dissociatedpress.com » Google Paranoia

Google And The CIA Invest In “Temporal Analytics Engine”

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 12:56:40 +0000

Love it or hate it (and in spite of occasionally hilarious results) the Google auto-complete feature can be uncannily accurate when guessing the rest of what you’ll type. So wouldn’t it be great if in the future, Google would know what you’re searching before you even search for it? If this sounds more like the movie Minority Report to you than reality, you should take a look into the kind of marketing and data mining methods that are in common usage on the web. For those of you who miss the “Big Brother” vibe of the Bush era and the Patriot Act, ponder this: Google and the CIA are both investing in a company called Recorded Future that “goes beyond search” to “visualize the future, past or present” using what Recorded Future calls a “Temporal Analytics Engine”. Although a disturbing alignment of interests, this isn’t so far from what other companies are already doing. Dig deep into the links in the recent WSJ feature What They Know to learn about who’s poking and prodding your browser, and which tracking technologies are at work. The days of simple cookies are over; these services use Bugs, Beacons and Flash Cookies (more on these insidious Adobe doodads below) not only to store information about which sites you visit, but even what you type while you’re there, or in the case of Flash Cookies, to re-insert the conventional cookies you’ve deleted without telling you! And we’re talking about “harmless” sites that you visit all the time, like Dictionary.com and CNN. While one might argue that you’d be happy to be served up ads based on the things you actively look at – which is a big part of what the intention is with these technologies – there are a few problems with that line of thinking. First of all, for people like me, this is an utterly useless approach; I do a lot of research looking at things that really don’t interest me. So when I write a piece about the billions being made by Farmville, for instance, I then get fed a constant stream of REALLY dumb ads targeting people who play web-based games and shop at Walmart. Another problem is that these third party services are often based on predictive marketing, and attach your data in ways that really DO very nearly identify you specifically with IP addresses and other information. BlueKai, for instance, is “aggregating valuable shopping and research behaviors across the Internet” to build “the world’s largest database of intentions”. Yes. You read that right. A “database of intentions”. If this stuff doesn’t trouble you, try putting what these companies are doing in a real-world scenario. Imagine going to the mall, buying something at The Gap, and then having a little attendant walk up and say “I’m just going to follow you around and watch what you buy, so we can improve your experience here at the mall today”. That would of course be annoying and unsettling, but wouldn’t it be even creepier if you knew a team of attendants were doing it with remote surveillance techniques? Below are some basic tips for easily blocking these rather invasive marketing tools.

If you’re using Firefox, tracking and blocking basic cookies is super easy with Ghostery. After you download and install it as a plugin, it shows you what services are tracking you, offers a link explaining what they do, and options for blocking or not blocking them. Ghostery is partnered with Better Advertising, which “was founded to ensure that the advertising industry’s voluntary initiatives meet the needs of consumers, government and advertisers”. Ghostery provides fairly unobtrusive little tabs to display and manage tracking activity:

Flash Cookies

These are a little trickier, and insidious enough that they’ve inspired a lawsuit. You can’t actually control these directly on your computer, even though the Adobe software that makes them work is installed on your computer. You have to go to this page on Adobe’s site, and use the rather confusing tool they’ve provided. It’s confusing enough that they provide a note that says “The Settings Manager that you see above is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager. Click the tabs to see different panels, and click the options in the panels to change your Adobe Flash Player settings“. When I went to the page, I quickly got an alert box like this:

When I told it to keep running, it eventually did this:

When I finally got it working, the choices were a little confusing, like this one.

And after all this talk about companies trying to guess my future actions, this threw me for a second:

Google Earth’s GeoEye & 360Cities 3D Panoramas

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:02:01 +0000

Here’s a quick preview of 360 Cities
with -appropriately enough – Dead
or Alive as a backing track

Do you ever get that funny feeling that someone is watching you? Well if not, you should. We’re getting closer every day to full time coverage of every location on the planet. Between things like the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in England, the way Google has you covered from your desktop to the sky, and the members of 360Cities obsessively creating cool 360 degree panoramas of the planet (see their blog for the latest views), it won’t be long before there truly will be nowhere to hide. Especially with tools like PhotoSynth to put the info all together. You may or may not find this kind of coverage invasive, but you know what? It’s really kind of FUN too. You may have read that Google made a deal with spy satellite company GeoEye last year to gain a competitive edge over Microsoft, Yahoo and other satellite image search providers. What you may not realize though is that the satellite can capture objects 16 inches across from 423 miles up in space! Don’t worry, Google isn’t allowed to use those images, only the NGA and men of integrity with security clearances like Dick Cheney are. And your secrets are always safe with the US government and politicians named Dick, right? In any case, the upside of all of this is that Google has been showing off the images on their Google Earth GeoEye pages. Even if you’re not stunned with the images, it’s a blast pretending you’re shooting the opening titles for a James Bond film by zooming in and out from the Earth, from an orbital view to street level in seconds. Likewise with the 360 Cities panoromas; some of the images aren’t so thrilling, but moving around in them is an entirely new experience, and a cool one at that. See a sample below.

There should be a 360 degree panorama embedded below.
Let us know if it doesn’t work on your system….

Google Voice, iPhones, And SpyPhones

admin — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:50:43 +0000

I just got an invite to try Google Voice, and after giving it a quick test run, I was left a little uneasy. I’m not really a tin-foil hat type, but I’m often reminded of William Burroughs’ remark that “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”. The uneasiness kicked in as soon as I clicked on the “accept” link, and had to decide whether or not to use one of my existing G-Mail accounts. Should I use my business account? My personal account? I knew that to test the service, I’d be entering both my mobile and land line numbers. Which meant I’d be linking pieces of my Google search history with my e-mail content, two phone numbers, and my name. And storing it all in one place on a Google server. I opted to create a new G-Mail account. In spite of Google Voice’s amazing features, I’m going to have to ponder exactly how to put it to use, because the same things that make it cool make it creepy. You can record calls, transcribe them to text, do conference calls, and even pick up as someone leaves a voice message, just like an answering machine. All in one place. Which is exactly the issue. All in one place. On a Google server. I know we’ll all eventually have shaved heads, a number instead of a name, and be constantly under surveillance like in the George Lucas movie THX 1138. For now though, especially given the random Google privacy blunders that have already occurred, the insidious behavior of AT&T, and the way Google is invading every aspect of our lives, I’ll hang on to the last shreds of my illusions of privacy. Speaking of AT&T and Google: although Google’s already found a workaround to being blocked as an iPhone app, we should be thankful that AT&T and Google are still competitors. Remember. AT&T’s a telephone company. Not a communications company.

Top To Bottom, Google’s Got You Covered

admin — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 13:38:46 +0000

From the screen you’re looking at right now to the sky outside your window, Google’s got it covered. Before you get too excited about Google’s new browser Chrome (and it is pretty cool), be mindful of the fact that in spite of all their talk about open-source and community (presented in comic book form, for an added feeling of harmlessness), this browser is part of their strategy to put all your software on their servers. If you’re comfortable having the same company handling your e-mail, providing all your web search results, and functioning as your office software while they watch you from above and at street level, enjoy your life. Personally, I’m starting to find Google a little scarier than the Bush administration. Especially now that they seem very interested in toilet tech, with rumours of cheap & easy to install bidet broadband on the way. And by the way, why does that Chrome logo look so familiar , anyway?