer to sell that information to those you don't want knowing such things, which is simply the worst kind of fabricated hyperbole.
Schmidt is criticized for having talked about the problem of people posting information they may not have wanted to later on, as if it's his fault for running a company who made it easy to discover such oversharing. But can I complain when sending an unencrypted email with baby pictures to my mother who lives halfway around the world, that Google switches my advertising from mountain biking to diapers as fair compensation for an email service I would use before any other? I can't do that in good conscience. It may not be something I appreciate if I'd rather keep getting the biking info, but I can't really call that creepy.
Maybe it's simply a matter of trust I have that no humans are bothering to look at pictures of just one more baby, which others do not share. Maybe I don't actually do anything I shouldn't be doing, as Schmidt said, or anything I'm ashamed of and don't want told about to my face. I've never heard an actual reason for why people think it's "creepy" and bothers them. If someone can elaborate, I'd like to see what you have to say.
Hmmmm. Let's see:
Want to get that free body scan for a little ice cream, little girl
compared to:
You will be assimilated.
Then there's the
What, you're going to jailbreak your phone?!? Death to the Android apostates!
Or better still
Forget that huge freaking yacht I own, I'm suing you cause you stepped on my patents!
And there are so many more.....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...but the internet ceased a looooong time ago to be the wild and secretive jungle that we all remember and loved, and it's now a commercial enterprise. Period. I don't understand how people can get so outraged over Google's data-mining without starting long before that. Google, as evil as people think they might be, track *who you say you are*. Of a handful of Gmail accounts that I have, exactly one of them has any information at all that could be traced directly to me. The rest are throwaway accounts, as are my six or seven yahoo accounts, and I don't think I have a single other account anywhere in my own name other than Facebook. When my identity got stolen, computers had nothing to do with it. They either stole my mail or my trash, not my Gmail password. Why do people freak out so much about Google using keyword-targeted advertising that's completely run by a machine that cares not a whit who you are and spends its day searching for "hdtv" or "tentacle porn", but these same people have no problem whatsoever giving their name, address, phone number, credit card number, bank routing information, and direct access to every single byte that comes out of their computer to the phone companies that have proved over and over and *%&$ing over again that they simply DO NOT CARE about their customers and look at them as nothing more than money troughs? (Seriously? $.30 for a text message, but a 650K jpg is free? *^&$ you.) Where's the similar outrage at the telcos, who are less progressive than the MPAA and will roll over for a warrantless wiretap like a wiener dog with an itchy belly? Seriously. Did I miss something?