I'm certainly willing to stipulate that Facebook has many gigantic problems. I would even say that my images, including my face, are part of my personal information that is being horrendously abused by Facebook. However, it is obvious to me that the lawyers are more concerned with creating new problems than solving anything.
My suggestion for a solution approach would be a rather different: A non-adversarial business model for Facebook. Rather than pitting us against the advertisers, which guarantees the advertisers are going to win because it's their money, a better system (which Facebook has no potential of becoming, if you ask me) would focus on cost recovery for actual services rendered. Yeah, I'm calling TANSTAAFL on Facebook and saying we should be paying for the real costs of the services we actually want to use. Of course we want to pay as little as possible, but we're paying anyway, even though Facebook doesn't show us any of the real bills and invoices. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
By the way, I think this approach could in theory be added as an extension to an advertiser-funded model. The reason Facebook can never do it is because they have become a corporate cancer, and cost-recovery is fundamentally opposed to profit maximization. Not acceptable to the cancer to leave those chips on the table because profit is NEVER sufficiently maximized. Or to put it in religious terms:
There is no gawd but profit, and Facebook wants to be the #1 prophet!
Oh yeah. About the face problem. It's okay if people want to annotate pictures with PRIVATE notes such as thinking an image is me, but it is NOT okay to share those notes with the world unless I quite explicitly agree to the sharing. In the wrinkled middle ground, I might (or might not) even be willing to confirm that a face annotated in private notes is mine, but that is NOT to say I would agree to making those notes PUBLIC without telling me. That's just the tip of the solution approach, but ADSAuPR, atAJG. (Twice in one post? Looks bad, folks.)
Maybe. #PresidentTweety is rejecting his salary as president and he isn't working for the voters, especially the majority who voted against him, but not even for the voters who were suckered and conned into voting for him. In that sense, rejecting the salary is more than an advertising gimmick, but an actual last gasp of honesty. However, if I had to bet on it, I'd bet that he changed his mind and kept the money after all. It's all there in those tax returns that he wants us to never see.
Actually, I think the real reason he loves Putin is because of the divide and conquer thing, though Putin doesn't use it so much within his own country. No need.
I guess I'm supposed to accept that apology and hope you are more careful in your reading in the future (even though I still don't understand the nature of your misunderstanding).
However I remain more interested in prevention than cure, so I'm wondering how to map that exchange into EPR (Earned Public Reputation) terms. What dimension of your EPR ought to be diminished by that exchange? Perhaps some dimension of my own EPR should be lowered, too? Certainly not a productive branch of the discussion, and the underlying objective of EPR is to save time by avoiding such... Not the only objective, but one of the important ones.
If I ever got a mod point to give, I'd probably give that an extra funny, though I was actually searching for gun-related jokes. Something along the lines of "I never miss my Windows Phone as long as I use my rifle. However it's pretty hard to hit it with my revolver." Projecting since my own aim with handguns was never that good?
Actually I think my first quasi-smartphone about 10 or 15 years back was running some kind of Windows OS. They've rebranded their small OS attempts so many time that I can't even remember what it was called. Fortunately I've mostly blacked out those memories except for lingering fears of Sharp and increased nausea towards my occasional involuntary usage of Microsoft software. Microsoft never understood such concepts as small or elegant, though they are great about stealing ideas and proclaiming "It ain't our fault and even when it is our fault you can't do anything to us. Nyah, nyah, nyah."
Then again, and as hard as it might be to believe, I was actually hoping Microsoft could offer a viable email alternative to Gmail. The EVIL of the google has become so much fresher and more pungeant... Maybe my memory is playing games, but I don't think I ever had such feelings of fear and trepidation towards Microsoft.
Actually, I stopped using Amazon more than 15 years ago. I used it twice, and it was satisfactory both times, but the ongoing pursuit of additional sales caused me to reject further dealings with the company. I'm not sure if it was the greed or the insult or the threat. Greed should be obvious. Amazon wants more sales. The insult is assuming that I'm so similar to other people that they strongly expect me to buy the same things in the same patterns. Remember at that time they were only fishing with two samples of my actual preferences. The threat is that they might be right.
Mostly we seem to be in agreement, though we are obviously drawing the lines in different places.
Thanks for the clarification. I should have also been more clear that I don't regard passwords as secure.
Actually, I think the notion of identity is key, and I actually advocate for the use of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) as a way to manage time and filter out such annoyances as ACs. Again, that's part of my framing around this entire topic... In theory the google data should include both private and public parts, but right now it's just an obscure mishmash and this story/discussion was in general not illuminating..
Or maybe there is no answer along the lines I was seeking?
Anyway, I do want to thank the constructive contributors, even though I didn't learn the kinds of things I was hoping to learn. I did learn a few new things and got a few new ideas, but mostly I feel like I framed the topic incorrectly. Is it evidence of too much Japanese influence to feel like an apology is in order?
However, Slashdot marches on, and this "story" has pretty much expired already... The google and our private data held by the data is not expiring.
If I ever had a mod point to give, you'd get my "insightful" vote. However I feel like I've already responded to the points you raised in the context of imagining that the google had a real competitor in most of the areas where the google makes money.
Hmm... Again I think of it from the perspective of more freedom is better, which goes back to the ideas of competition. If the google had a real competitor and that competitor offered similar or better services, then the value of my data within that system does become a concern for me as well. If bad data lowers the value and income of the service provider, then they have to offer fewer services.
However I admit that if the google were part of a competitive situation, I'd be shopping on a different tradeoff. Partly I'd want a piece of the pie, but I think I'd be more concerned with self knowledge. As things stand now, the google offers only a tiny bit of the pie, mostly in lottery form, and completely obscures the kind of information I'm most interested in. Maybe the google knows 'I can't stand the truth'?
By the way, do you know what the "Btute" in the Subject: is about? Just a typo?
Mostly I can only address one part of it, which is the "can't be 100% certain that you are you". The takeout website checks your password at several times in the process. I was actually surprised that there didn't seem to be any option to encrypt the file.
You only looked at the first part of the results? However, I think what you saw from Personality Insights was an example of GIGO. You picked problematic input. Not just the effect of multiple authors, but also Trump's YUGELY garbled delivery of whatever he was supposed to say mashed into whatever popped into his head from moment to moment. Largely incoherent input, and yet some parts of the results make sense. Empathetic? Yes, but in a twisted way. I actually think that Trump is strong on the "humanist" dimension, but strongly negative in his polarity. The only person who matters to Trump is himself, and I'm sort of unsurprised that the results got confused on that dimension because Trump does have extremely high empathy for the people who matter, which is only himself.
(Me? It's the idealistic dimension that dominates... But the world is mostly run by the materialists.)
In my largest experiment, I actually used my side of some long email exchanges with a particularly close friend, and the results were surprising and not surprising... At the time it seemed like too much effort, but perhaps I should try feeding it different samples to see how consistent my personality is when I'm writing to different people? Or how much I've changed over times? I think I didn't want to go there because the next step is analyzing THEIR sides of the conversations, perhaps on the excuse of seeing what sorts of people my friends tend to be...
Well, I think it's a thoughtful response, but not to any of the questions I was actually asking, and it doesn't seem to be worth the effort required to reinterpret them from your twisted, possibly ad hominem, perspective. Even less so since I'm certainly willing to concede the possibility that it is MY perspective that is the twisted one. Instead let me try to answer you [n3r0.m4dski11z] in terms of freedom, which, per my primary sig, is actually my overriding concern. To do that I had better include the latest version of my sig (which is not constrained by the Slashdot context):
(Even there I can't get a decent "not equal" sign... By the way, your reference to "free beer" is actually included in the 4th power there.)
What is actually relevant in my response to your comment is actually the 5, which is related to the magnitude of meaningful choice. If there are too few choices, then there is no freedom, and ditto with too many choices, though for different reasons. The goal of each corporate cancer is to grow so large as to eliminate all other choices, and the google is succeeding in many areas.
Viewing this in terms of a solution, I wish there were roughly 5 competitors, and now that the google has not-so-graciously given me a copy of my data, I really wish that I could take my data and go home, or at least transfer my data to a competitor who could provide similar services. As a first step, I wish I could understand what there is in the data that the google has allowed me to copy. (It's perhaps too obvious to me that my questions matter primarily from that perspective.) The actual transition to such a system of true competition seems almost inconceivable, though dividing and conquering the google seems better (to me) than all out war among the corporate cancers with the last surviving cancer getting to eat ALL the data.
I'm still trying to consider the differences between what you received in one gigantic file versus the smaller pieces I received... I feel my earlier response was not helpful.
Let me say that my original idea about the structure is definitely false. I speculated that the links in the index.html file would include relative references to the component files. That is NOT the case. I was even reduced to searching the google's documentation for such information.
Now you have me speculating that the redundant files are all unique, even though the folder names appear many times. I was looking for something along these lines, but I think I have to describe it in terms of an algorithm:
(1) Add files until the 2-GB limit is about to be breached. (2) Find smaller files from various directories until the 2-GB limit is exactly satisfied. (3) Start the next zip file and return to Step (1).
What happened at the end is still unclear, but I'm going to attempt to reconstruct a single takeout file on that theory, hopefully before this question has expired on Slashdot so I can share that part of the information. However, even if this approach works, I think it will only reduce to the interpretation problem for the Facebook data, which was basically similarly mysterious even though the amount of data was so much less.
It seems that you are leading into some of the sensitive topics that were touched upon earlier in the context of VPNs... However, to say more would be to draw exactly the sort of attention that I don't want to attract?
So far in my explorations of the data I haven't seen any browser history data, though I strongly suspect the google is collecting it. Are you saying that it isn't anywhere in the archive? Is the google claiming that this is some sort of derived information that belongs to the google, not me?
My hypothesis is that it's in there somewhere in some form, but I just don't know how to look for it. I certainly can't prove it isn't there.
That's sophistic BS. If there is any projection there, it's that I would respect her privacy as much as I would hope she respects mine.
As matters stand now, you sound like a child who was probably in diapers when I was wandering though my first flame wars. I knew flame warriors who actually enjoyed themselves, but I've always regarded ad hominem argumentation as a waste of time, but apparently unavoidable when hominems are involved.
I didn't introduce the gaslighting topic, and I would even argue that I made a sincere attempt to redirect the conversation towards a more productive course. Of course I'd never waste the efforts in your case, except perhaps by encouraging you to prove me wrong. Go ahead, make my day by writing something worth reading.
Highly principled stand, and I congratulate you [HermMonster] for your energy and enthusiasm and even for your efforts, but I think you are deluding yourself. One reason is that by attempting to hide yourself you would actually be attracting attention to yourself. Quite possibly, you are even rendering yourself a marked man and the FBI is following you around trying to figure out what you are trying to hide.
More seriously, some of the services cannot be used without leakage. Let me take an innocent example, the case of using a private browser window to evade a paywall. This is something I've started doing fairly routinely when using Google News. I've made the calculation that I'm willing to let the google use my identity to recommend stories that I'm interested in, but what am I actually hiding there? I'm willing to assume that the paywalled website is fooled into thinking that I've never been seen before (by the website), but am I actually fooling the google? I don't think so precisely because it is clearly in the google's interest to detect the link translation process.
In concrete terms of the data that I just downloaded from the google, I suspect that there are browser histories in there, including information on direct and indirect links to other websites. The new derivative question is whether or not the google is reporting on this to the paywalled websites?
So far this topic seems to be generating lots of new questions in my mind, and I haven't found many (any?) answers.
Sorry, Trax3001BBS, but I have to conclude that you are a terrible writer. Perhaps indifferent to communicating? If so, why write at all?
I'm really trying to strain my imagination for some meaning in any of your comments. Perhaps your last comment is supposed to mean that you think I'm advocating on behalf of Facebook in some sense of its superiority to the google? If so, I would say that I basically have the same questions (and concerns) about the Facebook data, even though there was so much less of it. At least based on Facebook's claim to have three orders of magnitude less data about me...
But because the google doesn't share the usage information or any of the profits with us, then we have no incentive to provide accurate data to the google. Even more seriously, if the data contains flaws and errors that reduce the value of the data when the google is trying to sell it, we can't correct those problems.
Your topic is actually related to the extended questions I added a few minutes ago, especially the last two.
Deserves an answer, and perhaps I have a good one, but I'm NOT going to waste it on an AC.
I think you have already confirmed that my policy of ignoring ACs is sound and that I shouldn't waste any more time expanding their hidden comments. Just a temptation to waste time in the absence of any actual dialog.
If the google is selling it, I suspect they only sell aggregated forms. From my perspective as part of the product, I would actually like control over the degree of aggregation. I'm not too concerned if something about me is included as part of the average for all the google users within a state or even a large city, but I'd start getting concerned if they are selling parts of my data as parts of extremely small groups such as the people who live in my neighborhood or even the level of an apartment building.
Perhaps your question could be inverted into the form: What kinds of data would cause the google to report your data to the local police?
First of all, thanks to all the people who have provided thoughtful or useful ideas. I'm about to make the attempt to read everything (except for the ACs, and I'm even considering looking at them this one time), but right now I want to add a few thoughts from my early reflections on the first comments I saw... I'm going to put them in the form of additional questions I wish I could answer from the voluminous, even overwhelming data that the google sent me:
(5) Where is the evidence that I'm a good person who deserves more success? The stuff I'd be glad to show to a prospective employer, for example.
(6) Where is the proof of what a prick I am? Assuming I want to be a better person (and I strongly suspect that many of us are lying to ourselves on that topic), I want to see that evidence to change or challenge. (To change myself or to challenge the evidence.)
(7) Is there anything in there that I should actually be afraid of? Things that my enemies could use against me, especially if they are more motivated to find those things than I am?
(8) How could I find evidence of strengths that I don't even know I have?
So far I'm just being highly reflective, but I've thought of at least two question beyond that low level...
(9) What is the economic value of my personal information to the google?
(10) Where are the pieces the googlers are cashing in on?
Now I'm going to look over the entire thing seeking more clues and provocations... Seems to be my duty as the "instigator" of this discussion in some sense of instigate...
Me thinks you [Lanthanide] are projecting, but I will confess that I never did understand how my own parents stayed together. My condolences to your much better half. Or perhaps better to respond with some variation of the old grading joke: "I was one of the students who made the dean's list possible!"
That was just minor tit for even more minor tat. The most appropriate response would probably be to ask "Don't you have anything to say on any aspect of the actual topic at hand?" If you know nothing and have nothing to say, then you can always say nothing.
I actually did consider raising the issue of using personality characterization for marriage guidance and counseling. I would not be at all surprised to find out that some branch of the google is exploring related business opportunities. However my own interests these days are probably much more mundane. I'm just trying to figure out who's treading on my freedom.
By the way, I don't think the google is the worst abuser of our personal information. In a sense, the google's motives are pure insofar as they are focused on the money. Almost every question about what the google is doing with our information comes back to the answer "... because they think it will increase their profits."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certainly willing to stipulate that Facebook has many gigantic problems. I would even say that my images, including my face, are part of my personal information that is being horrendously abused by Facebook. However, it is obvious to me that the lawyers are more concerned with creating new problems than solving anything.
My suggestion for a solution approach would be a rather different: A non-adversarial business model for Facebook. Rather than pitting us against the advertisers, which guarantees the advertisers are going to win because it's their money, a better system (which Facebook has no potential of becoming, if you ask me) would focus on cost recovery for actual services rendered. Yeah, I'm calling TANSTAAFL on Facebook and saying we should be paying for the real costs of the services we actually want to use. Of course we want to pay as little as possible, but we're paying anyway, even though Facebook doesn't show us any of the real bills and invoices. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
By the way, I think this approach could in theory be added as an extension to an advertiser-funded model. The reason Facebook can never do it is because they have become a corporate cancer, and cost-recovery is fundamentally opposed to profit maximization. Not acceptable to the cancer to leave those chips on the table because profit is NEVER sufficiently maximized. Or to put it in religious terms:
There is no gawd but profit, and Facebook wants to be the #1 prophet!
Oh yeah. About the face problem. It's okay if people want to annotate pictures with PRIVATE notes such as thinking an image is me, but it is NOT okay to share those notes with the world unless I quite explicitly agree to the sharing. In the wrinkled middle ground, I might (or might not) even be willing to confirm that a face annotated in private notes is mine, but that is NOT to say I would agree to making those notes PUBLIC without telling me. That's just the tip of the solution approach, but ADSAuPR, atAJG. (Twice in one post? Looks bad, folks.)
Maybe. #PresidentTweety is rejecting his salary as president and he isn't working for the voters, especially the majority who voted against him, but not even for the voters who were suckered and conned into voting for him. In that sense, rejecting the salary is more than an advertising gimmick, but an actual last gasp of honesty. However, if I had to bet on it, I'd bet that he changed his mind and kept the money after all. It's all there in those tax returns that he wants us to never see.
Actually, I think the real reason he loves Putin is because of the divide and conquer thing, though Putin doesn't use it so much within his own country. No need.
Z^-2
I guess I'm supposed to accept that apology and hope you are more careful in your reading in the future (even though I still don't understand the nature of your misunderstanding).
However I remain more interested in prevention than cure, so I'm wondering how to map that exchange into EPR (Earned Public Reputation) terms. What dimension of your EPR ought to be diminished by that exchange? Perhaps some dimension of my own EPR should be lowered, too? Certainly not a productive branch of the discussion, and the underlying objective of EPR is to save time by avoiding such... Not the only objective, but one of the important ones.
If I ever got a mod point to give, I'd probably give that an extra funny, though I was actually searching for gun-related jokes. Something along the lines of "I never miss my Windows Phone as long as I use my rifle. However it's pretty hard to hit it with my revolver." Projecting since my own aim with handguns was never that good?
Actually I think my first quasi-smartphone about 10 or 15 years back was running some kind of Windows OS. They've rebranded their small OS attempts so many time that I can't even remember what it was called. Fortunately I've mostly blacked out those memories except for lingering fears of Sharp and increased nausea towards my occasional involuntary usage of Microsoft software. Microsoft never understood such concepts as small or elegant, though they are great about stealing ideas and proclaiming "It ain't our fault and even when it is our fault you can't do anything to us. Nyah, nyah, nyah."
Then again, and as hard as it might be to believe, I was actually hoping Microsoft could offer a viable email alternative to Gmail. The EVIL of the google has become so much fresher and more pungeant... Maybe my memory is playing games, but I don't think I ever had such feelings of fear and trepidation towards Microsoft.
Actually, I stopped using Amazon more than 15 years ago. I used it twice, and it was satisfactory both times, but the ongoing pursuit of additional sales caused me to reject further dealings with the company. I'm not sure if it was the greed or the insult or the threat. Greed should be obvious. Amazon wants more sales. The insult is assuming that I'm so similar to other people that they strongly expect me to buy the same things in the same patterns. Remember at that time they were only fishing with two samples of my actual preferences. The threat is that they might be right.
Mostly we seem to be in agreement, though we are obviously drawing the lines in different places.
Thanks for the clarification. I should have also been more clear that I don't regard passwords as secure.
Actually, I think the notion of identity is key, and I actually advocate for the use of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) as a way to manage time and filter out such annoyances as ACs. Again, that's part of my framing around this entire topic... In theory the google data should include both private and public parts, but right now it's just an obscure mishmash and this story/discussion was in general not illuminating..
Or maybe there is no answer along the lines I was seeking?
Anyway, I do want to thank the constructive contributors, even though I didn't learn the kinds of things I was hoping to learn. I did learn a few new things and got a few new ideas, but mostly I feel like I framed the topic incorrectly. Is it evidence of too much Japanese influence to feel like an apology is in order?
However, Slashdot marches on, and this "story" has pretty much expired already... The google and our private data held by the data is not expiring.
If I ever had a mod point to give, you'd get my "insightful" vote. However I feel like I've already responded to the points you raised in the context of imagining that the google had a real competitor in most of the areas where the google makes money.
Hmm... Again I think of it from the perspective of more freedom is better, which goes back to the ideas of competition. If the google had a real competitor and that competitor offered similar or better services, then the value of my data within that system does become a concern for me as well. If bad data lowers the value and income of the service provider, then they have to offer fewer services.
However I admit that if the google were part of a competitive situation, I'd be shopping on a different tradeoff. Partly I'd want a piece of the pie, but I think I'd be more concerned with self knowledge. As things stand now, the google offers only a tiny bit of the pie, mostly in lottery form, and completely obscures the kind of information I'm most interested in. Maybe the google knows 'I can't stand the truth'?
By the way, do you know what the "Btute" in the Subject: is about? Just a typo?
Mostly I can only address one part of it, which is the "can't be 100% certain that you are you". The takeout website checks your password at several times in the process. I was actually surprised that there didn't seem to be any option to encrypt the file.
You only looked at the first part of the results? However, I think what you saw from Personality Insights was an example of GIGO. You picked problematic input. Not just the effect of multiple authors, but also Trump's YUGELY garbled delivery of whatever he was supposed to say mashed into whatever popped into his head from moment to moment. Largely incoherent input, and yet some parts of the results make sense. Empathetic? Yes, but in a twisted way. I actually think that Trump is strong on the "humanist" dimension, but strongly negative in his polarity. The only person who matters to Trump is himself, and I'm sort of unsurprised that the results got confused on that dimension because Trump does have extremely high empathy for the people who matter, which is only himself.
(Me? It's the idealistic dimension that dominates... But the world is mostly run by the materialists.)
In my largest experiment, I actually used my side of some long email exchanges with a particularly close friend, and the results were surprising and not surprising... At the time it seemed like too much effort, but perhaps I should try feeding it different samples to see how consistent my personality is when I'm writing to different people? Or how much I've changed over times? I think I didn't want to go there because the next step is analyzing THEIR sides of the conversations, perhaps on the excuse of seeing what sorts of people my friends tend to be...
Z^-1
Well, I think it's a thoughtful response, but not to any of the questions I was actually asking, and it doesn't seem to be worth the effort required to reinterpret them from your twisted, possibly ad hominem, perspective. Even less so since I'm certainly willing to concede the possibility that it is MY perspective that is the twisted one. Instead let me try to answer you [n3r0.m4dski11z] in terms of freedom, which, per my primary sig, is actually my overriding concern. To do that I had better include the latest version of my sig (which is not constrained by the Slashdot context):
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Justified - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
(Even there I can't get a decent "not equal" sign... By the way, your reference to "free beer" is actually included in the 4th power there.)
What is actually relevant in my response to your comment is actually the 5, which is related to the magnitude of meaningful choice. If there are too few choices, then there is no freedom, and ditto with too many choices, though for different reasons. The goal of each corporate cancer is to grow so large as to eliminate all other choices, and the google is succeeding in many areas.
Viewing this in terms of a solution, I wish there were roughly 5 competitors, and now that the google has not-so-graciously given me a copy of my data, I really wish that I could take my data and go home, or at least transfer my data to a competitor who could provide similar services. As a first step, I wish I could understand what there is in the data that the google has allowed me to copy. (It's perhaps too obvious to me that my questions matter primarily from that perspective.) The actual transition to such a system of true competition seems almost inconceivable, though dividing and conquering the google seems better (to me) than all out war among the corporate cancers with the last surviving cancer getting to eat ALL the data.
I'm still trying to consider the differences between what you received in one gigantic file versus the smaller pieces I received... I feel my earlier response was not helpful.
Let me say that my original idea about the structure is definitely false. I speculated that the links in the index.html file would include relative references to the component files. That is NOT the case. I was even reduced to searching the google's documentation for such information.
Now you have me speculating that the redundant files are all unique, even though the folder names appear many times. I was looking for something along these lines, but I think I have to describe it in terms of an algorithm:
(1) Add files until the 2-GB limit is about to be breached.
(2) Find smaller files from various directories until the 2-GB limit is exactly satisfied.
(3) Start the next zip file and return to Step (1).
What happened at the end is still unclear, but I'm going to attempt to reconstruct a single takeout file on that theory, hopefully before this question has expired on Slashdot so I can share that part of the information. However, even if this approach works, I think it will only reduce to the interpretation problem for the Facebook data, which was basically similarly mysterious even though the amount of data was so much less.
It seems that you are leading into some of the sensitive topics that were touched upon earlier in the context of VPNs... However, to say more would be to draw exactly the sort of attention that I don't want to attract?
So far in my explorations of the data I haven't seen any browser history data, though I strongly suspect the google is collecting it. Are you saying that it isn't anywhere in the archive? Is the google claiming that this is some sort of derived information that belongs to the google, not me?
My hypothesis is that it's in there somewhere in some form, but I just don't know how to look for it. I certainly can't prove it isn't there.
That's sophistic BS. If there is any projection there, it's that I would respect her privacy as much as I would hope she respects mine.
As matters stand now, you sound like a child who was probably in diapers when I was wandering though my first flame wars. I knew flame warriors who actually enjoyed themselves, but I've always regarded ad hominem argumentation as a waste of time, but apparently unavoidable when hominems are involved.
I didn't introduce the gaslighting topic, and I would even argue that I made a sincere attempt to redirect the conversation towards a more productive course. Of course I'd never waste the efforts in your case, except perhaps by encouraging you to prove me wrong. Go ahead, make my day by writing something worth reading.
Highly principled stand, and I congratulate you [HermMonster] for your energy and enthusiasm and even for your efforts, but I think you are deluding yourself. One reason is that by attempting to hide yourself you would actually be attracting attention to yourself. Quite possibly, you are even rendering yourself a marked man and the FBI is following you around trying to figure out what you are trying to hide.
More seriously, some of the services cannot be used without leakage. Let me take an innocent example, the case of using a private browser window to evade a paywall. This is something I've started doing fairly routinely when using Google News. I've made the calculation that I'm willing to let the google use my identity to recommend stories that I'm interested in, but what am I actually hiding there? I'm willing to assume that the paywalled website is fooled into thinking that I've never been seen before (by the website), but am I actually fooling the google? I don't think so precisely because it is clearly in the google's interest to detect the link translation process.
In concrete terms of the data that I just downloaded from the google, I suspect that there are browser histories in there, including information on direct and indirect links to other websites. The new derivative question is whether or not the google is reporting on this to the paywalled websites?
So far this topic seems to be generating lots of new questions in my mind, and I haven't found many (any?) answers.
Sorry, Trax3001BBS, but I have to conclude that you are a terrible writer. Perhaps indifferent to communicating? If so, why write at all?
I'm really trying to strain my imagination for some meaning in any of your comments. Perhaps your last comment is supposed to mean that you think I'm advocating on behalf of Facebook in some sense of its superiority to the google? If so, I would say that I basically have the same questions (and concerns) about the Facebook data, even though there was so much less of it. At least based on Facebook's claim to have three orders of magnitude less data about me...
But because the google doesn't share the usage information or any of the profits with us, then we have no incentive to provide accurate data to the google. Even more seriously, if the data contains flaws and errors that reduce the value of the data when the google is trying to sell it, we can't correct those problems.
Your topic is actually related to the extended questions I added a few minutes ago, especially the last two.
Deserves an answer, and perhaps I have a good one, but I'm NOT going to waste it on an AC.
I think you have already confirmed that my policy of ignoring ACs is sound and that I shouldn't waste any more time expanding their hidden comments. Just a temptation to waste time in the absence of any actual dialog.
If the google is selling it, I suspect they only sell aggregated forms. From my perspective as part of the product, I would actually like control over the degree of aggregation. I'm not too concerned if something about me is included as part of the average for all the google users within a state or even a large city, but I'd start getting concerned if they are selling parts of my data as parts of extremely small groups such as the people who live in my neighborhood or even the level of an apartment building.
Perhaps your question could be inverted into the form: What kinds of data would cause the google to report your data to the local police?
First of all, thanks to all the people who have provided thoughtful or useful ideas. I'm about to make the attempt to read everything (except for the ACs, and I'm even considering looking at them this one time), but right now I want to add a few thoughts from my early reflections on the first comments I saw... I'm going to put them in the form of additional questions I wish I could answer from the voluminous, even overwhelming data that the google sent me:
(5) Where is the evidence that I'm a good person who deserves more success? The stuff I'd be glad to show to a prospective employer, for example.
(6) Where is the proof of what a prick I am? Assuming I want to be a better person (and I strongly suspect that many of us are lying to ourselves on that topic), I want to see that evidence to change or challenge. (To change myself or to challenge the evidence.)
(7) Is there anything in there that I should actually be afraid of? Things that my enemies could use against me, especially if they are more motivated to find those things than I am?
(8) How could I find evidence of strengths that I don't even know I have?
So far I'm just being highly reflective, but I've thought of at least two question beyond that low level...
(9) What is the economic value of my personal information to the google?
(10) Where are the pieces the googlers are cashing in on?
Now I'm going to look over the entire thing seeking more clues and provocations... Seems to be my duty as the "instigator" of this discussion in some sense of instigate...
Me thinks you [Lanthanide] are projecting, but I will confess that I never did understand how my own parents stayed together. My condolences to your much better half. Or perhaps better to respond with some variation of the old grading joke: "I was one of the students who made the dean's list possible!"
That was just minor tit for even more minor tat. The most appropriate response would probably be to ask "Don't you have anything to say on any aspect of the actual topic at hand?" If you know nothing and have nothing to say, then you can always say nothing.
I actually did consider raising the issue of using personality characterization for marriage guidance and counseling. I would not be at all surprised to find out that some branch of the google is exploring related business opportunities. However my own interests these days are probably much more mundane. I'm just trying to figure out who's treading on my freedom.
By the way, I don't think the google is the worst abuser of our personal information. In a sense, the google's motives are pure insofar as they are focused on the money. Almost every question about what the google is doing with our information comes back to the answer "... because they think it will increase their profits."