Gmail is disturbing

[jmo1121109]

https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/purchases?pageId=none

Apparently gmail has a service that automatically pulls all your purchases from emails you get from amazon, netflix, and other companies with transactions and puts that data into their google pay app. You can only delete items line by line. Just a PSA in case anyone else didn't know about this shit.

[Matticus13]

The fee they charge for providing a service. It is BS. Nothing is free...

[flash2015]

The fee they charge for providing a service. It is BS. Nothing is free...

But even if you do pay for a product now, it doesn't mean you are free from the data mining. A central path to profit now for any TV manufacturer is "post purchase monetization" - i.e. spying on what you watch, if it has a microphone spying on sounds in your room etc.

[Foxcastle]

The fee they charge for providing a service. It is BS. Nothing is free...

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. (And even if you are, apparently...)

[dyager_nh]

Things are free on the internet because you are paying in other ways. I do agree there should be "data mining and advertising free" models but I suspect the price would be such, noone would take it.
Who would pay $50 a month for email or Facebook or $.50 per search? Not when I can pay with information that had little or no value to me.

[flash2015]

Things are free on the internet because you are paying in other ways. I do agree there should be "data mining and advertising free" models but I suspect the price would be such, noone would take it.
Who would pay $50 a month for email or Facebook or $.50 per search? Not when I can pay with information that had little or no value to me.

You are right that a lot of the things we receive on the net wouldn't be there without the "data mining and advertising" model. The question is - does that mean there should not be any regulation at all on the "data mining and advertising" model?

Much of the data that facebook has on you doesn't come from the information you provide to facebook directly. It comes from them tracking you around the web, tracking the apps you use on your phone (pretty much every app on your phone, except for Amazon/Google apps, sends/receives data from Facebook) and all the other places they get info from whether it buying purchasing data from credit card companies, tying your information to supermarket and other reward cards, smart TVs send your viewing data to Facebook, probably lots of ways I can't even think of etc which can all come to Facebook irrespective of whether you even use Facebook at all.

I think you are vastly overestimating the cost of these things. Paid email services can be bought right now for only a few dollars a month. Facebook makes about $27 - $30 per person per quarter so I would argue .50 cents a search is excessive.

And it all can cost you, the connection may not be as clear, perhaps it may be the job you don't get or the home loan you are rejected for (there is no transparency on how deep this goes)...or the hack which causes you embarrassment. If people can visually understand the privacy invasion they will reject it. Not long ago there was an issue about a person shooting down a drone, most people were siding with the shooter because they could see the potential privacy violation. The goal of many of these services is to hide how deep the data collections go so that there isn't such visceral reactions.

[Dejan0707]

We live in the world of Big Brother for some time now. We only not lable it as such.

[flash2015]

Unfortunately I can't disagree with that...

[Senlac]

Yes. Despite my best efforts I’m sure more is known about me than I would ever be comfortable with if I had a choice.
No social media on any device. I use Skype & Gmail to communicate (well that’s blown it already). Never carry a GPS enabled device. My phone makes calls only. Almost never buy anything online, unless there is absolutely no option.
I live in a country where CCTV is still rare & the Police do not have license plate recognition hooked up to cameras everywhere.
I bet the bastards still know way too much, even living a “Stone Age” existence as my children so politely put it:-)

[Restitution]

if it has a microphone spying on sounds in your room etc.

This is not true.

[e.m.c^42]

Huh. This is probably a very unpopular opinion, but I actually don't mind being mined so invasively for data. The thought that every aspect of my recordable life can be reduced to nothing but a set of points among billions of others is...comforting.

[flash2015]

if it has a microphone spying on sounds in your room etc.

This is not true.

Really?:

https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/smart-tv-spying.html

And this is one example of many...and it isn't just voice sounds. It could be one device watermarking the sounds from another device for identification (that tech has been around for way over a decade - like Shazam). Or one device explicitly communicating with each other via high pitched sounds out of human earshot. Smart speakers are rolling out features to identify lots of other sounds, ostensibly to helpfully function like an alarm system but it is all good info to go back to the mothership to improve their profile of you. I know companies make promise that they may not explicitly "sell" the raw data. Even if you accept that to be true that does not mean they don't use it to create insights about you or sell these insights...or allow third-party companies to describe "look-alikes" to target you. And that is not counting the extra attack vectors these give for three-letter agencies to spy on you too (e.g. Wikileaks docs showed how the CIA was hacking Samsung TVs).

It is difficult to know about how deep it goes because there is very little transparency in this. Unfortunately we usually find out years after the fact.

[Restitution]

https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/smart-tv-spying.html

This article is heavily editorialized and misleading.

What the device does is record anything you say after voice activation. It's not always spying on you and relaying that data. Of course, the article tries its hardest to make that seem like the case (without actually outright saying so).

This is like getting mad because Google records your google searches.

[Restitution]

I mean, it's literally breaking apart the EULA mid-sentence with no context. Obviously extremely shady reporting.

[yavuzovic]

https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/smart-tv-spying.html

This article is heavily editorialized and misleading.

What the device does is record anything you say after voice activation. It's not always spying on you and relaying that data. Of course, the article tries its hardest to make that seem like the case (without actually outright saying so).

This is like getting mad because Google records your google searches.

It's not spying all the time but be careful about applications that ask for microphone access. Some of them do...

[MajorMitchell]

Has anyone used Sociall ? It's a Facebook alternative. There's heaps of organisations gathering data on customer behaviour. I'm an old fuddy duddy so I have physically covered the camera lens on the front of my new phone. Is that silly or reasonable ?

[Restitution]

No app will record out of your phone's camera without your knowledge.

If an intruder is using your camera, you have bigger issues than them looking at the inside of your pocket.

[flash2015]

No app will record out of your phone's camera without your knowledge.

If an intruder is using your camera, you have bigger issues than them looking at the inside of your pocket.

Camera on your phone isn't very useful because it will drain the battery too fast...and as you said they most likely will be taking pictures of your pocket.

It is pretty much standard procedure to cover the camera on your laptop though. There have already been many scandals about people being silently recorded.

[Restitution]

It is pretty much standard procedure to cover the camera on your laptop though. There have already been many scandals about people being silently recorded.

yep. Or just use a webcam that has a light if it's on. Or a hardware-disable-able cam.

[flash2015]

https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/smart-tv-spying.html

This article is heavily editorialized and misleading.

What the device does is record anything you say after voice activation. It's not always spying on you and relaying that data. Of course, the article tries its hardest to make that seem like the case (without actually outright saying so).

This is like getting mad because Google records your google searches.

In **theory** it doesn't...but again we have no control of the software on these devices. And these mics aren't the same as mics on your phone - they are designed to be able to pickup voices at a distance (just try speaking into your phone more than a couple of feet away on a CC - no-one understands). We have already had multiple instances of people having whole conversations recorded by smart speakers.

It isn't the same as the Google search. Google can't capture everything I type into the computer (unless they have installed a keylogger), only what I specifically typed into the query. With an always on microphone they absolutely can capture everything...you are only trusting that they won't.