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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."
I'd take free ice cream in exhange for a full body scan.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
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?
while i've set up a Gmail account, i've never actually used it. partly because of all the other ways that Google has of data mining their users, the Gmail account would like icing on the cake to them. they'd have access to all of the people you associate with, on top of your interests and usual WWW practices. the latter is enough info already.
"To stop the terrorists."
I'm allergic to dairy, you insensitive clod!
Nevermind Google. Howabout a "do not track me" list for local governments and law enforcement that want to place tracking devices on me and my car?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Coming up next, our most recent study showing that Linux is more expensive than Windows.
For most businesses, Linux is more expensive than windows. Anyone who can tie their own shoes can set up a Windows server. Linux, on the other hand, requires someone who at least kind of knows what they're doing, and that commands more money. Not to mention the cost of training the Luddite employees on a new operating system, when it took them 10 years to get used to the last one.
How is the federal government supposed to enforce this? It's a nightmare in the making. Once permission is given, and the feds get their talons into your servers, it's only a matter of time before they're monitoring that data 24/7.
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.
TANSTAAFL
This post may or may not contain cancer causing materials.
"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 bet putting up "a 540-square-foot video billboard advertisement in Times Square, New York" costs a small fortune. So, where did a consumer group get that kind of money?
No doubt, from a hostile company. But who? Microsoft? Apple? Viacom?
Google is far move invasive than Microsoft, which /. always puts the Gates Borg King visage on the articles for.
I think the image of Schmidt at the end of the video would be perfect.
Google Analytics means that you can be visiting any of an ever increasing range of sites with no visible affiliation to Google, but still be being tracked by them.
So? Can I demand that the shopkeeper turn off the CCTV before I enter the store? Try buying gas without ending up being recorded on tape somehow.
If someone is that paranoid about being tracked, turn off the damned cookies in your browser. If you're super-duper paranoid, get off the internet - no-one is forcing you to browse.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Because the terms are probably written into the credit card agreements that no one reads when they open up the "pre approved for xxxxx" letters they get in the mail and go "wow, now i can get a new TV!"
... tracking you too. And that with Google Analytics. What a bunch of hypocrits.
Consumer Watchdog = troll sponsored by Microsoft. More here: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/
The only reason telcos don't do that is because there is no tech (yet) to do it cheaply and accurately. Even Google struggles with transcribing the human voice well.
Personally I think Google has every right to do whatever they want on their servers. There are lots of legal precedents regarding how an employee has no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' when they are using a work PC, bandwidth, etc for personal surfing or email. Their employer has every right to monitor and record (including keystrokes) everything they do. Why would Google be any different? If you don't want your activity and personal emails scraped by Google, don't use Google. Or at the very least sign out of Google before you go to www.hotunderagehorserape.com (god I hope that's not a real site).
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
The company that ran this promotion (Consumer Watchdog) has been using Google Analytics. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/03/businessinsider-anti-google-privacy-group-consumer-watchdog-is-tracking-your-clicks-with-google-analytics-2010-9.DTL Hypocrite, much?
You want to opt-out of being tracked by Google? Simple:
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
You change your mind about using Google and want to export all your data? Simple:
http://www.dataliberation.org/
The website/organization behind this ad doesn't even mention those links.
You think MS gives you options like this? Facebook?
I'm a big supporter of legit consumer organizations, like the BBB, but this one is clearly bogus. By supporting and giving attention to an organization like this we undermine the legit ones.
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.
Windows still requires someone with knowledge to setup the systems correctly, or you get all sorts of problems. Yes, for a small business, you can hire a newbie to do most of it, but as you grow you'll quickly realize you have to spend a lot of time / effort / downtime redoing things.
The separation of the two is in the enterprise space -- think midsize businesses and larger -- and as your enterprise grows larger, Linux is easier to maintain and implement.
Personally, I maintain 10 Linux servers / VM's, a half-dozen SQL Server servers with 30 or so SQL Server DB's (the largest is just under a TB), 4 MySQL servers, and I find time to do enterprise application development, enterprise reporting, and some web development (I consider myself poor at that). I also serve as 3rd tier network and OS support for 300+ employees.
If you know what you're doing, it's not difficult... and I'm paid fairly given my experience and years in the business.
Just because you can get someone for $20K a year to be a server intern doesn't mean they will be the one planning the network or making large decisions. A good seasoned admin keeps things running in a predictable way, allowing the business to focus on its core functionality and NOT on system limitations or integration issues.
More FUD. Yawn.
Assuming you only care about a 3 month profit cycle, you'd never do any kind of investment or significant change to your business, including upgrading your Windows , not that that would guarantee support of your mission-critical system either. Plus that's a hidden premise that a businesses necessarily has one of those and that it's both not portable and so convoluted Wine won't work today. Big stretch there, cowboy.
Your premise that Linux systems actually require a full time sysadmin is patently false. I have several friends who run contracting businesses (doing both Windows and Linux) for a living and they've got many clients each. The complain about how much time the Windows work takes.
Your other premises are similarly anti-Linux adoption, assuming it's inferior for unreasonable reasons. Good luck getting me into an actual discussion with those assumptions.
And I want talking about, nor care about desktops. There's little difference between Ubuntu and Windows, and no compelling reason to change an existing deployment. The cost to change is too great once you bury yourself in that hole, but Windows fanboys assume we're making that silly argument. And yes, if I were starting a new business, I'd never start off wasting money on Windows desktops.
Moron.
Is that your real name? Your parents must have really hated you.
...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?
Or at the very least sign out of Google before you go to www.hotunderagehorserape.com (god I hope that's not a real site).
Under Rule #35, you are now legally required to create it.
similar to the Do Not Call list developed to prevent telemarketers from aggressively calling consumers.
I almost never used to get soliciting calls on my cell. Then I foolishly put my number on this "do not call" list that the article compares this to. Lo and behold, I got a call a few times a week telling me my car warranty is about to expire. Good list analogy guys - if I don't want to be tracked then I'm expected to submit some information (name, ip address, whatever) to some site that the government / public has access to? I'll get right on it!
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
I see you've never used Linux, nor configured a Windows server. Anyone can NOT set up a Windows server without training; at least, not a robust, secure one. It's no harder to set up an Apache server on Linux. And Linux with KDE is as easy to use as Windows (actually it's easier).
Not to mention the cost of training the Luddite employees on a new operating system, when it took them 10 years to get used to the last one.
XP wasn't out for ten years. Vista was only around a year or two, Seven is still shiny-new, and moving from one version of Windows to another is no different than moving from Mac or Windows to Linux. I've been computing for 30 years and it took me a month or so to get used to my new netbook and Win 7. OTOH it took all of maybe two days to get comfortable moving from Win 98 to Mandrake.
Free Martian Whores!
Just for kicks I went to consumerwatchdog.org and used their search engine to search on microsoft . Top 20 header results :
1. There's no privacy in third world America - (anti-google article, no mention of bing)
2. Top trustbuster says DOJ watching search industry
3. Advocacy Groups Ask Facebook for More Privacy Changes
4. Critics Call on Feds to Squelch a Google Monopoly
5. Data Show Google Abuses Search Role, Group Contends
6. Watchdog Backs Google Antitrust Complaint with (More) Data
7. Google's Wi-Fi Data Harvest Facing More Probes, Lawsuits
8. Google Using Search Engine To Muscle Into Internet Businesses, Study Finds
9. Google Worth $1 Billion to Pa. Commerce
10. Google Raises Its Game In Washington
11. Google shows the way on search engine encryption; others must follow
12. FTC Clears Google Purchase of Mobile Ad Service
13. White House Reprimands Ex-Googler After Consumer Watchdog FOIA Request
14. Few Hardballs from Shareholders at Google's Annual Meeting
15. Google's Growth Markets Include Lobbying
16. Consumer Watchdog Targets Google
17. Privacy Groups, Business Firms Firing Warning Shots on New Online Ad Privacy Bill
18. Boucher's Privacy Bill Scolded by Consumer Groups
19. Google Spent $1.3 Million on Lobbying, What Are They Buying?
20. Consumer Group to Call for Google Break up
Damn, that's a lot of google mention for a search on microsoft. Hell, even on a search on facebookhas "google" in 6 of the top 10 results returned! Facebook doesn't appear until the 11th result, and is in 5 of the headers. What a joke, this site makes fox news looks fair and balanced.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
But how about then Facebook what knows exactly who are your friends, with who you chat and meet. Where you go, what music you listen, what movies you like, your ex's situations, your holidays places, your addresses, your workplace, even many gives their social security numbers and so on.
When it comes to Google, they can see everything what you ISP (= Government and the ISP as a company) can see, as well what you are doing in facebook.
But when it comes to real privacy, Facebook is bigger threat than Google. As Google does not know for who are your friends unless you use Google email services and you use them to contact your friends.
With all the social semantiks what facebook has, you can build so awesome anti-terrorists filtering and security system as you can just find everything from every facebook person.
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
Having the retailers tracking us, tailoring their products to our interests, it is part of our dream. We want robots to fetch us beer from the fridge and chairs that adjust to our bodies. How is retailers only showing stuff we're interested in any different? The chances of me clicking on an ad for tampons is vanishingly low, so why waste my time and their money to show me a tampon ad? Heck, I'd love for bricks-and-mortar stores to work like this. It seems like every time I go to buy new clothes, I have to walk through a mile of women's clothes. Do they really buy that much more clothing?
I admit, the tracking sometimes can be a disadvantage. I looked at some socks online, about a week ago, and that is all my ads are since. All showing different types of socks.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math