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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadWe 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.
I suspect that restricting facial recognition in Facebook photos to friends of the photographer increases accuracy by a lot.
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.
So maybe "the file is 5.5GB BIG, which is roughly 1 movie" would also be a fair comparison to make.
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.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en
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.
-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
Downloading the entire archive google has on my main account just for kicks though.