New Google Search Feature Already Ruffling Legal Feathers

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Camikazi

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Wait a min, Twitter does not allow Google to search their site completely but then they complain when Google search doesn't show as many Twitter results? How does that make any sense?
 

house70

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ROTTENberg (sic) has some other personal agenda; him calling Facebook a "challenger" (when in fact G+ is the challenger here) proves it. Maybe he's in it with Zuckerberg?
Privacy "concerns": one can sign out of their G+ account and use standard search features, if he/she wants to.
Twitter's concern: kinda opposite; they are upset searches are not focused on them, like search results are not "private" enough. Make up your mind, people.
No, I am not concerned about privacy issues, as long as I can elect to turn features off as I need.
 

billybobser

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news breaks on twitter, lollerskates.

if news is caring what celebrity made what for breakfast sure.

Twitter has it's uses, unfortunately it difficult to filter the world of monotonous shit making it unusable.
 

alidan

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so whats the problem? if google learns my taste better and provides linkls to better sites, i dont care... i only really use google any more to get a wiki page, or look up what a product is called.
 

mrmaia

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I think this kind of 'personalized' search will create an information bubble in which the average user will never know of and never get out. Maybe what he is really looking for stays away from his screen because of his browsing history.

Also, that immense amount of personal information Google collects scares me A LOT. And I'm not talking about stupid advertising here.
 

HEXiT

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to be honest all this privacy invasion is a bad joke. they are actually inviting people to give personal info that google can then use to tie together way to much personal data. this can then be mined by 3rd parties... yet google encourage you to do it with a smile...

its 1 thing to join face book and put your day to day up but who wants your web searches and web habits made public...
yes theres the "if you have nothing to hide, why you bothered", thats not the point... online privacy is important... especially with governments circumventing legal procedure in the name of protecting freedom...

 

dark_knight33

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[citation][nom]HEXiT[/nom]online privacy is important... especially with governments circumventing legal procedure in the name of protecting freedom...[/citation]

Exactly.

Why not just let the likes of Google & Facebook hold onto our freedom for us? You know, so it's protected. It's just the like the gov't doing it, only you can trust google/facebook to not abuse it. I mean, they would never whore your personal life out to make a buck, right?
/sarcasm

When will people realize that the gov't USES facebook and google to get your information? This is never to your benefit. *THE* best way to protect your personal information from people who might use it against you is to not give it out in the first place. Alternatively, if a company is going to make a buck selling my info to a third party, I want a cut.

Hey I'll go all "Keeping up with the DarkKnight's" if it means an extra paycheck. I'll be happy to
film myself acting like an ass and give it over for people to exploit for the right amount of $$.
 

blazorthon

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I really don't see this as a problem. I don't want it so I won't use it and since it is off by default it shouldn't be a problem at all. Google gave us an option to personalize our results slightly more, if we don't want to then we won't tell Google search to do this for us.

As for Twitter, I can see Twitter posts just filling up the screen... IF you search for a twitter user or his/her posts, in which case that is what you are looking for. If Google can integrate Twitter searching legally then go for it, if not than Twitter needs to shut up about it. Actually Twitter should shut up about it anyway because Google owns Google search not Twitter and Google can decide not to help other companies with their own products if they want too.

Like above posters say, yes privacy invasion is wrong. It should not be happening yet it is constantly going on. However, this feature does NOT invade privacy, it is off by default and is turned on and off by the user. Contrary to above posters the information related to this search feature shouldn't be made public anyway.

Besides that there are MANY ways to heavily increase privacy on the Internet that go ignored by most people. For example, there are programs like the TOR bundle (and similar but purportedly better Advanced Onion Router), web proxies, and more that can be used to protect privacy. There is Firefox with the No-script and Add-block add-ons that helps privacy a little and increases web speed.

Using Firefox without the Google search stops Google from monitoring your data too. If you really like Chrome or use specific Chrome add-ons/games then there is the Comodo Dragon browser based off of Chromium that claims to not send data to Google like regular Chrome does, is more secure in other ways, and has complete compatibility with the Chrome apps and add-ons. I have it myself and I like it.

There are even more ways to protect your privacy online besides these, besides TOR and the Onion router programs this stuff is all basic, relatively easy to do.

Another helpful thing is switching from Windows (where possible) to Linux. Mac isn't much better than Windows but some Linux distributions are just unbelievable. For example, there is one called Tinycore that uses a tiny ~10MB of storage space and needs only 48MB of RAM. Compare that to Windows 7 x64 that needs more than 20GB of storage space and at least 2GB of RAM yet is still slower than Tinycore. Then there are more mainstream Linux distros like Mint and all the different versions of Ubuntu, some of which use less memory than Windows XP x32 (minimum 256MB for decent use, better with 384MB or more).

I don't have any facebook/myspace/google+/twitter/etc. accounts so I don't deal with all that stupidity anyway but I do enjoy some level of online privacy by actually trying to get it. Sure it's not perfect but it's better than complaining and doing nothing about the constantly increasing privacy invasion problem.
 

alidan

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[citation][nom]dark_knight33[/nom]Exactly. Why not just let the likes of Google & Facebook hold onto our freedom for us? You know, so it's protected. It's just the like the gov't doing it, only you can trust google/facebook to not abuse it. I mean, they would never whore your personal life out to make a buck, right?/sarcasmWhen will people realize that the gov't USES facebook and google to get your information? This is never to your benefit. *THE* best way to protect your personal information from people who might use it against you is to not give it out in the first place. Alternatively, if a company is going to make a buck selling my info to a third party, I want a cut. Hey I'll go all "Keeping up with the DarkKnight's" if it means an extra paycheck. I'll be happy tofilm myself acting like an ass and give it over for people to exploit for the right amount of $$.[/citation]

oh no, the government know i like cats, porn, and my god, that i have a few friends.

seriously,the govenment doesn't care and if they have the ability they will wiretap you for no reason, so google takes my personal information, being my name location and probably key words that i post places, and sells it for better ads, remember the days of 10mb email boxes, or yahoo that let you have allot more, but sucked a bit more than hotmail... gmail gave me i believe 2gb day 1, gmail currently gives me 7.5gb ish. as far as im concerned, they can have basic information and sell it for that service they provide alone, they want to make searches a bit more personalized, and possibly pull in a few more $ per ad, i do not care.

the government wants to tap you THEY WILL
an internet company gives you free services in return for ads, I DONT CARE

i will never understand why people have such a problem with people knowing anything about you... you also have a problem with people taking a picture where you accidently end up in the background too?

what im saying is you have NO privacy unless you live off the grid entirely.
 

blazorthon

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[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]oh no, the government know i like cats, porn, and my god, that i have a few friends.seriously,the govenment doesn't care and if they have the ability they will wiretap you for no reason, so google takes my personal information, being my name location and probably key words that i post places, and sells it for better ads, remember the days of 10mb email boxes, or yahoo that let you have allot more, but sucked a bit more than hotmail... gmail gave me i believe 2gb day 1, gmail currently gives me 7.5gb ish. as far as im concerned, they can have basic information and sell it for that service they provide alone, they want to make searches a bit more personalized, and possibly pull in a few more $ per ad, i do not care.the government wants to tap you THEY WILLan internet company gives you free services in return for ads, I DONT CAREi will never understand why people have such a problem with people knowing anything about you... you also have a problem with people taking a picture where you accidently end up in the background too?what im saying is you have NO privacy unless you live off the grid entirely.[/citation]

The whole point of the privacy argument is that it is our right to have our privacy online and offline. It's not just the government that angers people about privacy invasion (in fact the government isn't even the worst offender most of the time) but also companies. Do I want Google storing anything at all about me? No. Same to every other company. They have all proven to be irresponsible with our data and many people have had delicate data stolen or given away because of this irresponsibility.

How many people have had their bank account and credit card information stolen? tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of such accounts are stolen and promptly hacked, ruining peoples lives. We have companies like Sony that leaves the information like these bank accounts and credit card numbers from their Playstation Network users and they got hacked several times, revealing all that data to everyone. Then we have other companies that have sold data like email addresses to spam companies.

I have several email addresses and thanks to crap companies that do that one of my accounts gets hundreds of spam messages each month (that's not an exaggeration). Then we have all these anti malware companies, most of which actually write a lot of the viruses and spyware etc. they "protect" us from! I don't know about you but all of this is pretty alarming stuff to me. Maybe you just don't care because YOU haven't had a serious problem or you just don't notice when you have problems but many millions of people have had problems related to this crap.

Now we even have this SOPA legislation garbage that wants to turn our internet into that huge, censorship crap like China has! Our government takes away our rights to privacy and free choice on the internet while the companies steal our data and either sell it or leave it unprotected for someone else to steal.

I said it before and I'll say it again: This is alarming!

 

okibrian

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I just cannot wait until people wake up one day and understand how bad it is that they have allowed, hell even posted themselves, such personal info. Go ahead and put all your eggs in that social media basket, but don't say you weren't warned or, "but I didn't know...". And even if you think the info you are posting is not that personal, guess again. You can do a lot with a little. And before you say your account is locked down and not everyone can view it just think, it is locked down on a server that you do not control, that all others have their info on as well and that is targeted every day by hackers with malicious intent. Once you create an account on Facebook that account will ALWAYS reside on Facebook's servers. You can close it, but the data stays. You were warned.
 

lordstormdragon

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The fact that Twitter still exists blows my mind. It's the only thing more gay (read: girly/weak/stupid/pathetic/weak again) than Apple stuff.

And I'm totally with you on that one, Okibrian. People who post personal stuff on the internet deserve whatever happens to them as a result. It's only okay if they're adult film starlets, you ask me. (nods!)
 

blazorthon

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[citation][nom]xerroz[/nom]Screw Google. Someone has to stop this privacy RAPING once and for all[/citation]

Please read the article here. This new feature is off by default and thus does nothing unless you activate it with a Goole+ account logged in. If it is off it doesn't touch your privacy.

As for everything else, no one will stop violating our privacy and stealing our information, selling it, or leaving it open to be stolen and otherwise exploited. We are all just idiotic pawns as far as these people are concerned so they don't care about us.
 

eiskrystal

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I'd be a lot more impressed with the "my informationz is known" brigade if all these people hadn't freely given this information to Google in the first place. If you don't want teh govmint to know what you had for breakfast, don't post it on Twitter and FB.

The happybubble phenomena is actually the biggest problem I see with this. We will have to see if it can be tweaked to avoid that happening.

 

torque79

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I love this ignorant comment from the interview:
"By searching for the "@wwe" Twitter user, Google's new search results lead to the official site of the WWE Universe. An "objective" web search would have pulled up the Twitter account instead."

Ummm... searching for @anything is a lot more likely to seek out the domain coming after the @sign, because email is far more prominent and has existed a LOT longer than twitter. I would assume the person is looking for the @wwe domain, not the twitter account (why would anyone).
 
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