
Want to freak yourself out? - sverige
https://twitter.com/iamdylancurran/status/977559925680467968
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badrabbit
Interesting but what should be of greater concern is how this collected data
can be used and the fact that you can't have them delete it.

It frustrates me when even very smart techies get caught up on data collection
when we know advances in ML and behavioral psychology have made it so that
these companies and governments can do some scary and downright disturbing
things.

For example: Sure, I don't like it when google plots on a map every place I
travel to via location history. But of greater concern would be collection of
gyroscope and other sensor data from my phone. Does <bigcorp> know how I
walk,handle my phone and what other devices are usually near me? Can they use
this and other seemingly innocuous data over time to recognize or infer
behavioral patterns about me? Is any of the content I consume being filtered
or customized based on this collected data?

Can FB for example induce depression and cause n% of people to commit suicide?
Can this data be used to manipulate employees to staying at or leaving a
company,or applying for or declining a position?

This is what concens me greatly,not whether or not google has a naked picture
of me or if someone at FB has knowledge of my phone or text conversations.

Sadly the public is completely clueless as to what is at stake -- it isn't
just privacy.

~~~
skybrian
You _can_ delete it, at least sometimes. For example, here is how to do it for
Google location history:

[https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en)

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platinumrad
I don't use any form of social media due to privacy concerns but this person
clearly doesn't understand the concept of caching despite being a "technical
consultant and web developer". Or he's deliberately sensationalizing things
that he knows to be innocuous.

~~~
lbotos
Caching implies short term use. Yes, all of the things he mentioned could be
useful for short term caching.

We both know that modern social tech is built on big data crunching, meta data
analysis, and using "micro-pyschology" (adding up all the small habits) to
influence people.

Do you use a search engine? Do your friends use Social media? Have you been
photographed in the last 3 years and stored on a google/facebook server? As
much as you want to believe "your data" is not a part of this dataset, you are
absolutely a node on this graph.

My fav eye-opener: Facebook tells you about your friend's photos that you
could be tagged in. Most people forget that facebook could also tell you about
the _strangers_ photos you are in, but it would freak you out.

~~~
platinumrad
I agree that much of what he's showing does not need to be kept by Facebook or
Google or whoever else and I've argued for strongly incentivizing companies to
keep as little data as possible elsewhere. I just feel like he's presenting
his material in a highly sensationalized manner with the express goal of
stoking as much fear and outrage as possible among a less technically-inclined
audience.

I suspect that restricting facial recognition in Facebook photos to friends of
the photographer increases accuracy by a lot.

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dublinben
Consider myself un-freaked out. I guess if you turn off these settings, and
don't feed Google any information, they don't really know very much about you.
I'm certainly not upset by anything they seem to know, to the extent that any
of it is even correct.

~~~
hoffs
Also in one of the tweet he says that his takeout is 5.5gb which also includes
his whole email history and gdrive which probably take up most of the space.

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skybrian
re: "the file is 5.5GB BIG, which is roughly 3 MILLION Word documents"

If this includes all your email (including attachments), this shouldn't be
surprising. After all, a big selling point for switching to Gmail was that you
can keep all your old email forever.

~~~
uxp100
It also includes your youtube videos (you have uploaded).

So maybe "the file is 5.5GB BIG, which is roughly 1 movie" would also be a
fair comparison to make.

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paulddraper
> Google stores your location (if you have it turned on) every time you turn
> on your phone, and you can see a timeline from the first day you started
> using Google on your phone

This turned out to be useful when I couldn't find my new $600 phone (and
battery was dead).

Turns out it has been in a park overnight after slipping out while I was
playing soccer with the kids.

Unfortunately, I had location off on an earlier phone, and I never did find
that one.

~~~
Jyaif
Location history has been super useful to me on several occasions:

-Find my way back to a cabin in the woods where I had been earlier (I had the address, bur google maps couldnt find it).

-Find that restaurant I went with some friends a week ago

-Verify if my credit card was compromised, or if I actually had spent 30€ mysef that night

~~~
vokep
Right, these are nice but you could also, yknow, just track it
yourself...which is what is happening actually, but then you're giving it to
google

~~~
paulddraper
Track it myself...where?

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alistoriv
Given the fact that Google apparently stores the pictures you've taken with
your phone (at least on Android?) and Snapchat saves all of the pictures
you've sent with it for an unknown amount of time, wouldn't that reasonably
mean that both companies are storing child pornography on their servers?
Snapchat in particular.

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godelski
Isn't this word for word (picture for picture) the same BBC article that was
on the front page yesterday?

~~~
sverige
It might be, I don't know. It came through on my Twitter feed and I thought it
was interesting.

