This isn't a legal issue (yet) it's an ethical one. So fine, as you have pointed out, many of the people who had their data collected may have been ignorant of the fact that their data could be gathered by any passers by. Does that mean that they wanted that data to be shared and disclosed? Obviously not, it may even suggest that many of them, if not ignorant, would have chosen to protect that information (as you pointed out with your SS, DoB Garage Door analogy, that's information that you would obviously want to protect, therefore your WiFi traffic is something that you believe any reasonable person would also want to protect). So, now knowing that many of those people out there would not want you to gather their data, but are ignorant of the fact that you can get it, and there are no legal obstacles to you doing so, you just go ahead and do it because you benefit from something that they would perceive as a harm? I'm sorry, in my book that's just wrong.
We don't know what prompted them to disclose the collection in the first place. Corporations have been "coming clean" on things that were on the verge of being exposed _forever_, there is nothing to suggest that such a thing did not happen here. They "failed to do the right thing" in collecting the information in the first place. Even if we take it to be an "accident" there still must have been employees who were aware of what was happening and chose to not act sooner. I don't know if you realize, they collected a pretty substantial amount of data in a pretty systematic way.
Usually when these kinds of things happen (companies apparently acting against the public interest for their own gain and then getting caught in the process) there is a big backlash and a call for government investigations and regulations. Internal audits are just a classic tactic to try and squelch that knee-jerk reaction. Banks, manufacturing companies, heck, pretty much any kind of company caught in the government/public cross-hairs will do that. It's just a defensive play, it doesn't mean that they didn't screw up, and it doesn't mean that the government should not still look into it. Would you be satisfied if the government accepted BP's post spill "internal audit" as sufficient investigation and then just left it at that?
This is assuming that most common users understand that their networks are not properly secured and are making a conscious and informed decision to share their data with anyone in range of their network. That is a stupid assumption from a societal standpoint. A good parallel would probably be analog cell phones, which could be monitored using specialized radio scanners, which were then made effectively illegal to prevent eavesdropping. The argument you just made could have been applied to that same situation: obviously the people understand that their cell phones are not secured, and therefore consent to anyone listening in if they want to. No sir, I don't believe I would like to live in your world.
You are suggesting that in the entire chain of people who were attached to that project, who knew the processes and methods that were employed, nobody noticed that they were "accidentally" collecting data? Either it was not an accident, or a whole lot of people at Google are completely OK with looking the other way when it comes to accidental user privacy errors. I don't know about you, but I think the latter of those two may actually be worse.
I agree, the government should not be trusted with that kind of data, but how would you feel about government regulation and oversight of data collection and retention practices and policies?
BP is handling the spill because the government does not have the technology/resources necessary to handle it better. Google is a totally different situation though. They are acting in an arena where there is little government oversight/regulation at present, so the responsibility falls entirely on them to "do the right thing" from a moral standpoint, and they appear to be failing, once again, to act in the public's best interests. It's my opinion that this is yet another example of why government oversight of privacy standards is not only a good idea, it's a necessity.
Their support services have gotten pretty good, but they wont stop calling me to try and sell me Voice and Data services (I use cablevision for my cable, and verizon for FiOS service). Every 30 days, like clockwork, they call me. Every time I explain that I don't want either services, that I don't care what specials they are running, to please for the love of god, stop calling me over and over and over again. Every time they say they wont anymore, and every time it's a freaking lie. I hate that.
You're right about that. Cable companies could easily deliver more bandwidth over that coax cable than a family of four would be able to saturate. My experience though was coming from Cablevision. When I was an "Optimum" customer they would impose upload caps at the drop of a hat and I was never able to achieve my advertised bandwidth (they just oversold it back then). From what I understand they have since improved on these performance dimensions but I have not had a compelling reason to switch back, so I haven't (some Newton's law of consumer subscription services?)
Standards implementations are slowly converging over time and the focus now is on proper application development which flash has just never done a very good job of proving itself in. The needs of Adobe's customers changed, and their product just didn't change fast enough to keep up.
Not everyone wants the same things from their providers, and not all customers receive the same quality of care, network, etc. Hey, if what you has makes you happy then that's great! But it doesn't mean that it should therefore also make everyone else happy.
I know of a campus that went from a leased line to TWc for internet. Unfortunately, the cablemodem+router provided was a POS that couldn't handle reasonable PPS rates for the application meaning that they never were able to take full advantage of the bandwidth provided by the service. It was the only cablemodem+router that TWc would provide/support/allow. Now, I think they are switching to a metro-ethernet provider.
Cablevision has pretty terrible customer service, and their ads have always been designed to mislead (which rubs me the wrong way). But I would disagree that they stopped innovating. In response to Verizon rolling out FiOS service, they began offering service all the way up to the 100Mbit level to compete on what is really their core business: providing more bandwidth. However they are going to have to get a bit more innovative when it comes to providing TV service. Slow cable boxes, limited boring service, and a laughable on-demand system when compared to what you can get on an xbox/roku is not going to keep customers paying their high monthly video cable bills.
Full Disclosure: I am also a former cablevision customer who has been using FiOS for about...four years? can't remember, early adopter anyway.
It's complicated by the fact that the government was the one who drained the marshlands originally and then sold the resulting dry land to expand the city. If they tried to blame the people for living there, people would then in turn blame them for suggesting that it was safe to live there. But more to the point, didn't these people have flood insurance?
Yeah, spectrum killed WiMax in Europe; at this point so many carriers are on the LTE bandwagon that it would be very very hard for any other standard to really have a chance.
Actually just thinking about answering my own question; having real lagged data to the trend data could be useful in correcting for the hype no? Hype is essentially another variable in the regression analysis. I'm not sure where the data would come from for it but if you could estimate the hype factor for recent past data and had some measure of present hype you may be able to correct for some of it right?
I hope someone does some regression analysis on this and writes a paper. I would be very interested in how well the google trends data fits with the new rapid CDC data assuming that one of them is a lagged indicator of the other. How well would the data fit? What are the likely sources of error? Omitted variables? Fascinating questions.
How many people know about Open Office? How many of them have no say in what they use? All too frequently it's some PHB that says what will be used. Now if you have the choice then it's easier. If you're not going to upgrade Office because of cost why switch to Open Office? I say if something works for you use it. You should only upgrade or switch if what you have doesn't work. Then when that tyme comes look into alternatives to see if they will work.
I'd say that among the general public relatively few people know about OpenOffice. But among the IT community, or particularly the makeup of CIOs of large organizations, almost all of them are probably aware of the product. There are actually publicly traded companies which deploy OpenOffice throughout their enterprises and don't support the use of Microsoft Office; it's not completely unheard of it's just very uncommon. The real question though is, if it makes sense to switch why doesn't everyone do it? As you've pointed out, people wont switch unnecessarily.* However you also pointed out that there is a recent instance where people were forced to switch applications (and bore significant costs as a result) but they were switching from office 2003 to office 2007. If open office is a perfect substitute for office, and if its switching costs are equivalent or lower than those of switching from office 2003 to office 2007 (a logical inference of your earlier points) why have we not seen a massive migration away from the expensive commercial product?
*if it's working for them that is, and I agree with this, it's also a point supporting non-zero switching costs [i.e. the products are sticky, both of them are]; and having to overcome resistance to change certainly adds to the switching cost.
Just as there's training moving from MS Office to Open Office, there's training moving from MS Office 2003 to 2007 and there will be expenses upgrading to MS Office 2010. I could write a book on the complaints I've heard from Office users upgrading. Some of those complaints were about Office 2007 new Ribbon UI. A simply google turned up this article from last year, Arrogance or efficiency? Why Microsoft redesigned the Office user interface.
Complaining that switching to another app has costs without acknowledging MS upgrades has training costs as well is MS FUD.
Fair point, but it still does not provide an explanation as to why businesses have not switched en masse to open office; which based on your most recent point alone should have happened as a result of the interface changes between office 2003 and 2007.
Lock-in [wikipedia.org] is when the user is dependent on one vendor and can not change to another one, at least not easily.
Have you ever seen what happens when you take an average, non tech-savvy expert microsoft office user and then tell them that they have to use open office instead? they can't find anything! File formats can be an effective method of lock-in, but having a large base of users who are completely accustomed to using your product as the standard can be as well.
If OpenOffice were a perfect substitute for Office, and switching costs were zero, that would be it; the story would be over. Microsoft would only be able to give office away as everyone would be completely indifferent and simply switch to the cheaper product (in this case, OO, which is free). [proof by contradiction] Either they are not perfect substitutes or switching costs are non-trivial, or a mixture of both.
it doesn't have to be. it's already their job to ensure that but when they're doing it in house they need to procure a massive amount of infrastructure and a staff to maintain it; which is certainly not easy.
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You're again countering a moral argument with a legal argument. However, what is legal and what is right are not one and the same.
This isn't a legal issue (yet) it's an ethical one. So fine, as you have pointed out, many of the people who had their data collected may have been ignorant of the fact that their data could be gathered by any passers by. Does that mean that they wanted that data to be shared and disclosed? Obviously not, it may even suggest that many of them, if not ignorant, would have chosen to protect that information (as you pointed out with your SS, DoB Garage Door analogy, that's information that you would obviously want to protect, therefore your WiFi traffic is something that you believe any reasonable person would also want to protect). So, now knowing that many of those people out there would not want you to gather their data, but are ignorant of the fact that you can get it, and there are no legal obstacles to you doing so, you just go ahead and do it because you benefit from something that they would perceive as a harm? I'm sorry, in my book that's just wrong.
We don't know what prompted them to disclose the collection in the first place. Corporations have been "coming clean" on things that were on the verge of being exposed _forever_, there is nothing to suggest that such a thing did not happen here. They "failed to do the right thing" in collecting the information in the first place. Even if we take it to be an "accident" there still must have been employees who were aware of what was happening and chose to not act sooner. I don't know if you realize, they collected a pretty substantial amount of data in a pretty systematic way.
Usually when these kinds of things happen (companies apparently acting against the public interest for their own gain and then getting caught in the process) there is a big backlash and a call for government investigations and regulations. Internal audits are just a classic tactic to try and squelch that knee-jerk reaction. Banks, manufacturing companies, heck, pretty much any kind of company caught in the government/public cross-hairs will do that. It's just a defensive play, it doesn't mean that they didn't screw up, and it doesn't mean that the government should not still look into it. Would you be satisfied if the government accepted BP's post spill "internal audit" as sufficient investigation and then just left it at that?
The people shouting *know* that other people can hear them.
This is assuming that most common users understand that their networks are not properly secured and are making a conscious and informed decision to share their data with anyone in range of their network. That is a stupid assumption from a societal standpoint. A good parallel would probably be analog cell phones, which could be monitored using specialized radio scanners, which were then made effectively illegal to prevent eavesdropping. The argument you just made could have been applied to that same situation: obviously the people understand that their cell phones are not secured, and therefore consent to anyone listening in if they want to. No sir, I don't believe I would like to live in your world.
You are suggesting that in the entire chain of people who were attached to that project, who knew the processes and methods that were employed, nobody noticed that they were "accidentally" collecting data? Either it was not an accident, or a whole lot of people at Google are completely OK with looking the other way when it comes to accidental user privacy errors. I don't know about you, but I think the latter of those two may actually be worse.
I agree, the government should not be trusted with that kind of data, but how would you feel about government regulation and oversight of data collection and retention practices and policies?
BP is handling the spill because the government does not have the technology/resources necessary to handle it better. Google is a totally different situation though. They are acting in an arena where there is little government oversight/regulation at present, so the responsibility falls entirely on them to "do the right thing" from a moral standpoint, and they appear to be failing, once again, to act in the public's best interests. It's my opinion that this is yet another example of why government oversight of privacy standards is not only a good idea, it's a necessity.
Their support services have gotten pretty good, but they wont stop calling me to try and sell me Voice and Data services (I use cablevision for my cable, and verizon for FiOS service). Every 30 days, like clockwork, they call me. Every time I explain that I don't want either services, that I don't care what specials they are running, to please for the love of god, stop calling me over and over and over again. Every time they say they wont anymore, and every time it's a freaking lie. I hate that.
You're right about that. Cable companies could easily deliver more bandwidth over that coax cable than a family of four would be able to saturate. My experience though was coming from Cablevision. When I was an "Optimum" customer they would impose upload caps at the drop of a hat and I was never able to achieve my advertised bandwidth (they just oversold it back then). From what I understand they have since improved on these performance dimensions but I have not had a compelling reason to switch back, so I haven't (some Newton's law of consumer subscription services?)
Standards implementations are slowly converging over time and the focus now is on proper application development which flash has just never done a very good job of proving itself in. The needs of Adobe's customers changed, and their product just didn't change fast enough to keep up.
Not everyone wants the same things from their providers, and not all customers receive the same quality of care, network, etc. Hey, if what you has makes you happy then that's great! But it doesn't mean that it should therefore also make everyone else happy.
I know of a campus that went from a leased line to TWc for internet. Unfortunately, the cablemodem+router provided was a POS that couldn't handle reasonable PPS rates for the application meaning that they never were able to take full advantage of the bandwidth provided by the service. It was the only cablemodem+router that TWc would provide/support/allow. Now, I think they are switching to a metro-ethernet provider.
Cablevision has pretty terrible customer service, and their ads have always been designed to mislead (which rubs me the wrong way). But I would disagree that they stopped innovating. In response to Verizon rolling out FiOS service, they began offering service all the way up to the 100Mbit level to compete on what is really their core business: providing more bandwidth. However they are going to have to get a bit more innovative when it comes to providing TV service. Slow cable boxes, limited boring service, and a laughable on-demand system when compared to what you can get on an xbox/roku is not going to keep customers paying their high monthly video cable bills.
Full Disclosure: I am also a former cablevision customer who has been using FiOS for about...four years? can't remember, early adopter anyway.
Isn't this very similar to the way eInk works?
It's complicated by the fact that the government was the one who drained the marshlands originally and then sold the resulting dry land to expand the city. If they tried to blame the people for living there, people would then in turn blame them for suggesting that it was safe to live there. But more to the point, didn't these people have flood insurance?
Yeah, spectrum killed WiMax in Europe; at this point so many carriers are on the LTE bandwagon that it would be very very hard for any other standard to really have a chance.
Actually just thinking about answering my own question; having real lagged data to the trend data could be useful in correcting for the hype no? Hype is essentially another variable in the regression analysis. I'm not sure where the data would come from for it but if you could estimate the hype factor for recent past data and had some measure of present hype you may be able to correct for some of it right?
How does Google go about adjusting for hype now? Does anyone know?
I hope someone does some regression analysis on this and writes a paper. I would be very interested in how well the google trends data fits with the new rapid CDC data assuming that one of them is a lagged indicator of the other. How well would the data fit? What are the likely sources of error? Omitted variables? Fascinating questions.
How many people know about Open Office? How many of them have no say in what they use? All too frequently it's some PHB that says what will be used. Now if you have the choice then it's easier. If you're not going to upgrade Office because of cost why switch to Open Office? I say if something works for you use it. You should only upgrade or switch if what you have doesn't work. Then when that tyme comes look into alternatives to see if they will work.
I'd say that among the general public relatively few people know about OpenOffice. But among the IT community, or particularly the makeup of CIOs of large organizations, almost all of them are probably aware of the product. There are actually publicly traded companies which deploy OpenOffice throughout their enterprises and don't support the use of Microsoft Office; it's not completely unheard of it's just very uncommon. The real question though is, if it makes sense to switch why doesn't everyone do it? As you've pointed out, people wont switch unnecessarily.* However you also pointed out that there is a recent instance where people were forced to switch applications (and bore significant costs as a result) but they were switching from office 2003 to office 2007. If open office is a perfect substitute for office, and if its switching costs are equivalent or lower than those of switching from office 2003 to office 2007 (a logical inference of your earlier points) why have we not seen a massive migration away from the expensive commercial product?
*if it's working for them that is, and I agree with this, it's also a point supporting non-zero switching costs [i.e. the products are sticky, both of them are]; and having to overcome resistance to change certainly adds to the switching cost.
Just as there's training moving from MS Office to Open Office, there's training moving from MS Office 2003 to 2007 and there will be expenses upgrading to MS Office 2010. I could write a book on the complaints I've heard from Office users upgrading. Some of those complaints were about Office 2007 new Ribbon UI. A simply google turned up this article from last year, Arrogance or efficiency? Why Microsoft redesigned the Office user interface. Complaining that switching to another app has costs without acknowledging MS upgrades has training costs as well is MS FUD.
Fair point, but it still does not provide an explanation as to why businesses have not switched en masse to open office; which based on your most recent point alone should have happened as a result of the interface changes between office 2003 and 2007.
Lock-in [wikipedia.org] is when the user is dependent on one vendor and can not change to another one, at least not easily.
Have you ever seen what happens when you take an average, non tech-savvy expert microsoft office user and then tell them that they have to use open office instead? they can't find anything! File formats can be an effective method of lock-in, but having a large base of users who are completely accustomed to using your product as the standard can be as well.
If OpenOffice were a perfect substitute for Office, and switching costs were zero, that would be it; the story would be over. Microsoft would only be able to give office away as everyone would be completely indifferent and simply switch to the cheaper product (in this case, OO, which is free). [proof by contradiction] Either they are not perfect substitutes or switching costs are non-trivial, or a mixture of both.
it doesn't have to be. it's already their job to ensure that but when they're doing it in house they need to procure a massive amount of infrastructure and a staff to maintain it; which is certainly not easy.